For aficionados of one-sided litigation coverage, here’s a lulu from the Associated Press. It’s an article on the lawsuit (National Federation of the Blind v. Target) seeking to establish that companies violate the Americans with Disabilities Act when they do not design their websites so as to make them “accessible” to users who are blind, deaf, lacking in motor skills needed for mouse use, etc. The article fails to mention the courts’ rejection of the disabled rights groups’ position in the Southwest Airlines case, though it’s the major existing precedent on the point. And aside from a ritual and uninformative denial by the retailer defendant Target that it is liable, the article presents as uncontroversial the demand that non-accessible websites be declared unlawful, with not a hint of why anyone might consider it a thoroughly disastrous idea. Oh, wait: the article does incorporate a bit of controversy, by recording worries that a victory for the plaintiffs in the Target case might not go far enough and come out being “read too narrowly. Not every business or Web site is subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act, said [Washington, D.C. lawyer] John D. Kemp”. (Seth Sutel, “Blind Web surfers sue for accessibility”, AP/San Jose Mercury-News, Oct. 24).
Web accessibility suits: AP weighs in
For aficionados of one-sided litigation coverage, here’s a lulu from the Associated Press. It’s an article on the lawsuit (National Federation of the Blind v. Target) seeking to establish that companies violate the Americans with Disabilities Act when they do not design their websites so as to make them “accessible” to users who are blind, […]
5 Comments
Web sites have massively enabled many disabled people; much content comes to people with minimal effort rather than moving the people to the information. Consider the alternative of the not so distant past of treking to the public library or university research library. Things become immensely better for so many and their next response is to bite the hand that feeds them, by demanding that efforts for these wonderful benefits be redoubled or else we’ll shut the whole thing down just to spite every disabled person in the country.
The genuinely disabled of this country need to protect their interests and smack down those who would turn public sentiment against them. Investing in the disabled was very recently a positive things for corporations, now it is has quickly become a quagmire only the insane would attempt.
I can’t wait for someone to notice that blind theater patrons might not be getting the full experience from their visit.
What’s next a suit against J.C.Pennys, Sears and L.L.Bean that they dont’t provide braille versions of there catalogue? Or a suit aganist Sear because they don;t have braille labels on every item in the store. At some point accomidation of a disabled minority can be sufficiantly onerious to be absurd. Another example is a suggestion I heard recently that every porta-potti in the country should be outfitted to allow for wheel-chair access, even though that would likely require all of them to be twice a big and thus would likely mean only half as many at any given location.
Yet surfing the Internet is not always worry-free for the blind. Crista Earl, the head of Web operations for the American Foundation for the Blind in New York, said graphics that don’t contain textual labels – which can be read by screen-reading software – are a common obstacle for blind Internet users
I wonder if their next target for a lawsuit is going to be the porn sites.
porn sites are just about the only ones making serious money…
This does hit close to home for me though. I work in a company providing certain specialist web services which include graphs of stockmarket trends and things like that.
I wonder how they expect us to make those in such a way that they contain the same information for a blind person as what a seeing person can get from them…