poppyrich - 3:35 pm on Aug 28, 2008 (gmt 0)

@incrediBill:
Not so fast. Don't be so dismissive, please.
I empathize with how you feel about "legal extortion" more than you can ever know.
However, expecting a major retailer to design a site that's friendly to screen-readers like Jaws - provided it does not place an "undue burden" - is hardly outrageous.

I'd like to offer this perspective:

My eyesight has always been pretty good but a couple of months ago I noticed that the sight in my right eye had gotten kind of blurry.
Blurry and distorted, too. I was seeing straight lines as wavy lines in the right hand portion of my right eye.
At the optometrist's I could not even see the "top line" of the eye chart and magnification wasn't correcting anything.

I was referred to a retinal specialist, and it turned out I've got a retinal inflamation accompanied by some bleeding in the retinal wall of my eye.
After extensive diganostic tests showed me healthy (no brain tumors, at least!) - the doctor has absolutely no idea what brought it on.
Here's the rub, though:
Just a few years ago there was no treatment for this. It might have gone away on it's own but maybe not and I would be functionally blind in my right eye. Luckily there's the redundancy evolutionary biology has been kind to enough to provide me in my left eye, but it kind of got me thinking about what I would do if the left eye went also.
And it would get you thinking, too.
Further, the condition I've got is extremely similar to a condition called Macular Degeneration which is an extremely common age-related disease. For some reason, it hits caucasian (white) people almost exclusively.
Think you won't have a severe visual disability to deal with in your life? It's not a good bet - visual problems increase with age, period.
And I assume you're planning on sticking around.

@farmboy
Yes, it's a settlement but the offending techniques or lack of them (alt text seems to be a big part of the complaint) will no doubt have to be rectified.