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Judge Rules Sites Can Be Sued Over Design
BcNexus writes "According to the Associated Press, a California judge has ruled that a lawsuit brought against the Target Corporation may proceed under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The catch here is that the suit, leveled by the National Federation of the Blind, concerns the design of Target's website. Could this set a precedent and subsequent flood of lawsuits against websites? What if another design is not tractable?" From the article: "'What this means is that any place of business that provides services, such as the opportunity to buy products on a website, is now, a place of accommodation and therefore falls under the ADA,' said Kathy Wahlbin, Mindshare's Director of User Experience and expert on accessibility. 'The good news is that being compliant is not difficult nor is it expensive. And it provides the additional benefit of making accessible web sites easier for search engines to find and prioritize.'"
Smaller businesses can take years to squeeze the cost of a total site re-design out of their profits. A large, sprawling site that's been growing for years may not lend itself to anything other than a major piece of work. That's not to say the business shouldn't do it for other reasons (like SEO), but if they want to alienate some customers because for them, that's less expensive than a big IT project, that should be their call. Not a lawyers. I can't believe that any business not in the mood to do this doesn't have competition that is.
Of course, I smell some consulting blood in the water, here. On the other hand, one of my customers sells eyewear for sports. Somehow I don't think that redesigning their site for the blind is going to be high on their list. The irony is, they can still get sued anyway. Brilliant.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm considering adding braille to my website and building ramps between pages for those in wheelchairs.
That's the one good thing that can come out of this, I guess.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
This is one time where I would say that reading the article is a waste of time. In fact, the article is actually an advertisement for this Minshare outfit. There are eight paragraphs in the article and five of them are about Mindshare and nothing else. Can we please find better material for the front page of slashdot?
It's the same situation in the U.K. The Disability Discrimination Act specifies that any place of business must be accessible to people with disabilities (including web-sites).
I see the legislation as a "good thing", the internet is the great leveller, many people who otherwise would find it hard to make purchases or converse in real life find fewer barriers.
It goes further than just visually impaired visitors however, you have to take into account things like colour-blindness, essential tremor (so big chunky web 2.0 buttons are fine!).
All of our sites and web apps (including admin backends) have been fully DDA compliant for several years now. Being compliant makes business sense, it doesn't cost much more to build it in from the start and then you increase your potential client base - plus you get a warm fuzzy feeling when you know you're not preventing people from accessing your services.
I am NaN
For example my parents run a quit shop, not in the US so this doesn't apply, however it gets me thinking. They have a large amount of fabric online you can buy. It's just pictures and sku numbers. There's not any text descriptions. Why? Well that takes time to write, time they don't have. Their web person doesn't even keep up with the load of things to be done as it is, much less have the time to write up fabric descriptions.
So to say it "wouldn't be expensive" to do this is BS. They'd have to hire someone. That's expensive, especially considering they aren't making a profit right now. It also wouldn't be worth it, there are a whole lot of blind quilters since it is a visual medium. There's nothing stopping a blind person from doing it, of course, but it's hard to appreciate your work if you can't see it.
So ya, I'm sure the expense is minimal for large companies, but you've got to think about the small businesses too. When your entire web team is one person, and your entire staff is like 6 people, hiring another person IS expensive, really expensive.
Yahoo Finance News article has detailed information on the ruling.
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I've been making a huge push for standards compliance - and it looks like those of us who still fight for it might finally have their voices heard. I just finished up a design contract for a hospital, recently - one where their current (soon to be old) website was all but easily usable by the blind.
For those of you who think that the blind don't surf, they do; Do you think TTS readers are just so you can make your computer say naughty words? There are numerous blind users on the web.
While transitioning from crap to standards compliance is a pain in the butt to do, once you are there, it is usually smooth sailing (assuming you have an experienced designer do the site). I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to manage some of my current web projects while using tables for layout, and whatnot.
Now, if only IE would catch up on the standards game..
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Um, no. It isn't a judge's job to advocate legislation. It's a judge's job to apply existing law to specific cases. It's exactly the judge's job to interpret 'service' and 'accessible', and to then explain how he reached those conculsions in his opinion (thus "case law" and "precedent"). That's how the Anglo-American system of law has worked for several centuries now.
