News

NFB and Target Settle - $6 Million in damages (Posted August 27, 2008)

Today NFB and Target announced a settlement in the class action lawsuit brought by NFB in February 2006. In that agreement Target has committed to making their web site accessible and usable by blind customers. In addition Target has provided $6 million to settle claims for damages to be allocated to blind shoppers in California who were not able to use the Target site. Target agrees to (and will pay for) annual monitoring of the site for accessibility by NFB and by Jim Thatcher

Back in October, 2007, I wrote here about Law and Accessibility and the importance of Judge Patel's ruling that the case could move forward to trial. The importance is now evident. In my non-legal opinion, the Judge said that the ADA applied to Target.com (to the extent that the web site related to Target's bricks and mortar stores) and, most importantly, that the California anti-discrimination law (referred to as the Unruh Act) applied to Target. Whereas the ADA does not provide for damages, the Unruh Act does. Note that it doesn't make any difference where a U.S. company is located in applying the California law; the issue is whether or not there is discrimination against a California resident. The fact that Judge Patel said that the case would move forward meant that the issue of whether or not the web site discriminated against people who are blind would have to be settled in court and I think that is not where Target wanted to be.

Glenda Sims (Glenda the GoodWitch) has a really good summary of the NFB/Target settlement. And also more settlement information and realted documents are available on the DRA web site.

John Slatin - 1952-2008 (Posted April 2, 2008)

John Slatin - 1952-2008

John was a very dear friend, a colleague, compatriot, and accessibility advocate. Often we worked together for web accessibility training or consulting. Always we worked together from day to day, like "John, what do you think about this" or "Jim, will this work?" There were plenty of these exchanges when the Judge Brothers (John, Jim Allan and I), met for breakfast at Waterloo Ice house on 38th Street (Austin) and most recently at the Austin Diner on Burnet near Diana's Studio.

John defined a resource to be accessible when a person with a disability could use that resource as effectively as someone without disabilities (http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility/about/more.html). He knew exactly what he was talking about and he meant it.

I am so sorry that John lost his nearly 3 year battle with Leukemia. That battle was expensive for John and his dear wife Anna. Sharron Rush at Knowbility and Andrew Kirkpatrick, of Adobe have inaugurated a great memorial activity for John and for accessibility, a memorial that will help Anna with the terrifying expenses of that battle.

Here's the idea - consultants sign up to do a 3 to 5 hour accessibility assessment and companies sign in to have such an assessment with a contribution of at least $500 to the John Slatin Memorial Fund. So if you are an accessibility consultant, sign-up now and if you represent a business - please contact Sharron Rush, at Knowbility for more information are visit the company information page. We will help Anna and promote accessibility; how fitting.

Section 508 Web Accessibility Tutorial is Updated - Finally (Posted November 5, 2007)

As I promised in a previous item posted here on August 31, 2007, the Web Accessibility for Section 508 Tutorial, originally written in 2001 for the Information Technology Technical Assistance and Training Center (ITTATC) has now been completely revised. If you want, you can read more about the history of this undertaking.

Web Accessibility, the book, now available in Japanese (Posted November 3, 2007)

Order in Japanese from Amazon

The new book on web accessibility, well new last year, the only web accessibility book rated 5 starson Amazon.com, Web Accessibility - Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by Jim Thatcher, Michael R. Burks, Christian Heilmann, Shawn Lawton Henry, Andrew Kirkpatrick, Patrick H. Lauke, Bruce Lawson, Bob Regan, Richard Rutter, Mark Urban, and Cynthia Waddell, is now available in Japanese. And you can order Webアクセシビリティ ~標準準拠でアクセシブルなサイトを構築/管理するための考え方と実践 from Amazon.com.jp now. Thank you Masahiro Umegaki and Takayuki Watanabe, thank you very much.

A ruling in the NFB vs. Target lawsuit (Posted October 3, 2007)

Yesterday Judge Marilyn Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a ruling on the case in which the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) (http://nfb.org) is suing the Target Corporation alleging that Target's web site, http://www.target.com, is inaccessible, especially for shoppers who are blind. More discussion of the ruling here.

Updating the Section 508 Web Accessibility Tutorial (Posted August 31, 2007)

The Section 508 Web Accessibillity Tutorial is the most popular landing page on my site. The entire course is being updated. Check out the the list of updated sections here. I know, it's about time.

More on In-page links and the IE Bug (Posted July 6, 2007)

I have been writing about this problem on and off for about 2 years, first the article on skip navigation links; then information about the hasLayout property and how that relates to the IE bug. Here is another twist.

 

Archived News Items

Skip Sidebar.

Articles

Popular Pages

: