Slashdot Log In
Web Accessibility Gets a Boost In California Court
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Oct 14, 2007 02:02 AM
from the as-california-goes dept.
from the as-california-goes dept.
The Register is reporting on developments in a California court case pitting blind users against the retailer Target over the lack of accessibility of Target.com. (We discussed the matter on two occasions last year.) The case is being brought under a federal statute, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and two California laws that are somewhat broader. Even though Target has made improvements to the site since losing the first phase in court, the judge has just ruled that the case is eligible for class-action status. The end result could be mandated accessibility for for all Web sites reachable by visually impaired users in California.
Related Stories
[+]
Ask Slashdot: Website Accessibility a Legal Issue? 218 comments
geekwithsoul asks: "Target is being sued because its website is not usable by the sight-impaired. While this story from the San Francisco Chronicle is from February, I've seen surprising little coverage of it in either mainstream or tech-focused media. Is the threat of legal action the only really effective way to get companies to create accessible (and thus standard-compliant) websites?"
[+]
Technology: Should Online Stores Be Subject To ADA? 546 comments
prostoalex writes, "HTML tutorials usually mention alt tags for images and noscript tags as something optional that a Web designer should add to a site for the crawlers and users browsing with graphics or JavaScript turned off. However, a recent lawsuit against Target by the National Federation of the Blind accuses the retailer of not complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Since Target's online store is unbrowsable with a screen reader, the nation's 200,000 blind people who go online cannot become paying customers, the NFB contends. From the article: 'In denying Target's motion to dismiss the suit two months ago, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel... held that the law's accessibility requirements applied to all services offered by a place of public accommodation. Since Target's physical stores are places of public accommodation, the ruling said, its online store must also be accessible or the company must offer equally effective alternatives.' Does the judge's name ring a bell? Yes, it's the same Marilyn Hall Patel who handled the RIAA's case against Napster in 2001." Web builders and tools may need to start brushing up on the Web Accessibility Initiative.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
acronyms. (Score:4, Funny)
That's they get for using a WYSIWYG editor to make their website.
Re: (Score:2)
Ooh, wait until the plaintiffs discover this thing called flash.
> We've hit the JACKPOT people, look at this monstrosity, you cant use if you are blind. Let's sue.
Even if you aren't disabled (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only is the layout wildly different from site to site, but also the semantics. And sometimes the access to some services aren't in a menu at all but hidden on a specific page that you don't really think it would be.
Re:Even if you aren't disabled (Score:4, Insightful)
My guess is that one of the questions which will start getting asked is "how do I block visually impaired users in California?"
Parent
Re:Even if you aren't disabled (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This smacks of bullshit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:This smacks of bullshit... (Score:5, Insightful)
If Target makes 0.1% more profit this year, no one gives a crap. But if one million Americans who can use a wheelchair are suddenly able to live their lives, this makes a significant difference in the world. (And yes, blindness and business websites can be considered the same as wheelchairs and physical buildings, hence the analogy.) Leave your idealistic philosophy at home and consider the real-world impact of your ideas.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When an affected group is as small as the population of blind online shoppe
Funny how /.'ers are libertarian until (Score:3, Insightful)
FREEDOM OF CONTRACT PEOPLE. GET GOVERNMENT OUT OF OUR LIVES! LIBERTARIANISM IS NOT JUST ABOUT WIRETAPPING!
Re:This smacks of bullshit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Fucking troll? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting dichotomy. You rail against a lawsuit designed to compel accessibility to their services, saying that the stores should be free to choose to cater to these people, but when moderators freely choose to reduce accessibility to your diatribe by moderating you down, you reverse yourself and demand equal respect and accessibility rather than shopping elsewhere for a more receptive audience (while denying Slashdot ad revenue by reducing its readership).
You do your cause no credit.
His "cause" is that no one should be forced to cater to the disabled at gunpoint, which is effectively what federal regulation is.
