Target.com sued by blind student
As this arstechnica article describes, a blind university student is suing Target for not being accessible to the blind. This goes right along with my entry Saturday on accessibility in design.
Here’s one major reason: take a look at the validation results, or look at the page source. Not only do they not use alt attributes on their navigation and image maps, which would at least make their site usable by blind people, but they don’t even have a DOCTYPE declaration! That’s step one, people. Anyway, this isn’t cutting edge technology, these are properties and tags that have been part of HTML from the beginning. What makes it worse is that they are using Amazon’s backend technology which, yep, you guessed it, their code is just as bad. However, Amazon at least has the sense to use the alt attribute on their navigational elements, which makes it usable.
Lesson of the day? Use alt attributes on every image on your site, even if you’re too lazy to specify a DOCTYPE that requires it.
Posted Monday February 13, 2006 in Web Development by Chris Curtis
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