Should Online Stores Be Subject To ADA? 546
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.
About Time! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's got my vote. (Score:4, Insightful)
flash doesn't work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:About Time! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:About Time! (Score:5, Informative)
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It's just that 99 times out of 100 it's used for pointless little animations or as a substitute for actually trying to write some proper f'ing HTML which renders sensibly. It's a case of the many giving the few a bad name.
Probably just as well... (Score:5, Insightful)
-b.
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Yet GMail is faster than SquirrelMail. By your logic, that shouldn't be the case. SquirrelMail is simpler, has less dynamic components, and is more compatible with accessibility standards. Why is it slower?
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Are we running it on comparable servers, first of all? Google has a lot of 'puter power at its fingertips. Also, one may be more efficient with local caching than the other. Who knows?
-b.
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You can assume comparible servers, and GMail will still win every time. In fact, any webmail provider using a "classic" webmail design is likely to show up slower than GMail, even if you assume the same hardware and bandwidth.
The difference is that all that AJAXian voodoo is actually doing something more than making everything look pretty. It's responsible for transferring only the information necessary to update the display. Nothing more, nothing less.
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GMail, every time. As a regular visitor to Slashdot, you should know why. If you don't, look at the replies two siblings up.
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Target's site was (is) crappy IMHO. Anyone who has used it via dial-up should agree. I timed it and it took almost 5 minutes to log in and get to your account summar (first screen after logging in.) Watching logs and wireshark showed that the majority of that time was huge javascript downloads followed by image downloads. I often browsed with images turned off when using dial-up but that's not possible on Target's site. If you have images turned off then login fails. (WTF?)
I personally have no
Marilyn Hall Patel... (Score:2, Informative)
Market (Score:2)
Why, sure, the market will fix this one. (Score:2)
Just like the market solved Jim Crow. No intervention by the government necessary at all.
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Actually, Jim Crow was government intervention. That's why they were called "laws."
I think you missed the sarcasm... (Score:2)
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Re:Market (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't care that people with wheelchairs can't get to the second floor of the Gap sometimes, then this is fine. If you do care, then it's not. Sort of a personal judgment call on how you feel about government intervention to protect the less fortunate.
Regardless of how I might feel about forcing retrofits (not a big fan), setting standards before establishments are built seems somewhat reasonable (and it's usually not all that expensive if you plan on doing it from the beginning). Having rules established ahead of time is basically the same as having building codes, and just as onerous.
With regard to the ADA and websites, it seems that the internet is not at all what was envisioned when the ADA was drafted and it should be looked at anew. If you want to set rules for website design, it has to be clear what those rules are going to be before design begins. Forcing major sites to redesign after they're established seems mean spirited and expensive. If this is something that people feel strongly about, they can go back to Congress and draft an amendment. Courts are probably wise to stay out of the way until then.
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I'm not a lawyer of course, but perhaps there is a parallel with the requirements for bringing buildings into compliance that applies here. I believe the ADA requires that a building complies if they are "places of public accomodation", and are either new or undergoing major renovation work. On the web, most "major sites" undergo major renovation work fairly regularly, with new look and feel, or new functionality.
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And this simply does not work for quite a few reasons. The most prominent ones are:
- Too few customers with a specific handicap to make this attractive for virtually any shop (except for a few highly specialized ones).
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In this case there certainly is a market, but it leads to results we don't like. The problem is that the extra profits gained from selling to a small minority (the disabled) are probably much less than the expenses in accomodating them. Therefore it is rational for most retailers to simply ignore the disabled. Of course t
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Bad luck, 'cos you did. Why should e.g. a blind person not be able to use e.g. Amazon? (picked at random but the regulations must apply to every seller) I mean, would you crow about the market if a shop decided to spend some money installing a wheelchair ramp? Or would you inisist that the physically-disabled open their own shop at ground level?
In the UK, we had a similar Act [wikipedia.org] introduced last year. Everyone just got on with the necessary work ahead of time
No (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing one should require is to stick a div tag with CSS to make it invisible at the very very top of the site, that says "If you are a disabled person using a screen reader to navigate this page, and wishes to make a purchase, dial the following number and talk with one of our friendly representative who will be happy to help you, and give you any web-only discounts you deserve".
