Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [141]
National Federation of the Blind vs. Target
In February 2006, the business case of accessibility was thrust into the public eye. The prominent American retailer Target became the focus of a lawsuit brought by an individual and the National Federation of the Blind. The president of that organization said, “Blind customers should have the same access to Target’s online service that Target offers its sighted customers.” A judge deemed that the website could be sued just as the physical store could be sued.
Alternative Attributes
There were three primary areas in which the Target website failed to serve those who were blind and using assistive technology. The first issue was a lack of alternative attributes, also known as alt attributes or alt text. As discussed in Chapter 5, an alt attribute is the text that shows up on a web page if the image is not available. This may happen for a variety of reasons such as slow connection speed, server timeout, or heavy network traffic. I’ve been at busy conventions where the Internet has slowed to a crawl because of all of the trade show vendors, mobile devices, and laptops trying to access the Internet from the same location.
alt attributes are critical, especially when the replaced image is a call to action, such as a subscribe action, add to cart, or simply an instruction for the next step in a process. If the image is not available and there is no alt attribute, then there are no instructions provided to the visitor.
The primary assistive technology device used by blind users is a screen reader, of which JAWS by Freedom Scientific is the most pervasive. Assistive technology takes the information from the text of a web page and translates it into a device that is usable for nonsighted or low-sighted users. JAWS will read the text of a web page so that a blind visitor can hear the content, make selections, and continue the process.
The collision in usability comes when assistive technology cannot access the required information to communicate to the visitor. In that case, the visitor is left to either troubleshoot and navigate the website without instructions or leave and go to another website to accomplish their task. When alt attributes are not used for images, important instructions may be unavailable to assistive technology users.
Figure 13-1 shows a page from the Baby section of the Target website in 2006. It covers a lot of content. For sighted users, this page is very easy to navigate and understand.
Figure 13-1: The Target website’s Baby section
However, because the majority of content of the website is actually pictures and pictures of text, there is very little information available to the visitor if the images do not load into the browser (see Figure 13-2). When the images do not load, there is nothing other than navigation links. A visitor cannot understand what content is available on the page, where they are, and what they can do. There is no instruction, content, or any information that helps the visitor.
To anyone using assistive technology, this is especially frustrating, because the screen reader is mute. There is no content on the page, so little content is read. Only the links are read to the assistive technology user, so they are the only content on the page.
What makes this style of website development even more egregious to the nonsighted user is the amount of calls to action, sales, discounts, and free shipping offered that are available only through images (see Figure 13-3). The image links are made to look like text but are not text and, thus, not available.
Figure 13-2: Target.com Baby section with no images
Figure 13-3: Target.com