Accessibility is Still Important
I was recently pointed to this article on a lawsuit involving Target and one of it’s customers. For the second time, Target is in court because of having an inaccessible website.
According to the ruling, plaintiffs — including the National Federation of the Blind — claim Target.com violates federal and state laws prohibiting discrimination against the disabled.
That is extremely irresponsible (for the second time) for Target, who has a top-tier e-commerce site, to ignore the task of making their website accessible. From a company that does an awesome job with their advertising, you would think that they could staff a world class web development team as well.
The sad part is, making a website accessible to the blind and visually impaired isn’t really a hard part of web development. It should fit in naturally when you are coding, and shouldn’t be something to go back to it once all of the coding is near completion. However, when doing a 508 check on the homepage of their site, it fails. I counted 16 warnings of having no alt tags for images. And that’s just the homepage.
I hope this is a wake up call, at least for some. Developers need to build sites suited for the people that are going to use them. If you are new to the web dev world, please do not ignore the issues of accessibility. It makes using websites better for everyone, not just people with no disabilities.