Judge Rules Sites Can Be Sued Over Design 709
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.'"
This is Dangerous (Score:2, Insightful)
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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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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
Re: "Not hard or expensive to comply" (Score:3, Interesting)
The web is meant as a free-for-all where everything exists, and only the worst illegal activities really draw fire.
If a business has a site which doesn't play nice with certain disability accessibility tools, they shouldn't be sued. I don't know what auxilliary benefit flows to the defendant besides "just buying my sweater", but I would be terrified if this spawned a Professional Disabled Litigator.
Wait, that makes my head spin. Isn't the definition of "disability" something t
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To ensure that my pages are accessible to all, I really should
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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 n
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The reasonable tactic would have been to app
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?
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).
Re:This is Dangerous (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is Dangerous (Score:4, Insightful)
So, according to you, it's perfectly OK if stores put up "NO BLACKS" signs again?
How about a gas station refusing to sell gas to handicapped people who can't operate the pump themselves? They can always push their car with their wheelchair over to the next gas station...
Or how about web sites like
Re:This is Dangerous (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, to put it in your own words, No one has a right to start a store. Period. If you don't like the fact that we chose to make you follow requirements, then vote with your feet/money and start a store elsewhere. If we cut out enough business, we will either change the laws or go bankrupt and be conquered. This applies to ANY limit place on who may open a store. If we are stupid enough to limit who can start a store, then we have to live with it. But stores have NO business coming in and telling us to change it. Period.
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What the hell does that mean? Gee, college isn't a right either, does that mean it's ok for colleges to discriminate against people based on their being disabled? or how about the color of their skin or their sex? Hotels aren't a right, so wheelchair ramps shouldn't be required either I guess...
Legal protection against discrimination for the disabled are just as important as those for minority ethnic groups and women. Come out of the 50's and start living in the 21st century.
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Read this comment [slashdot.org]. The author is right on the money.
lifetime appointment judges
This is an entirely different topic, though I totally agree with you.
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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They'll have to provide a simple text only alternative to the site
Alternative? If the site's made well using web standards, all the browser needs to do is ignore the stylesheet (like Firefox has the option to do, and Lynx has to do), and you can see the site without any snazzy design getting in the way of the actual content. You certainly don't need to make two copies of every page.
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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.
Someone needs to post the actual ruling... (Score:2)
And in other news... (Score:2, Funny)
Deaf people use TTY (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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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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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
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Sounds like a very search-unfriendly site. Adding descriptions - which would certainly help people relying on screen readers - has a knock on effect of those descriptions being indexed on search engines. This has the benefit of bringing in targeted traffic to the website - of people looking for a particular fabric. An imme
Blind person who buys goods for sighted person (Score:2)
One member of a family uses sport eyewear. Another member of the family, who holds the purse strings, is blind in one eye and legally blind in the other. One of your customers will likely lose business to a competitor whose site is more accessible to blind people.
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In Target's case, they have a large company with a site that's driven by a database and modular components. Adding ALT tags to their product image really shouldn't be that big of a deal unless they did some sloppy development. Their legal fees probably cost a lot more then their development costs. I imagine the plaintiff simply followed through with this case to set precede
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?
Really bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Really bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd point you to section508.gov [section508.gov], but
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
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Accessibility (Score:5, Funny)
Don't bother reading the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: your sig (Score:2)
The first problem of which is obviously "What am I going to do with all this free time I have now?", but what's the second?
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My design background, which was colored by engineering, had emphasized working within the boundaries set by the project and/or needs of the client. You're right that many web site designers feel that form is all that matters, functionality be damned.
In fact, many graphic designers (who would be better called "visual artists") feel that to bend their vi
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.
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If you're building from the start, that is. If you've already got a huge, existing website, then it can be quite the PITA
Not to mention that without any legally-defined standards, you can just be sued by someone with a disability you haven't considered. What if your site's navigation is too complex for a person with mental retardation to use? What if a double-amputee is trying to use your site with no arms? What if someone is dyslexic, and can't re
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Which, of course, exist.
More information (Score:5, Informative)
I'm confused. (Score:2)
What's next, suing Target for not sending out braille catalogs?
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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.
American's really love to sue (Score:2)
Re:Americans really need to sue (Score:2)
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..
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Unconstitutional (Score:2, Insightful)
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What? (Score:2)
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Well, there's the sound my silly joke falling flat on its face.
A lot of over the top responses... (Score:2)
And even those that were allowed forward simply allow the plaintiffs to make the case that the law was violated.
