Target sued by the National Federation of the Blind for lack of Web Accessibility
I’ve been wondering when something like this would come down the pike, and now it has. This is a landmark case, and one that Target, whether it wins or loses in court, or settles out of court, has already lost in the realm of Public Opinion if they don’t do something about their website SOON.
Quite frankly it’s unbelievable that this is the quality of the code coming out of a major corporation’s IT department in the year 2006- it’s a mass of tag soup, javascript, imagemaps, flash, and other show stoppers for anyone using ANY device other than a regular computer. The lawsuit focuses on the image links with no alt tags or confusing alt tags. In an article by Carol Sliwa on the Computer World website, it talks about Bruce Sexton, a blind web user and his experience on the Target website–
. . . the screen-reader software doesn’t read the weekly list of special offers on Target’s Web site, Sexton said. He can’t tell whether the numbers he hears on other parts of the home page correspond to products, files or something else. Deeper into the site, he doesn’t know which item goes with which price. “It’s difficult to find anything,” Sexton said. As a result, he no longer tries to buy goods from the Target site, which for a long time he couldn’t do anyway because, he said, it required the use of a mouse.
When I read this, I got curious, especially when I peeked at the source code and saw huge masses of javascript, no doctype, and bloated table code. So I ran the Target homepage through validation. The W3 validator coughed, hacked and finally spit out an amazing 526 validation errors on the Target Homepage. What I find truly amazing is that it even renders in a browser at all.
It’s already been proven that dynamically generated sites can be made standards compliant and accessible. If corporations don’t start doing just that this lawsuit will be just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure there will be more lawsuits soon, as the press jumps on this and the attorneys catch the scent of corporate deep pockets blood in the water.
And I predict that Ebay will certainly be on the hit list . . .
