Apart from the legal issues and the bad PR, making accessible sites has two other very compelling reasons in its favour: 1 It makes your site easier for “everybody” and so ultimately increases your conversion rate. 2: It also makes your site more search engine friendly which will increase your search engine performance.

If Target had already lost, the story would be all over social media news sites, because the implications for the web would be huge. Even if the ruling is limited to e-tailers with brick and mortar presences (as one plaintiff attorney argues), it will still be a significant extension of the ADA outside of the physical world, and it would result in huge amounts of money being spent to fix compliance issues.

I’d much rather just see voluntary compliance. It’s easy to say “Yeah, I hope Target loses,” but applying existing legislation into new and unanticipated areas always has unintended consequences that can often stifle innovation.

For example, there’s one perspective that states that what we call Web 2.0 might not have happened (or certainly not as rapidly) because of accessibility issues with the new coding involved (think Ajax). There’s more on that, and a lot of other good insight in this Computer World article about the lawsuit and the surrounding issues.

The focus of the article is to show what makes a site accessible and that the basic principles of accessibility are all aspects of what we advocate as good practice in making a site convert better for all visitors.

On Adobe Access, the link provided in the article is to a tool that allows a visitor to enter the URL of a pdf file and convert it to html. Thank you for the input on proper pdf formatting Elaine.

The issue, and it’s a tricky one, is then making sure that the PDFs are themselves accessible, have the correct formatting, tags, etc. (I’ve tried to do it, and with a sufficiently complex document, it’s a PITA.)

And it’s alt attributes, not tags.

Sorry to be so pedantic, but I’ve spent a lot of time both reading and doing, so I can’t let it pass!

Otherwise, it’s a great description of basic accessibility and its importance. I’m really curious to see how this whole Target thing will turn out.

Brian – thanks again, we had no intention to mislead.

Thank you for that very important correction, and for your insight. We’ve updated the post to reflect it.

Not sure how that was missed, but the intent of this article is still very relevant, so we’ll keep it live.

Target has not been required to do anything. I agree with the general sentiment of this post, but let’s be very clear here.

There has been *no ruling* that requires Target (or anyone else online) to comply with these accessibility rules or other ADA requirements. The only thing that has happened is that a lawsuit has been filed, and the judge has allowed a class of eligible plaintiffs to join the suit (the “class has been certified”).

As an attorney (thankfully now non-practicing), I must say your post is terribly misleading, in that you seem to indicate more than once that Target lost the case. It has not. The case has not been decided.

I’m not saying you did this intentionally, but a simple reading of the blog post you link to indicates that the case has only been transitioned from a single-plaintiff case to a class action. No ruling on the merits has happened, and given the speed of justice in California Federal court, no ruling will be happening any time soon.

Again, I agree with the basic premise of your post related to accessibility standards for websites, and I agree we should all voluntarily do everything feasible, but leading people to believe this is now the law needs to be corrected immediately.