Web Accessibility Gets a Boost In California Court

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.

Since this is California...

[__aaclcg7560]

I can't wait for a lawsuit against sites that require Internet Explorer to work correctly. Web access should be available to all browsers.

just crowdsource it

[Anonymous Coward]

http://pornfortheblind.org/ [pornfortheblind.org] is doing this with pornography sample clips already, the basic idea should apply to any site.

Re:how hard can this be?

[seebs]

Yes, there's standards. They're probably imperfect, but this stuff is not hard; Target's got things like graphical buttons with no alt text, where the graphic is just a picture of some words. VERY easy to fix.

Re:how hard can this be?

[PietjeJantje]

>So you have a regular website template and one for disability. Is that so hard?

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.

Vision Impaired

[Babel]

The term you are looking for is "vision impaired", which means: people who have a lack of vision (blind) or have poor vision. The term "visually impaired" means: ugly.

Fourteenth Amendment

[tepples]

Isn't it written into the constitution that its illegal to discriminate?

Whose Constitution? In the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits states from "deny[ing] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." But what is "protection" and what is a handout? And can states delegate this requirement for "protection" to businesses within their borders? The wording of the Constitution leaves this up to the sociopolitical climate.

What elements enable disabled users to make better use of a site and what create barriers to use?

Here are a few I can think of; see WCAG [w3.org] for details:

• Use of structural markup (h1, h2, h3, h4, strong, em) instead of presentational markup (font, some uses of table) helps. Structural markup lets you specify different CSS for different kinds of media, such as screen, print, TV, and handheld computers, and if your organization is large enough to have the money to cater specifically to blind people, you can have someone make CSS for speech.
• Make sure that your site can still be navigated (even if it doesn't look the way the branding people want) if none of the data referenced by img or object elements actually loads. And make sure that the replacement text for an img or object element is kept up to date.
• Strictly, the preceding point means sites done in SWF need a parallel site done in HTML. (I can't afford retail Adobe Flash software at the moment to verify how well Flash accessibility works.)
• Make sure that your CSS has enough luma [wikipedia.org] contrast between text and backgrounds and that any background image is paired with a comparable solid background color.
• Test increasing the font size in Firefox and IE, and make sure that the layout doesn't break and that the font size actually changes. (You should test in Opera too, but I mention Fx and IE because Opera's zoom is an entirely different process.)

Those of us who do get to grow old may well become disabled too. That includes you too maybe ?

Devil's advocate: Do people who grow old enough that the normal aging processes cause disability still have the disposable income to spend on luxury consumer products?

Re:Normal users too have problems also.

[JoshJ]

Firefox also has a nifty feature that lets you set a guaranteed Minimum font size- anything smaller than, say, 12 points can be preemptively forced to 12 points.
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.)

Re:hmmmm

[wk633]

At the time of the lawsuit, it was impossible for a screen reader user to 'checkout'. You could, with difficulty, put items in a cart, but the 'checkout' button was a hot region on the screen which was not selectable by keyboard. You HAD to use a mouse to click on the checkout button.