It's easy to dismiss or overlook accessibility when thinking of optimization, but like it or not, some eyes on the web can't actually see. One company has learned that the hard way, as
blind web surfers are suing Target for having an inaccessible web site. The article on MSNBC has the following snippet:
Danielsen, who writes a blog called "The Voice of the Nation's Blind" for the National Federation of the Blind, says accessing the Internet has been a "huge boon" for blind people. It's allowed them to accomplish a great number of tasks on their own that would otherwise present difficulties or require the help of a sighted person, such as banking, buying plane tickets and shopping for things like groceries and music.
But like any evolving technology, accessing the Internet has hardly been a smooth ride for the blind. Some sites can be difficult to navigate, particularly if they contain relatively few text links and rely more on graphics and other visual elements that screen-reading software such as Jaws can't interpret.
According to the article, images with no alt attributes and unlabeled forms are among the biggest obstacles for blind or vision-impaired web users. Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit, it's bound to open the eyes of corporations who have sites that are poorly optimized to meet disabled users' needs. Will we begin to see more acknowledgment of these often overlooked users as a result?
About rebecca —
Rebecca Kelley is the content marketing manager for Intego, a Mac software company. She also guest-blogs/freelances at various places and runs a couple hobby blogs for shits and giggles.
Didn't look in detail, but I think this is the one a heard about a few months ago... which wouldn't be surprising since the legal system is a bit of a slow train.
I think a number of big retailers have been hit, and in most cases, have settled out of court. Which makes sense... especially given the risk of it becoming a huge media item... no matter the outcome, you're going to lose... even if you win in court, the negative PR spin could be far worse.
It is something I've also pushed and feel is very important... though sometimes you have to remind others that some of the biggest "challenged" users on the web are the search engines themselves.
It has also been challenging though to really develop appropriately... beyond just dumping tables, moving to CSS layouts, proper ordering, etc. We started to implement accesskeys, only to find out that doing so might actually be a greater hindrance to the people we're trying to help. I haven't had time to investigate, but I think there are now some screen readers that are free, which would allow testing and really give designers/developers a true experience... for the longest time it seemed liked the only screen readers available were either very expensive or were very limited on the platforms they could run on. Would be nice to be able to add them to the list just like any other browser to test a site against.
The Target case isn't quite as clear cut as the MSDN article would have you believe. MSDN says:
"The decision to hold Target's Web site to the same standards of accessibility as its physical store under the Americans with Disabilities Act was considered a victory by many advocates for the blind"
This statement is misleading. The interim ruling did not state that the ADA applies to Web sites. The judge only refused to limit ADA application to physical stores. Web sites were not definitively ruled in.
More info is available at Etre.com
On the subject of accessibility, I noticed yesterday that Firefox 2 and Opera 9 on Windows do not seem to support the accesskey attribute. Does this mean that my efforts in making sites accessible is wasted time?
@Dave: You might be interested to know that WCAG 2.0 appears to have downgraded accesskeys from a must-have to an optional facility (probably due to the conflicts described above).
My office is based here in downtown Minneapolis, not very far from Target corporate headquarters. I spoke with Target about a year ago about improving their site to meet accessibility standards, and they didn't bite.
The amount of money that they're going to lose in this lawsuit is nothing compared to what it would have cost for my firm to make sure they are Bobby/Sect. 508 compliant.
Fellow SEO/Mers out there can use this as a selling point for additional services when meeting with clients.
On the topic of accessibility, is there anything wrong with making a form field like this: [label for="field"]Field [input type="text" id="field" /][/label] vs: [label for="field"]Field[/label] [input type="text" id="field" /]
I know the second is probably semantically correct, but I use the first example a couple times throughout different sites depending on the CSS I need to use to style it. Any thoughts on that?
Labels are semantically attached to inputs via the "for" and "id" attributes. Nesting an input inside a label tag is not semantically proper ( a label references an input, it doesn't contain an input) so your second example would be the proper one, in my opinion.
There was a similar case against AOL a few years back. I can't remember the outcome though.
-Navid
Did you do that on purpose?!
Hahaha, no.
I have been pounding the pavement about this for years. I am glad to see someone go down for it!
Just reading through the cover notes for my copy of the: BSI Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites.
"10 million people in the UK with a combined spending power in the region of 80 billion pounds per annum."
That ought to get someone's attention...
Sorry it seems everytime I comment here its over nit-picky things. Maybe I should be your semantics adviser?
There is no such thing as an "alt tag". Alt is an attribute of the IMG tag.
So it should be called the alt attribute. If you ever want to fire up Roger Johansson call it an alt tag.
I noticed that Yahoo (AP News) also got it wrong too (although they did put quotes around it..bleh). Just wanted to set it straight for all you non-web developers out there.
This time your nitpicking did not go unheard. I fixed it, so thanks for the catch.
Yeah, it should be an eye-opener for those people who have no time to implement accessibility on their websites. Soon enough, it will become an industry of its own - much like SEO. No? :)