Otherwise, if you ever thought IE6 was holding the web back, never freagin mind screen readers. If your page is nothing more than documents with information, and maybe 1 form (which I guess a lot of e-commerce stores are), then go ahead and make it accessible. Its not very rough. But depending on your target audience, it very well might be a desktop-like application with all the wiz and buzz that it implies, and there's simply no way to make that accessible without ruinning your normal user's experience. And if you DO manage to make it accessible, it will be in the terms of the law only: it will still be useless a to a blind person. Those laws are out of date, simple as that: they consider the web as being nothing more than a giant e-book. It doesn't work like that anymore.
Mod this guy up (Score:2)
The ADA is overall a good law that has served a good purpose. But in this case, this is all Target should need to do - p
Re:Spoken like... (Score:4, Insightful)
Spoken like an old web page designer who hasn't seen what the web can do.
Again: if all I'm doing is a standard web page, thats fine. Its pretty easy (to some extent). Being purely XHTML compliant doesn't make you accessible, and there are some things in some situations that are pretty rough to deal with.
That being said, as soon as you use something like, let say, Ajax (I use this as an example because everyone heard of it, and from your post you really don't seem to realise what people have used the web for these days, so I won't go in any more details), screen readers don't pick up the refresh, and thus its not compliant. So woohoo, I have to kiss ajax good bye. If I was using Ajax to refresh a dropdown list or something, thats easily remedied. If I'm doing something akin to Google Calendar in features, making an "accessible" version can take months.
Again: The Web is not a giant e-book reader anymore.
Incentives (Score:2)
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There is no one forcing them to care about normal customers. So they don't. But because t
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Absolutely not (Score:2)
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Retailers, be they virtual or brick and mortar, are places of public accommodation, and as such have to make themselves available to everyone. By this logic, Target could exclude , which would be patently illegal.
Legally, I think the ADA applies equally to Web sites and physical locations. Ethically, I think the ADA is on very shaky ground. But then, I support the right of individuals and companies to discriminate based upon sex or ethnicity as well. I think the government should be held to a standard of
Unequivocally, yes (Score:2)
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And here's an interest followup. My online store uses ajax. Now granted, my implementation has complete no-javascript, fallback support, but not all ajax websites do, and in some cases I'd say a fallback option isn't very feasible. How do screen readers cope with ajax websites?
C'mon (Score:2)
Let market forces work it out. These companies will lose business because of the accessibility problems, and probably also because of unfriendly interfaces. Money talks to business far better than lawmakers, and it's a language they can speak that doesn't require translators.
The ADA is one of those "nice intentions" laws that, for every wheel-chair ramp added to a school has 20+
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Yeah, we all know how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination problems worse. And who needed that Emancipation Proclamation anyway? Unnecessary government intervention in private market matters.
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Nope. Here I have to disagree. Disabled people are a miniscule portion of the market and if we leave it to market forces alone, their interests will never, ever be served. Handicapped parking, bathrooms, ramps, elevators, braille plaques, etc are simply not economically feasible in any business. The only reason businesses do it is because they are obliged to via building codes, etc.
However believe you me these relatively small but unp
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Sounds Reasonable (Score:2)
Fund the Mandates (Score:2)
Likewise, if our government is going to require websites to comply with ADA, our government should offer free software and validation testing for easy compliance. That's a lot more cost-effective (and just effective) than spending time and money forc
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The same can be said with the 'Rights' to be able go to whatever store you want. IMO, you dont have a right to be in my store, you have a privledge. If I dont wish to cater to a certain group of people, I shouldn't have to. Where's *my* rights?
Interesting Ruling (Score:2)
It would seem to me that the disabled, blind or otherwise would be more prone to use internet services to begin with. The fact that retailers haven't seen this and adapted already is interesting into itself.