Can you sue over designs that are so obnoxious they cause you to go blind?
I can only see this as ending poorly for site developers.
You mean they'll have to provide a simple text only alternative to the site? Uh, oh, that's like -so- bad for everyone involved.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Should people have a RIGHT to minimum wage or decent working conditions? Workers can always choose to work for a different company, or not work at all
Should people have a RIGHT to not have their medical records released to everybody? We can always choose to not use a health care provider that doesn't protect privacy.
Protection laws such as minimum wage or ADA were enacted to address the gaps between social responsibility and the free market.
Just look at the Interstate Commerce clause in the Constitution.
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Just a few years ago, a federal judge ruled that the ADA only applies to physical spaces. From the article:
In the first case of its kind, U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz said the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies only to physical spaces, such as restaurants and movie theaters, and not to the Internet.
"To expand the ADA to cover 'virtual' spaces would be to create new rights without well-defined standards," Seitz wrote in a 12-page opinion dismissing the case. "The plain and unambiguous language of the statute and relevant regulations does not include Internet Web sites."
Since you now have a couple of federal judges in different districts disagreeing with each other, the Supreme Court may ultimately decide this one.
The reasonable tactic would have been to approach Target and offer to work with them to find a solution. Not only would it be cheaper for all sides in the short and long terms
They did. Target refused to make any reasonable effort to make their site accessible.
"The NFB wrote to Target in May, asking it to make the site more accessible, according to the plaintiffs. Negotiations broke down in January, which led to the filing of the lawsuit, the organization said."
I know that bashing lawyers is instinctual for some people, but at least think first, OK?
What scares *me* is knee-jerk reactions like yours. Do you realize that the ADA limits lawsuits so that the owner has to make improvements, but the plaintif can't get damages? All the lawsuit is is a way to force property owners to comply with the law.
And in this case it's working exact like it was designed.
And any web designer who didn't do it the right way has only themselves to blame, because the ADA was passed in 1990.
This wasn't a decision that websites have to be "accessable". The judge just refused to dismiss the suit in the preliminary stages. The judge also refused to compel Target to make the site "accessable" during the litigation. So this just means that there's enough of a question to proceed to trial. It's not a "decision". Computerworld has a better story on this.
they complain about an inherently visual medium not being accessable enough
How is the web an inherently visual medium? It's based entirely on textual data, with support for graphics bolted on to make it prettier. The important things at the Target website are lists of store locations, operating hours, phone numbers, and that's what they were sued over. You don't need a picture to tell someone the address of your store. You don't need a picture to tell someone which brands of irons you carry and how much each model costs. You *should* add pictures of items to increase sales, since people generally like to see what they're buying, but blind people accept that limitation.
This is, quite frankly, a perfectly sensible ruling and something web developers have been warning companies about for nearly a decade. This is not some crazy fringe group out to cause trouble, this is a problem we've all known about for years and years but too many people ignored because it was cheaper or easier to cross your fingers than follow sound advice (although ironically enough, a well-designed (and therefore accessible) site will be cheaper and easier in the long run because of easier maintenance and adaptability).
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Check out Target's site. On the first screen, there are four words of text: "Sign In" and "New Guest." The stuff that looks like text really isn't, it's been saved as GIFs. There's also a big ol' Flash thing there. The second screen has actual text: the bulleted items are, even though the menu on the left isn't. Also the navigation panel at the bottom uses text. You can verify this by trying to select the "text." (For links, just make sure to move the pointer over a different link before you let go of the mouse button.) If you can select individual letters, it's actual text.
I'm definitely impressed by Target's committment to stupidity. Most people wouldn't bother taking the extra time to turn plain, unenhanced Tahoma text into a bunch of 1.5KB GIFs. I mean, it makes the site 500 times bigger, it makes the site unusable by people with vision problems, it takes probably 10 times longer since you have to do it in Photoshop, and I bet they had to spend hours fiddling with the code to make everything line up properly. Most people would bail when they realized precisely how stupid an idea this was, but not Target! When they were done, they just wanted to know what stupid thing they could do next! "Hey guys, let's challenge this lawsuit that we patently have no chance whatsoever of winning! We're still going to lose, but now it'll cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and a bunch of bad publicity!"