I noticed that Target got itself into a class action suit on web accessibility last week. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but the story popped at me again while I was reading the dead tree edition of ComputerWorld. I'll note that IANAL, but there are some obvious things Target is doing wrong, just from a basic accessibility viewpoint.

Go ahead and visit the site - then put the mouse over any of the images. Notice what's not there? No alt text. Now, I'm hardly perfect about that on my blog; I often let the default "jarober uploaded a file" text stay, for instance. Over on the main Smalltalk site though, I've tried to make sure that there's alt and title text for all the images - if I've missed something, I'd love to hear about it.

The funny thing is, this rather salient fact went unmentioned in many of the stories I saw on this - news.com being a notable exception. There may be other accessibility things necessary, but Target isn't even doing the basic stuff.

Technorati Tags: law, accessibility