There's nothing in that philosophy that says it's not perfectly OK to publicly call out a bunch of jackass robot-head mods for the dumbfucks that they are. In fact, it's remarkably consistent with the idea above [slashdot.org] that it would only take a few 'chair bound folks crawling into Target stores on their bellies with the media in attendance to change things. Public spectacle embarrass
Re:This smacks of bullshit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This smacks of bullshit... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yes, I wheel crippled people to restaurants and to doctor's appointments, I've taught blind and deaf relatives both practical matters and technical ones. Failure to make reasonable concessions to accessibility cuts them off from social, economic, and political opportunities. It's penny wise and pound foolish: a store as large as Target, which dominates the commerce in entire towns or neighborhoods, bears a legal and social responsibility to serve that entire community.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Is this unreasonable to try to ensure disabled people get a similar quality of service to able bodied people?
Isn't it written into the constitution that its illegal to discriminate?
Now don't you think it would be reason
I think you're trolling, but here's your answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Free enterprise works pretty well - when everyone decides to spend money in whichever way satisfies their greedy nature, resources get allocated fairly efficiently.
But this is not always the case. For example, if you run a manufacturing business that produces toxic chemical waste, depending on how greedy your nature is, you may choose to just dump your waste in the nearest river. While this works well for you in the short run, it works well for no one in the long run if all businesses operate that way because soon everything would be too polluted to use. So we have government regulations that say 'Hey, if you make waste, you have to pay to dispose of it properly', and then the costs of that get passed on to the consumers of the product that caused the generation of the waste in the first place.
Did you see how that worked? In this case, government regulation ENHANCES the proper allocation of resources, by making sure the entire costs of manufacturing a product is borne by those who use the product.
Legally mandated disability access works in a similar manner. For any given business, the direct cost to them of maintaining access for the disabled may not balance out just not accepting that business in the first place. But, if we don't require that all businesses make reasonable efforts to be accessible to the disabled, then very soon no businesses would be accessible to the disabled. And that's a problem for everyone - because now instead of having disabled people, who through reasonable accommodations made to them are independent productive members of society, we now have disabled people who are essentially locked up in their homes, unable to participate and contribute to society, where we then have to either divert our tax dollars to support them, or let them starve to death (or in the very least, let them out on the street to beg).
Secondary to that, disability access is a bit like health insurance. While most of us are not disabled CURRENTLY, it's quite possible something might happen where we become disabled in the future. An accident, a disease, or shit, we could just get old, and not be able to walk or see as well as we used to. So, as a society, by deciding to make reasonable accommodation for the disabled, we also ensure that in the event we ourselves become disabled in the future, access is available to us. We may not ever need it, but if we do, we'll be glad we have it.
Another point to note here is that web accessibility is NOT just about seeing-eye-dog-blind people. Some people can't see very well just because they get old and lose their vision. That's probably not as big a deal now because most older Americans don't use computers anyway, but in 20-30 years, it'll be quite important as the internet generation starts to lose their eyesight.
Parent
Re:I think you're trolling, but here's your answer (Score:3, Insightful)
A manufacturer who doesn't properly handle toxic waste is violating the rights of the persons upon whom the toxins impinge. Laws should identify those rights and devise a method for ensuring that rights are not violated (and compensating those whose rights are violated).
A business that doesn't provide handicapped access is violating no-one's rights; the property is privately owned and any visitor is there by permission, not by right. Prov
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you then advocating apathy as a method for positive change?
