Ah, the joys of American lawsuits
Judge allows class action against Target website
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A federal judge in California certified a class action lawsuit against Target Corp (TGT.N) brought by plaintiffs claiming the discount retailer’s website is inaccessible to the blind, according to court documents.
Next up: A class action lawsuit brought against the Louvre for making its paintings inaccessible to the blind, followed by a suit against God for making sunlight inaccessible to the blind.
Anyway, the point of the lawsuit is that Target.com requires the use of a mouse—not keyboard-friendly, and it lacks alt-text for its images, so voice-over programs can’t read them.
Any blind people reading this? What are your thoughts?
Posted on October 3, 2007, in Laugh, dangit!!, The issues and tagged blindness, culture, humor, internet, lawsuits. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Dear sir,
I myself am legally blind, and I have only understood your blog post through a personal reader who accompanies me everywhere. It is this type of blog, which lacks braille entries, that I despise.
Good day.
I am truly sorry for your condition and for the reprehensible state of my “web log.” My heart feels like lead. However, I am encouraged to hear that your particular case of blindness is, in fact, in accordance with the laws of our nation-state. Perhaps one day you and I will be able to see eye to eye. Metaphorically, of course.
I myself am overweight, and find it much too painful to sit in a chair long enough to read your needlessly long blog entries. My lawyer will contact you shortly.
Bitter(sweet)ly,
Stuffed in CA
Next time you are in Baltimore, Maryland, you & your readers are invited to make a reservation for a free tour of the International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind with its 2.5 to 3 million dollars worth of tech hardware and software. Our blind computer experts will show you how “screen readers” work. Basically, they permit anyone who can’t see the PC screen to use the keyboard instead of a mouse, as the software reads aloud whatever the unseen cursor, directed by the reader, is reading aloud.
You can try a sample of the two most popular ones yourself right now by going to http://www.freedomscientific.com for JAWS software or to http://www.gwmicro.com for Window-Eyes.
Any Website can be “seen” by screen readers if it has built-in ALT tags, a practice recommended to all Web developers.
By the way, if you want the world to stay just as you first found it, why are you using a computer or writing a blog? Stuff changes and the older we get, the more we need to stay flexible for it….like alt tags on Web pages for a company that will now get more customers and would have saved $6 mil if it had told its programmers to build in the tags during the design stage. Just a thought.
Ah, if you insist on every message having a joke, what is the score if Stevie Wunder and Ray Charles play a round of tennis?
Right. “Love All.”