03.13.07
Make Sites Accessible To Avoid Lawsuits
A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. (Northern District of California Case No. C 06-01802 MHP). The suit charges that Target’s website (www.target.com) is inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Target asked the court to dismiss the action by arguing that no law requires Target to make its website accessible. The Court denied Target’s motion to dismiss and held that the federal and state civil rights laws do apply to a website such as target.com.
This information comes from Disability Rights Advocates, dated 2006-09-07. DMNews, a direct marketers’ information site, has coverage from 2006-09-20. It is also covered in the San Francisco Chronicle, on 2006-02-08.
Looking at their site, I noted that it doesn’t even declare a DOCTYPE. A browser or screen reader is supposed to just figure out how to render the site without something to tell it which variant of HTML or XHTML is being used? Now, Target is a huge corporation and able to take care of itself. However, if your small business uses some guy who just throws something together with one of those GUI-based site design tools, you could be the next business to be sued over an inaccessible site.
Here’s another clue: If your site is entirely done in Flash, Java applets, or similar technologies, it is probably not accessible. When your site designer / developer shows you the almost-completed site, be sure to view it in Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers, Opera, IE 6, IE 7 and in text-based browsers such as Lynx. If you can, you should also view it in Camino (a Mozilla-based Mac browser) and Safari on the Mac platform, and Konqueror (based on KHTML, related to Apple’s Safari and Syllable’s ABrowse) on the Linux platform.
My way of looking at it is that I want (1) to serve as many customers as I can without turning them away for minor reasons like not using IE as a browser; and (2) I do not want to attract lawyers. For those reasons, I always try to use valid XHTML 1.0 or higher on any site. I discussed this on Opportunity Knocks a few months back.
If you own or manage a small business, you cannot afford to be wrong on this one.