Since this is California... (Score:5, Informative)
Target might do something surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
There are incidences of mass lawsuits invoking the disabilities act even against stores which comply with it. It's not something that you can feel happy defending against and odds are that
how hard can this be? (Score:5, Interesting)
Which makes me think, do they have standards documents for creating a disability accessible website? What all is involved? And what about amazon's "look inside" function? There is no way a text to speech algorithm can read those books because they are images.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:how hard can this be? (Score:5, Informative)
This seems to be a leading theme, presumably by people who do not make sites or make sites that don't work well with disability. The company I work for actually built a site for a foundation for blind people, and they provided a test panel to go through the motions, and a whole set of guidelines to go with it. Let start by saying it isn't just throwing another template at it. If you think you're coding in standards, nice div's and CSS all, and that it just requires throwing a template at it with less bling, think again. Essentially the "problem" is readers, and you'll have to cater for the basic, anal reader html parser. A whole lot of tags you thought were ok, suddenly turn out to be wrong, such as BR. The whole navigation design and design in general will fail, because it's not much fun going into a page for content and being read 50 links first. The whole way of logically setting up text areas and making sure it flows takes a lot of reconsideration. The testing and debugging takes a lot of time, and you -will- bumb into issues you just plainly did not consider because you are simply not blind. Then there's the CMS, and its users should not be able to break any of this. I can go on, but all in all it took about 150% of the time web site builders normally put in a site, complete with "basic" template. That is, if you want to do it 100% right.
Parent
Good for F/OSS Browsers? (Score:2)
Conversely, could this be used to push some Ultra-proprietary Screen reader technology only Windows Supports by adding elements that would make FireFox and Konqueror unusable?
What will the outcome be? Is this the sum of all fears?
Solution: (Score:2)
Blindness is not a disability, it is [wikipedia.org] a [hugereviews.com] superpower [wikipedia.org]!
I should totally be made a (highly-paid) part of their blood-sucking legal team.
just crowdsource it (Score:4, Informative)
Federal Government Intrusion (Score:2)
Pile on enough laws and you can destroy the web for everyone. It's not as resilient as you may think.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Vision Impaired (Score:2, Informative)
Or there is the alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
Or it could begin a wave of website owners deciding "this shit isn't worth it", and they either turn off their site entirely or at least block known California IP ranges.
Re:Yay lowest common denominator (Score:5, Insightful)
Because most people believe the disabled have a right to equal access to services as everyone, firstly because those who use assistive technologies have no choice and secondly it's not their fault. Not only that but there's really no excuse for designing an inaccessible site, it's not difficult, in fact in most cases it's easier. Inaccessible usually means Flash/Javascript/IE only sites, which not only stops access for the disabled but for those of us who hate Flash/Javascript/Internet Explorer too, it also implies the Web designer/developer is incompetent.
There are circumstances where it's impossible to cater for people using assistive technologies: like wheelchair access to listed buildings (not uncommon in Europe) or prohibitive cost for small businesses to provide wheelchair access, I don't think Web sites are one of them though.
Think of it this way: do you use Firefox? Do you think all Web sites should work given your chosen technology? Or is it your job to somehow adapt to people who only code for Internet Explorer? Is it their fault that you don't use Internet Explorer? Frankly too bad on you. Life sucks. Now imagine someone's showing you that attitude, yet your body is setup such that you can't use anything but Firefox. If you ever go blind from looking at too much Natalie Portman smothered in hot grits I hope you remember your post.
Back on topic: the biggest problem I see for site owners is CAPTCHA as screen readers can't read the majority of CAPTCHAs out there, everyone had better make sure the system they use allows for a sound file alternative. reCAPTCHA [recaptcha.net] looks like a good service, you get to encode books at the same time as fighting spammers! Personally haven't used it on a project, but did notice the sound file alternative link.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yay lowest common denominator (Score:4, Insightful)
At some point almost everybody suffers a "life sucks" moment, and we create rules to try and fairly take care of people during those instances. If you have a genetic defect, why can't health insurance companies deny you coverage? If somehow you lose your job, why are you allowed to get out of debt by filing bankruptcy?
Sure life sucks, that doesn't mean society can't help with "reasonable accomodation."
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Yay lowest common denominator (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is blind. Are you aware of how many people tailor Web sites for that thing?
I have a sneaking suspicion you've never used a screen reader, nor are you a proficient Web designer. Where the text is on the page is irrelevant, as long as the page has good structure: headings, lists, blockquotes, em tags, strong tags etc. a screen reader will be able to read it perfectly well. The Web is for communicating information, text is the best way of achieving that in most cases and where images are used all that's needed are the trivial additions of alt tags to provide a quick description of what the image contains.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
However, to a person who's been blind their whole life, the two-dimensional layout of a webpage is often irrelevant. It doesn't matter to them that one button is to the right of another most of the time. It's far easier to find something by name than it is to find it spatially.
