KenB - 3:10 pm on Sep 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

Please note, this thread progressed so fast this morning that there were several new posts made during the timeframe I was writing this post.

People are panicking unnecessarily. Nobody's suggesting for starters that Bob Smith's personal webpage has to be perfectly coded.

Exactly... Besides, the laws could not be written in a way that put these burdens on personal/non-commercial webpages and still passed muster with the first amendment. This issue is strictly a commercial endeavor issue.

Even with commercial endeavors we're not (or at least I am not) suggesting that there should be laws that require perfectly coded pages. What we are suggesting is that a basic level of accessibility be supported (e.g. ALT attributes for graphics and keyboard navigation.). As has been pointed out and ignored is that HTML by its very nature is already accessible and keyboard navigation is inherently built into HTML. All one normally needs to do is simply add relevant ALT attributes to graphics, add label tags to forms and not do anything stupid that disables keyboard navigation to be accessible.

Should COMMERCIAL websites fall under the ADA yes they should. Should they be required to meet WCAG Level 1 yes. Should they be required to meet WCAG Level 3, maybe not. The web is inherently accessible. It was designed from the ground up to be accessible. In order to render a site inaccessible requires very significant failures on the part of the website's developer.

In a B2B setting (e.g. web based CRM) existing equal employment opportunity laws could very easily be used to force accessibility because the web is inherently accessible and failing to make that B2B web application accessible is denying a disabled person the ability to perform a specific task for no good reason.

Nor are they suggesting that if you miss out a couple of alt attributes or accidentally forget to label one form field you can be sued. But, if you are a business and you put up a public site that a non-disabled person can use, in the same way as a brick and mortar shop, then you need to take reasonable steps to ensure that as many users as possible can complete the main call to action of the site.

Exactly, if one puts up an ecommerce site they are directly competing with traditional bricks and mortar stores for the same business. It is not unreasonable; in fact it is the basis our laws are based on, to expect an online company to have to abide by the same regulations as their offline counterparts.

Offline business are required to put in curb cutouts, elevators, ramps, automatic doors, accessible bathrooms, counter areas of certain heights, etc. Requiring an online business to provide basic levels of accessibility simply levels the playing field. There are no good or justifiable reasons to render most sites inaccessible.

How would you feel if someone said to you, "I know I could have built my site so you can buy your groceries without needing help, but I couldn't be bothered learning how so instead you'll have to rely on a friend/relative/carer to do it for you. It must feel good having to rely on others when at your fingertips is a way to be able to do it yourself." Its all about setting a reasonable standard.

Requiring accessibility standards doesn't just liberate disabled people, but it eliminates unnecessary burdens disabled people place on society by enabling them to do things for themselves. Even in a bricks and mortar situation most accessibility requirements don't place a tremendous economic burden on the business but they do lift major economic burdens from society in general. By requiring accessibility in the work place, people who thirty years ago would have been an economic burden on society because they couldn't work can now be fully functional tax paying members of society and not dependant upon government hand outs simply because they couldn't find work because of their disablities.

Nobody who's reading this has a site that is accessable by Every handicapped person.

Indeed, my site is more accessible than the vast majority of websites out there and there are still small parts of some pages that may not be entirely accessible. Most of us in this discussion calling for accessibility aren't saying sites need to be made accessible to the last degree. Not even the chap that sued Target was asking them to make their site AAA compliant to WCAG level 3. From my reading of this issue over the past year or so he was simply asking for single 'A' compliance to WCAG level 1. He simply wanted ALT attributes LABEL tags for forms, keyboard accessible buttons and alternative navigation means when inaccessible image maps were used.

Following accessibility guidelines doesn't just help the disabled; it makes sites more usable for "normal" folks. Again the biggest myth out there is that accessibility is hard or requires extra work. If it requires extra work to make a site accessible during the development process than the developer is doing something wrong.

