Target and Standards Compliance
Target Corp. is being sued by a blind college student at UC Berkeley. He filed the lawsuit because Target’s website lacks even basic accessibility provisions like alt-text, which screen reading software relies on to help blind individuals navigate the web.
A cursory glance at the site’s source code reveals that it is not even in compliance with WAI Priority 1 standards, the lowest level of basic requirements for accessibility compliance. I see a lot of people complaining that web standards restricts creativity (yeah, if you don’t take the time to learn CSS, just look at CSS Zen Garden). It is easier to comply with accessibility laws using web standards, but for those who can’t be creative with CSS and Javascript, it can also be done with proprietary methods like Flash. For large e-commerce website such as Target, however, Flash does not make sense because of the tremendous bandwidth it incurs.
This is good news and good publicity for web standards! It will scare other large websites into doing it the right way, or face class-action lawsuits over accessibility. This should create more jobs for people who understand and who, furthermore, promote web standards.