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Blind people sue Target because they can't access Target's website.

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patrickl:
Because the web moves so fast, companies redo their websites every 5 years anyway.

I don't see any outlandish requirements for ADA compliance. See the Written ADA Guidelines
for an indication. These are all pretty common things that you already should do even if you don't specifically have the vision impaired in mind.

Take the Target site. It's pretty difficult to navigate for a seeing person too. If they would just clean up their site and make it more accessible to seeing people (and increase their sales from them actually), the site would be a lot easier to use for blind people too. They would easily make up for their investment by higher sales.

I still really wonder what the actual complaint is. It really matters if the site just doesn't work at all for some reason or if they just think it's a crappy site.

Ed_McCarron:

--- Quote from: ChadTower on October 07, 2007, 03:09:42 pm ---Being Korean is not a disability.

--- End quote ---

It is if I want to read a non-Korean website.

ChadTower:

--- Quote from: Ed_McCarron on October 07, 2007, 08:06:14 pm ---It is if I want to read a non-Korean website.

--- End quote ---

Disability is defined under the ADA.  Not speaking a language isn't in there.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying compliance with the ADA is technically difficult... I'm speaking about the large retailer's ability to make rapid change to their web storefront.  I'm speaking at least as much about their desire to make such changes... the web storefront is pretty low priority, in terms of corporate resources, for many retail chains.  I guarantee you Target cares a whole hell of a lot more for the web/VPN apps that drive the national distribution chain and communication with suppliers and vendors.  The company I work for certainly does and our web storefront is much better (and also HIPAA compliant) than Target's.

jbox:
It's also a non-trivial point that major retailers also have a vested interest in *not* making this stuff easy, not because of blind people of course, but because these same features also make it easier for screen-scrapers like "cheapestfruitjuice.com" to tell people to shop at one of their competitors instead.  :banghead:

A "Nice" webpage (singular) is of course easy to build. "Nice" transactions are not.  >:(

shmokes:
Well . . . ADA was passed in 1990 and 1992, I think.  So it definitely predates Target's online presence.  I don't remember when, exactly, the internet was approved for commercial use, but Mosaic wasn't released until 1993 and Netscape in 1994.  Target probably wasn't online until at least five years after ADA was passed.

Now . . . the internet was new, and it might just never have occurred to them to make the site ADA compliant.  Hell . . . there may not have been a way to even make a site ADA compliant back then.  Who knows whether the readers blind people use today even existed back then?  But at the same time, when Target first made a presence on the web, it wasn't a giant storefront.  It would have been a little corporate web page with some info on it and that's all.  You know they've completely rebuilt their website from scratch at least once or twice since then.  But, seriously . . . even if it was going to cost Target $10,000 to make their website ADA compliant, which I doubt (I know it wasn't your claim), that's pocket change to them.  They've probably spent that five times over so far just fighting this case.  Just in the first quarter of this year they did $10.3 billion in sales generating a $438 million profit.  When numbers like $10,000 are thrown around, they sound big.  But it helps to have some perspective.

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