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Judge Rules Sites Can Be Sued Over Design
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Sep 09, 2006 06:58 PM
from the some-attrocious-colors-should-inspire-suits dept.
from the some-attrocious-colors-should-inspire-suits dept.
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.'"
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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.
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Not expensive? By what standard? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
No kidding (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Not expensive? By what standard? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, no problem there, then, because website accessibility issues have been discussed and understood in professional circles since the late 1990s. That's lots of time. The Web Accessibility Initiative [w3.org], for example, is driven by the same organisation that defines HTML and XML. They've been promoting accessibility publicly since about 1998. So someone could hardly call themselves a web professional and not know about this issue in detail.
Unless you've been sucked in by some fly-by-night operator who thinks that FrontPage and an undergrad arts course are all that's needed to create the public face of your business, you're already good to go. Because you know that standards compliance saves you money in the long run, and that the most common blind person to visit your site is a web crawler, meaning that accessbility and search engine ranking can be directly correlated.
Yep, as long as you diluted the commercial, proprietary snake-oil with just a few dollops of common sense, ensuring accessiblity is a simple matter of picking up the WAI checklist and having an intern spend a few days verifying the few minor problems that somehow leaked into production.
So what was your objection, again?
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Accessibility (Score:5, Funny)
Don't bother reading the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Same in the U.K. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
More information (Score:5, Informative)
Designer's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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..
One crucial point not addressed by the ruling (Score:5, Funny)
Does not establish a precedent ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Wrong. This isn't a decision, just preliminaries. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [computerworld.com] has a better story on this.
Today's Karma Burn (Score:4, Insightful)
Making a site 508 compliant [section508.gov] is not really all that hard and it essentially consists of making sure your site validates as XHTML 1.0 (preferably 1.0 Strict) or even better, XHTML 1.1. Do that and you are about 90% of the way there. The rest consists of actually knowing html and using it correctly. Learn to use labels, fieldsets, and other html elements that have been largely ignored, despite being quite useful. Actually use the alt tags for images of consequence. In other words, if you've designed a site that complies with web standards, you have little to worry about with this lawsuit. If you haven't, then now you know why we have and push standards. Consider it a lesson learned and move forward a wiser developer.
The only downside to writing a site to be 508 compliant is that AJAX must be used carefully. Screen readers still don't detect client-side content changes well, so client-side dynamic content is slightly more limited, requiring a few more postbacks that you would normally use. But if you know what you are doing, those sorts of "intrusions" to your normal programming work are almost inconsequential. One caveat: Don't trust that Visual Studio 2005 and IIS will give you compliant code, even if they say they will. They won't.
You need to know a little something about real web development but the end your site will be better, cleaner, and more easily maintainable. I've done it. It's ain't that hard.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]
Re:Flash (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Flash (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Is this the end? (Score:4, Interesting)
Braile displays have been available for years now. In fact, the CSS 2 spec allows you to write one stylesheet targetting, say, visual displays, and other for braile.
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Re:Really bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is Dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:This is Dangerous (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:This is Dangerous (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you have a somewhat optimistic view of how a company like Target would respond to such a request. I think a more likely response would be that they would say that they're definitely interested in building a more accessible site, that they'll get to it when time allows, a short flurry of memos would be distributed among the website people stating such, and then it would be forgotten about by the time the next redesign came around and nothing would end up happening.
Doing it that way would definitely be cheaper for Target, and probably cheaper for the disabled, but runs the serious risk of resulting in absolutely no change at all. In truth, there's nothing in the story that indicates what kind of contact they may have had with Target prior to filing suit (there's really nothing much in the story at all), so they may well have attempted to pursue that option but ended up having to file suit anyway.
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Re:This is Dangerous (Score:5, Informative)
They did. Target refused to make any reasonable effort to make their site accessible. [com.com]
"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?
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Re:This is Dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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Re:This is Dangerous (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:This is Dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
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!"
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Re:Bad in every way (Score:5, Insightful)
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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