There's more to it (Score:2, Insightful)
If all Target had to do was add some alt-text to their images, it seems foolish for them to refuse to do so - wh
Two Words (well four)... (Score:2)
One crucial point not addressed by the ruling (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Solution: M$ Word Intraweb. (Score:3, Funny)
Putting their best spin on recent web news, Microsoft spokesvole Andy Nonymous told reporters gathered at a press conference about M$'s radical new Interweb.
"For years we've been telling the free software terrorists that they were bad for business and their work was hurting disabled people and killing puppies, this drives the point home."
"We stood silent as Sendmail replaced the far more disable friendly US Post Office, but formulated a plan." At this he cackled like a fiend. "We made M$ Word the default editor for email, though most people rejected this. It really hurt us to see the demise of 3m word attachments as a means of conveying 1k of text."
"As Apache on Linux [netcraft.com] took over the world wide web, we were stunned and shaken that people who wanted to stay in business avoided our IIS unless we paid them to use it."
"It was in Mass. that we finally realized that our email strategy right all along. M$ Word is the only blind free format in existence and we are now pressing for it's use as a standard for all interweb pages! This is indeed the cheap and easy solution the good people at Mindcraft are talking about. Victory at last."
A stunned silence settled on the conference. One or two hands came up but and Nonymous nodded off stage.
A huge, sweaty, bald man with a chair then danced onto the stage carrying a $2,000, 75lb office chair raised over his head. "Any questions?" he asked through a truly demented grin [google.com]. And there were none. He had fucking killed them.
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.
Existing racket (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_ada_sha
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/arti
http://blog.mises.org/archives/001453.asp [mises.org]
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]
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Not necessarily. New versions of SWF include ways to make objects accessible. But on the other hand, it could spell doom for sites that exclusively use visual CAPTCHAs [w3.org].
Re:Flash (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Flash (Score:4, Funny)
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The good news is that being compliant is not difficult nor is it expensive.
Right.
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Of course, this isn't performed selflessly. Often times, these same people will try to
Re:Why (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not trivial. There are programs that will read web pages and then pump them out through a voice synthesizer. The trouble is that the reader programs can't understand all HTML. I've forgotten the details of what fails, but I remember deciding I never wanted to work on a 508-compliant web site. 508 is a separate set of accessibility regulations for government websites [section508.gov]. Information can't be just graphic, for example. On one hand, this is essentially adding another type of browser. But it is more complicated than ms vs. netscape, because you have to have a version of each page that doesn't use graphics.
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i run a number of websites that sell video games and tools for game developers - am I going to be sued because these sites are graphically intensive? or because the games (products) themselves are 'inaccessible' to the blind?
this is ridiculous.
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You mean like... the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [w3.org]?
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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There are text to speech programs for web sites. There are braille output devices, I think you might have seen one in the movie Sneakers.
So no, your comparisons don't apply. I don't understand your telephone comparison either, aren't you aware of TDD?
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Ha! Hilarious! You stick it to those irrational fucks, man. And speaking of silly things, what's with requiring buildings to have ramps? What're they gonna do, claw their way up them? They can't walk! Ridiculous!
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having a site be accessible is easy - provide a plain text alternative. Simple.
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Of course, there's also a qualitative difference. You don't need to do anything special to make your store "black-friendl
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Now, what constitutes 'reasonable accomodations' for website design is up for debate, but I can't imagine that they'd have had a problem if the
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Due to all the diffferent shades and varieties of colorblindness, we'll end up with every single site either white on black, or black on white.
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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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And, no, the alleged rights you mentioned don't exist, either. They're figments of the socialist imagination made possible by lying about what the U.S. Constitution actually says and clearly intends. When people such as FDR and his friends wanted to change the rules by which the republic was governed, they didn't bother with little things such as le
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Blind allegience to free markets to the detriment of people is absurd. An economic system is a tool for the use of resources in society. Capitalism maximizes efficient use of resources, but since labor is a resource, the maximization can result in negative impact on people.
For the most part capitalism works to serve society, there are some cases where the syst
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The requirement is reasonable accomodation, businesses can apply for a compliance waiver if they feel if the requirements are impractical.
Yes, a blind person can hook the telescope up to a computer or figure out so
Egg on marketing's face (Score:2)
The versions may slip out of sync. If not, and the accessible version is usable enough, then people will start using the accessible version because accessible pages are generally more usable anyway, and all the money that the company's marketing department spends on making the eye candy version look good will be wasted. Marketing doesn't want to make itself look like a waste of m
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See also:
http://ron.dotson.net/diary/ussa.htm [dotson.net]