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That would be nice. I mean, I don't really expect a lot of flash animation on pages for the blind - do you? I think I'll choose the "blind" pages on purpose...
One of the worse lawsuits in recent times (Score:2)
Interesting parallel to the Quebec Language Police (Score:2)
To my knowledge the PQ in Quebec have not started chasing websites with their language laws, but I would not be surprised to hear that they are thinking about it. How long before the US goes bi-lingual with Spanish as a second language? If you think adding alt
Bullshit (Score:2)
Ever been to Target's site? (Score:2, Informative)
I've bought quite a few things at Target's website, and I'm stunned that it's unusable with screen readers. There's little or no dynamic content, and none that couldn't be easily done by showing/hiding DIVs with CSS. Granted it's graphics-intensive, but there are still descriptions of products and other stuff that should make it usable for VI people using screen readers.
So I went to target.com in Lynx, which is our quick and dirty check for SEO and screen reader usability (we do other checks before we f
Target has a terrible approach to user-friendly. (Score:2)
Judge for Yourself (Score:2)
OT: Where have the modpoints gone? (Score:2)
court case few years ago, online != public accomod (Score:2)
Whether or not the online world should fall under the AD
Target already offers an alternative (Score:2)
Duh.
Fucking bleeding-heart courts.
More non-sensical ADA fallout... (Score:2)
The real problem with the ADA is that there is no real cost benefit analysis. For many ADA required fixes, the cost is huge and a small benefit goes to a very small group of people. How much will it cost a small mom and pop store to completely redesign the website of their home business? Thousands and thousands of dollars? And how many blind web-surfers will c
Ada? (Score:2)
Well it worked for Charles Babbage...
Re:ADA is bad law (Score:4, Funny)
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Flash = tyranny of the clueless.
I'm no fan of the ADA, but anything that puts Flash developers on the streets with signs saying "Will skip intros for food" is OK by me.
I'm with you on that one (Score:2)
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Put them in solitary confinement until they can fill out a 500 page webform explaining why they should be released. Every page has a non-skippable flash intro, the answers on the form are maintained by session cookies and the form is only accessible by a very noisy 14.4 dialup connection that can't be re-established without closing their browser.
It's not life imprisonm
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Well, anyway, interpretations of ADA are taken too far. There are some things that handicapped people just cannot do - that's the very definition of a handicap. Should we require rock-climbing equipment stores to accomodate double amputees?
-b.
Re:ADA is bad law (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unfortunately, use of a relay operator is becoming common for scammers, etc. to hide accents and out of area calls.
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(Or they could just make a .html version, but ...)
Re:ADA is bad law (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, in California, we have a statewide, free, public relay service so that TDD users can communicate with anyone with a phone with no problem, so its not an issue. I thought that was fairly common, and not unique to California.
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That's an interesting parallel case. However, in this case, the law requires that the PHONE company (and hence you) find a way to make the PSTN work for the deaf. There are organizations (names escaping me right now) that have non-deaf operators that provide the interface between the deaf and the non-deaf worlds: if you are deaf, you call these operators via TDD, and they make a voice call to the destination, translating back and forth.
Just getting STARTED, my friend! (Score:3, Funny)
No! Every store should have to employ someone who signs in American Sign Language (and every other dialect too, of course, in case you get a foreign handicapped person) to be ready to answer a video conference call. Also, in case of a Helen Keller type situation, you'll need someone who can spell things out in brail, real-time. Also, if that
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On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with the requirement that it should be possible to enter into your shop in a wheelchair. Somebody who can't walk is already compensating for their disability as much as they can by using a wheelchair. I
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No? You're not against that? OK. Now, making a Web site accessible is not particularly hard or costly and whereas one TDD machine in a shop may benefit a handful of blind people at most, making a Web site acce
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Web commerce is definitely something that handicapped people can do. This really is not that big of a deal if you use your head. Especially for such retail giants as Target, there is no reason why they can't implement ADA for their customer web sites.
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Re:ADA is bad law (not) (Score:2)
rock climbing double amputee [upbeat.net]. You knew this was coming, didn't you?