Since you've never seen a screenreader before, check out this video:
http://video.yahoo.com/video/pl [yahoo.com]
Re:Yay lowest common denominator (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really know the answer, but I can offer you some speculation: If you're offering your services to the general public, then you'd be unfairly discriminating against disabled people. (This is assuming, of course, that the changes are reasonable. Ramps leading to the doorway aren't the same as denying wheelchair access to a roller coaster.) Now, that's a little broad/extreme, so I'll water it down a bit. A place like Target sells everyday needs to a broad range of people. If a wheelchair-bound person cannot buy something like toilet paper, they're in trouble. I think the idea is to make the world a little easier on people that have these problems.
"Why isn't it their job to somehow adapt? Is it my fault someone else can't see, hear, walk, or think clearly? Frankly, too bad on them. You got a shitty roll of the dice. Life sucks."
Well, I suppose that's one way to look at it. Unfortunately, that's not something you'd be saying if you were stuck in a wheelchair. Those people with a shitty roll of the dice are doing the best they can with the technology available to them to continue to lead a productive life. If common everyday tasks are difficult because a big company like Target didn't spare a little extra expense to resolve the issue, it becomes offensive. "Why is it so frickin hard to build a ramp?! I just want some f'n toilet paper!"
Okay, that's wheelchair access to a physical property, so that example doesn't work well in this discussion. So what about this particular case? From what I've gathered, they could, without a lot of effort or expense, update their site to work for the blind. They're not doing that. In theory, they could just take their business and move on to Wal-mart or Amazon or something. But the problem is that disabled people have had to fight battles like this for decades. If they don't win something like this, the risk is other companies will ignore them because they're not big enough to be profitable.
Life sucks for these people, but it doesn't have to. That's the point. When a little more thought goes into the design of a building or a webspace, it makes life easier for everybody, but it also makes life livable for those with disabilities. Life can suck. That roll of the dice can happen to you at any time.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It's also, and this may matter more to you, stupid.
A cooperative society walks all over an uncooperative society. Hint: You will never, not in your whole life, be worth as much to us as Stephen Hawking. We'd rather accommodate him than you.
Re: (Score:2)
They are adapting - they use assisstive technologies like screen readers. The law essentially says that you have to meet them halfway, because they can't come all the way to you. Screen readers aren't magic, and they're not string AI, they need pages to be built within certain guidelines or they can't do their job properly.
As for why the law exists, your attitude and tha
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"but what are the "and headings are missing that are needed for navigation"?"
I would guess that means things like tables are missing properly formatted (meaning they can be picked up by the naked eye) headers. There are numerous accessibility guidelines that websites are generally required to follow, unfortunately many developers are completely unaware of them or put them at a very low priority. Its more fun to develop that neat web 2.0 javascript widget than it is to ensure all your inputs have proper
IMG tag inside a H1-H6 tag (Score:2, Insightful)
"They probably use IMGs instead of H1-H6 tags, either because they are using a non-standard font, or some design in the headings. There are a few workarounds for this. You can use H1-6 in your markup, and replace it with images in the CSS (assigning an ID to each H1-6.)"
Actually, it is easier then that. Just simply put the IMG tag inside of a H1-H6 tag and make sure the ALT option has text. If the image is not used, the ALT text will show up in the H1-H6 font and style. Also screen readers and site i
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If your a completely private entity, those accessibility rules would not apply. But for businesses open to the public, there's a long history of discrimination that has been held as improper ("Irish need not apply" help wanted signs, real estate deeds preventing sale to Jews, "Whites Only" lunch counters, etc.) and the state and federal governments have the legal power to force you to be open to everyone if you're not a completely priv
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Edit-preferences-content (tools-options-content on windows)
Under "Fonts & Colors" click advanced
Set your minimum font size.
Alternatively, in about:config, you can edit font.minimum-size.x-user-def (and anything else that happens to be under font.minimum-size.)