A legal precedent for standards and semantics

Finally something interesting filtered through to me today… Target corp. got sued by groups representing the visually-impaired community and their right to sue was upheld by the court.

I’ve been whining for quite a while about the need for accessibility on the web. Even if every site isn’t built around screen readers, people with disabilities (including those using Internet Explorer) should be presented with usable content in a semantic manner. These table based websites all over the place, and even CSS-P websites that use a ton of extraneous markup and fail to create standards compliant XHTML are just further muddying the web for those who can’t see all of the pretty tricks.

I design with prototype library (javascript) effects. The first thing I do when I finish a design is turn off javascript and see what happens. If the site isn’t usable without javascript, it’s time to rethink things. Then I check it without style sheets and see how things are going to look for a text based reader (such as a search engine robot). Then, if there’s any reason to believe that the site has accessibility needs above and beyond what regular semantic markup and separation of markup and presentation layers, I run accessibility checks and make modifications based on the results.

I always believed that there were moral obligations to do this. I’m an idealistic person, and as I’ve said before, I believe that the future of the web depends heavily on designers being able to conform to standards and make pages degradable for a range of viewers, including the disabled. Just like we’ve come to realize the the future earth depends on us changing our ways in real life. Well, some of us have come to that realization, anyway. All that being said, there’s now a court precedence that may or may not actually bring additional motivation, especially to high traffic sites, to design with web standards and for accessibility.

I can’t say I’m not happy to hear it.