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Can a landmark court case force Bob to redo IH's Web site?

May 11, 2006
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3014
... a landmark case [between] the National Federation of the
Blind and Target.
http://www.target.com/gp/homepage.html/
... charges Target with violating the federal Americans With Disabilities Act.
... scheduled for a hearing next month at U.S. District Court in San Francisco,
could have a broad impact because Target's site is hardly the only one
that could be accused of having access barriers, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs.
... lawsuit claims [Target's] site is difficult if not impossible for the blind to use,
the retailer is denying them equal access to the goods and services it provides
to customers without disabilities.

The NFB this week plans to file a motion for a preliminary injunction, asking the court to order Target to make its Web site accessible promptly.
At a bare minimum, to make basic HTML-driven sites more accessible to PWDs, authors of Web content need to program an alternative text tag into their hyperlinks. For example, if you mouse over the link to ComputerWorld above, you should see how I've programmed the alternative text tag to say "Story about disabilities lawsuit between NFB and Target." When Web authors do this, the text-to-voice screen reading software used by many PWDs puts those PWDs on a level-playing field with people whose sight isn't impaired and who can intuit the purpose of the link based on what they see. In other words, people with impaired vision need to hear what people without such impairments normally see. By not religiously using the alternative text tag on all links, you're basically leaving PWDs that rely on text-to-speech assistive technology in the dark.
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