Judge Rules Sites Can Be Sued Over Design

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.'"

Deaf people use TTY

[tepples]

Also, the National Association of the Mute is suing AT&T because telephones do not adequately provide for the communication needs of the non-speaking.

Your analogy falls apart. Deaf people can tunnel text over a voice channel and have been able to do so for decades, even back when AT&T had a monopoly on telephones. It's called a teletypewriter [wikipedia.org]. Nowadays there's even a relay service to translate between voice and TTY modes.

Same in the U.K.

[Phil John]

It's the same situation in the U.K. The Disability Discrimination Act specifies that any place of business must be accessible to people with disabilities (including web-sites).

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

[fragmer]

Yahoo Finance News article [yahoo.com] has detailed information on the ruling.

Re:This is Dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Off-topic, but an answer to your question.

While I don't have any web-based citations, there was a case in the late 80's where a student at a high school in Eureka California fell through a skylight and injured himself while trying to break in to vandalize the school. He sued the school for damages, claiming they should have had warnings, visible in the dark, to warn people not to walk on skylights. He won the initial suit, and the school won on apeal - reducing the payout to the kids medical bills.

I was not involved with the incident, but one of my friends was a student there at the time and was well informed on the details. I know. Without a real citation, this becomes a bit of a friend of a friend anecdote.

Cases like this are, admitedly, rare. But they do happen.

Re:Really bad.

[MP3Chuck]

"How do you define 'accessible'?"

I'd point you to section508.gov [section508.gov], but ... it's inaccessible (i.e. "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www.section508.gov"). Granted, Section 508 only legally applies to government agencies, but I would imagine (IANAL, of course) that compliance by commercial websites would be sufficient in cases like this.

WAI [w3.org]'s WCAG [w3.org] might be a good place to start if you're concerned about whether your site is accessible. I'm also pretty sure there are Section 508 and WCAG validators out there.

Re:I'm confused.

[SEE]

They don't HAVE to sell their products to blind people if they don't want to...

Actually, in the United States, they do have to even if they don't want to, because Congress and the first President Bush enacted a law to that effect.

Does not establish a precedent ...

[slightlyspacey]

Just a few years ago, a federal judge ruled [zdnet.com] that the ADA only applies to physical spaces. From the article:

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.

Re:This is Dangerous

[theodicey]

The reasonable tactic would have been to approach Target and offer to work with them to find a solution. Not only would it be cheaper for all sides in the short and long terms

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?

Wrong. This isn't a decision, just preliminaries.

[Animats]

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.

Re:No kidding

[NMerriam]

So ya, I'm sure the expense is minimal for large companies, but you've got to think about the small businesses too.

Something that is frequently unknown whever laws applying to businesses are discussed is that the vast majority of regulations do not apply to small businesses. Accessibility, equal opportunity employment, etc are all bogeymen dragged out by people as keeping small business down, but they simply don't apply until you reach a certain size (100 employees seems to be a common minimum).

If you have a small business with three employees, you can laugh at people in wheelchairs and refuse to hire black people all you like. The only exception would be if you were trying to sell to the government, in which case they might require you to observe those regulations as a condition of the contract. And if you have a business open to the public, there are other regulations usually requiring accessibility and non-discrimination for customers.

So this ruling won't mean anything to small businesses, and once you have 100 employees you should be turning over at least a few million a year, in which both your construction of wheelchair ramps and accessible website should fit.

Existing racket

[Frankie70]

This is an existing racket which has just been ported to the web.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_ada_shak edown.html [city-journal.org]
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/artic le.html?storyid=5543 [theconservativevoice.com]
http://blog.mises.org/archives/001453.asp [mises.org]

Re:we no longer have the right to own property

[RKBA]

I wish I had some mod points to give you.
See also:
http://ron.dotson.net/diary/ussa.htm [dotson.net]

Re:This is Dangerous

[Arker]

This [com.com] has more information. "Sexton, who attends the University of California, Berkeley, says that while he can search the site for specific products, he's unable to associate prices with those goods." "If he did get to the checkout point, he would face an additional barrier: the Web site requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, noted plaintiffs' attorney Mazen Basrawi, who works for Berkeley, Calif.-based Disability Rights Advocates and is also blind."

Re:This is Dangerous

[jZnat]

It's cheaper, easier, and more efficient to design the site in the first place so that it falls back to an accessible view in a text-based web browser, screen reader, or braille terminal. You also get a lot more choice in design via CSS with your semantic XHTML (although you might need to throw in a few div's to prevent it from looking like complete ass in IE, but that could also be done via DOM manipulation, so whatever).

Re:This is Dangerous

[moresheth]

Sorry to interrupt, but if you have Firefox, you might want to do a "View > Page Style > No Style".

They have text links for just about all of their links. I'm not sure if those were in place at the time of the suit, but they are there now.

The great thing about what's happening on the web right now is that with all of the web standards, and great image-replacement techniques, it's possible to have image-based links and still have an accessible, down-grading website that will work for everyone in some fashion.

There was definitely a time when the Flash Backlash began and everyone joined the armored bandwagon against using Flash for websites. I know, I've been on the wagon for awhile now. But just like how people are starting to learn how to use Javascript and image links properly now, they are also using Flash properly and responsibly.

I realize not everyone will know how to do a "View Source" or see pages without styling, but you may want to keep it in mind for the future.