As far as I can tell, every REI and EMS I've been into has been pretty well designed in terms of universal design. [udeducation.org]. Were they required to? Probably not to the extent they were. I'm sure that since they're in malls, they have to meet minimum requirements by law, but, they also seem to be companies who are inclusive by nature, and likely to go beyond the minimums. To my admittedly non-expert eye, they seemed to be more accessib
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You'll sing a different tune if you go blind... (Score:2)
"Georgia, Georgia, The whole day through Just an old sweet song Keeps Georgia on my mind...."
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I doubt I could carry a tune if I were deaf.
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Is a law bad because it requires businesses to accommodate ALL customers, regardless of whether or not they can see, hear or walk? Or are you a part of the group of pseudo-libertarians who think that government should butt out?
If it wasn't for ADA, my wife (who is confined to a wheelchair) and I would be extremely limited in where we go, what we do, and where we can shop, eat, or stay.
So it seems a bit ridiculous to you that Target was the target, and they want them to make the site a
It is their loss (Score:2)
But in truth I have mixed feelings about enforced compliance with the ADA on online stores, for commercial organizations. They are trying to sell a product or provide a service - if they don't want your business (by way of not properly accomodating you) then don't give it to them! It is just that easy! Go to their competitor and let them reap the reward.
But then you start trickling down the web chain and think, what about non-profit orgs?
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Is a law bad because it requires businesses to accommodate ALL customers, regardless of whether or not they can see, hear or walk? Or are you a part of the group of pseudo-libertarians who think that government should butt out?
It's a bad law because it goes way overboard in forcing businesses to accomodate every single person on the planet and every single malady they could possibly have. If the government feels that strongly about it, it can pay for it. Then people can decide with their own wallets, at
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hold on there sparky, If you can't provide a service for people then you should be allowed to go out of business. No one can say "You're not allowed to do business because someone can't do business with you." It would be more like "Are you crazy??? If you
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Welcome to capitalism.
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Part of doing business in the community is that you have to be a part of the community. If you can't provide a service for people there is no reason you should be aloud to operate. You don't have nor should you have a right to do business wherever you like.
Um, why? That's kind of a value judgement there.
ohhh.... snap (Score:2)
Would be interested in knowing
Re:ADA is bad law (Score:4, Interesting)
At all the new parks in the city, the picnic tables are 1) missing one of the seats and 2) have tables mounted neck-high so you can run a wheelchair underneath them. The furniture is very uncomfortable for the 99.9% of the normally-abled public.
The ADA had the right idea but the implementation has been a nuisance.
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These accesibility laws are not about making special exceptions to handicapped people. It's simply allowing handicapped people to live, participate, and work to contribute to themselves and their community just like e
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(Applause)
It _is_ a special exception. But it's a relatively _small_ investment on the part of the business owner which makes a HUGE difference in the independance and quality of life of the disabled. What society gains is a change betwe
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It is absurdly difficult to accommodate screen readers.
They are undetectable, and cannot be sniffed.
Therefore, you have to assume that potentially anyone coming in can be using a screen reader. You have to program extra code, but not too much extra code, or the screen readers will be reading "spacer" "spacer" "spacer" for three hours. You need to have noscript, and noembed tags in everything, and offer an alternate text version of your site that needs to be up to date
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If you keep to standards and don't defecate non-semantic pseudo-HTML from your crutch of a WYSIWYG editor, then it's really easy. Alt tags are required by HTML 4 and XHTML - they're not optional. Non-Javascript alternatives reduce support costs - for instance, you don't have able-bodied twits phoning up, asking why a particular section of their website doesn't work just because they disa
Is it? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the law's provisions is that service animals are largely unilaterally allowed in places of public
accomodation. My wife is disabled as was our housemate at the time. They both have service dogs- certified
as such. Service animals aren't just seeing-eye or deaf dogs, there's a lot more there than that- and they
do actually help out in a lot of ways and you can't just arbitrarily separate them from their owners willy-nilly.
Needs to be very sp
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Such as?
the site IS poorly designed. (Score:2)
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