To me one of the greatest scams a web development firm can do is to charge extra to make a site accessible. When I was helping to oversee a web development project the company I was working for had contracted out to a third-party, that third-party kept trying to make accessibility sound really hard and complicated such that they could charge extra for this service. It was complete garbage and simply a ploy to milk more money out of the company I was working for.

This is no different the garbage extra fees web developers try charge to ensure websites support different browsers. With practice it is no harder to code to W3C specifications and to be able to ensure that a website works correctly on all browsers than it is to get a site to work correctly on only MSIE; and presumably anyone who calls them self a professional web developer gets plenty of practice.

I suspect that if case law was built up that showed the ADA applied to the web and that web developers could end up being dragged into ADA lawsuits, we would pretty quickly see an end to the practice of inflating development costs to cover basic levels of accessibility.

The real problem with making ecommerce sites accessible isn't companies like Target. The problem is the bad advice provided by web developers and the inflated fees web development firms charge for these "special" services. In the long run it might actually save money for companies who want to do the right thing if case law was built up that showed commercial websites were bound by ADA requirements as web developers would have to make accessibility part of their normal development process rather than an extra service with an additional fee.

Sorry let me rephrase that. People do not want separate sites because separate sites rarely get updated as regularly and most blind users will tell you they feel they get given less information. Why should they have to cope with separate, crappy text-only sites when a professional web designer who actually knows what he's doing can make the main site accessible quite easily?

This is exactly the point. It is a complete myth that one needs to develop a parallel site to handle accessibility issues. A competent web developer can build a completely accessible website that does not sacrifice any of the desired functionality for sighted, mouse using users with little to no extra effort. If a specific piece of functionality can not be made accessible than the developer really needs to reevaluate the functionality in question because actually might not be that user friendly for their target users who can see and use a mouse AND it would probably cause SEO issues as well.

I think the hostility to the whole idea of building well-coded, standards compliant accessible sites points to the reason there needs to be legislation about it. People think they shouldn't have to think about the needs of others, that it's someone else's problem "It's MY shop I can do what I like" or "let them go to another shop if they can't access mine" but not only are 80% of websites NOT ACCESSIBLE so going somewhere else is not an option in most cases, but general social concern suggests that people simply should think about others. You know, in the 19th century they had to pass legislation to require children up to the age of 16 to go to school. The parents didn't want it because they wanted their kids working in factories and bringing in money. At the time it was considered a blow to the free market. Today, we realise education is invaluable and can be thankful that we were given that nudge towards something that benefitted society as a whole.

Very good points that bare repeating.

Does every book ever published HAVE to be available in braile? Nope, so why does my website HAVE to be the electronic equivalent? It doesn't. And nowhere in this topic does it state that. We're talking about basic html guidelines here and nothing else. If the guidelines for developing a website were followed, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

This is a very important point. Printed books are not by their nature accessible to the blind; however, by design HTML, CSS, etc. are innately accessible. To make a site accessible requires nothing more than following best development practices that are very simple and straight forward. For a competent web developer (and anyone claiming to be a professional should be competent), it takes NO MORE EFFORT to build a completely accessible website.

Developers, designers, consultants, etc. cannot continue to design as if it were 1995. The year is 2006. One of the biggest and most important things one can do is to learn basic html, the elements, the attributes, what each one means and how it makes a page whole. And then, one will need to learn basic CSS. With an external style sheet and NO inline styling and/or presentational markup, you've covered a very large part of the accessibility issue. As long as a user can override your stylesheet, you are leaps and bounds ahead of those who have pages full of <font> and/or inline styling.

Indeed. There is no excuse for web developers to be still using tags like FONT, I, B, etc. These were depreciated seven or eight years ago. Professional web developers should also be striving to free themselves from tables. Honestly, abandoning tables is the most liberating thing I have experienced as a web developer. Personally I'm appalled when I see "professional" web developers still relying on FONT, I or B tags when they weren't even developing websites prior to 2000. There is no excuse for this.

Relying on HTML only to provide structure and using CSS to provide layout control and design opened up a whole new world of options to me. Suddenly I could make all pages of a website printer friendly with doing no more than adding one simple style sheet and creating two classes ("PrintOnly" & "NoPrint"). It even made SEO much easier because I could separate the position of objects on a rendered webpage from their position in the source code. Now the most important part of a page (e.g. the body content) is one of the first things to appear in the source code and less important things (e.g. menus) appear at the end of the source code. This works really well from an accessibility stance in that a user of a text only browser (e.g. dynamic Braille display) doesn't have to wade through menu links to get to the core content and when they have completed reading the content of a page the menu links are then provided to them to encourage them to continue on to other pages of my site.

With my home brewed CMS I use for many of my websites I don't even need to redesign the HTML source when creating new sites, I simply rearrange the design of the site using style sheets. This means I can accomplish in a half day what used to take me days to complete.

Don't get me wrong, I agree one should indeed make the effort. I can't give links here but look on the bottom of my site and you'll see the little WC3 thingy, albeit only on the core pages as I had to pay someone to get them that good. I use a WYSIWYG thingy, html is not my strongpoint.

If you are creating a personal site, I see no problem with this; however, for a professional web developer that creates commercial websites it should be unacceptable to say "HTML is not my strongpoint". After all for a web developer HTML is the profession.

On the flip side if it were shown that ADA laws do apply to the web then developers of HTML development software like the WYSIWYG editor you use would be forced to make their software better such that it did a better job of creating accessible web pages without the user of said software needing HTML to be their strong point.

Likewise, just what kind of "damages" is this kid expecting? Pray tell what *harm* he came to by not being able to shop at some specific shop?

In the case of Target, in the beginning the only "damages" being asked for was for Target to fix their site. I'm sure it progressed beyond this now to at least also cover legal expenses of the plaintiffs.

How is it more moral to FORCE a storekeeper to cater to a specific group, than to simply not provide websites that the blind can see? The blind cannot see, they are NOT equal in the seeing aspect.

The ignorant thing about this comment is that on the web it does not matter if one can see. The web is nothing more than bits of data stored in a digital format and transmitted over wires and cables. That data is interacted with via an input device (e.g. keyboard) and an output device (video monitor, dynamic Braille display, etc.). HTML and the web were DESIGNED to be device independent from the ground up. Accessibility wasn't an afterthought it was a core feature and objective from the very beginning.

The whole philosophy behind the development of HTML and CSS was to eliminate any barriers between people using different devices and with different physical abilities. It takes no more effort to design a site that is interoperable (works on different devices) and completely accessible than it does to create a site that only works correctly in MSIE using a video monitor and mouse.

Let me say this very clearly. It is inexcusable for professional web developers to create sites that require specific web browsers and/or are not accessible. Failure to make a site accessible violates the very tenants upon which the World Wide Web was designed and built.

It's ironic: if the first thing some folks had heard about accessibility was that the techniques are a reliable shortcut to better SEO, they'd be all over it thinking, "I gotta learn how to do that."

This really is the sad irony to this whole issue; making a site accessible and SEO go hand in hand. Typically the things that make a site accessible are also tremendously important to SEO objectives.

Want to read an excellent SEO Book? [w3.org...]

This really is the best SEO source on the web.

As someone pointed out earlier, if Target had immediately started trying to change they would actually open themselves up to a lawsuit in any case.

If they had immediately started to work towards fixing their accessibility issues to begin with when those issues were raised BEFORE the plaintiffs filed a lawsuit there would have been no grounds for the lawsuit. In addition the plaintiffs did try to work with Target outside of the legal system to resolve this issue before filing the lawsuit. The goal wasn't to get lots of money out of Target. The goal was to get target to make their website assessable.

--reason for edit--
typos.

[edited by: KenB at 3:17 pm (utc) on Sep. 14, 2006]