Legal Research

Target (you know, the big red bull's-eye people) have agreed to a settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by the National Federation of the Blind.  The suit was certifed by Justice Patel, of the Northern District of California, as a state and federal class action in November of 2007.  It was after plaintiffs successfully argued that the website was a place of public accomodation within the meaning of the ADA that progress was made toward settlement, which up to that point Target had fought vigorously. 

Reading the writing on the wall, Amazon and RadioShack have also announced that they have agreed to make their sites more accessible to the visually impaired.  Coding sites so that the text readers used by the blind function properly is easy to do, if done at the construction stage.  And as this article in Law.com points out, the increase in traffic, as the visually impaired visit sites they can now read, will more than make up for any increased cost.  As a sighted person, you can tell when a site is properly coded if, when you hover your mouse over clickable text, the contents of the text appear in a little box.  Are you listening, NSU?  UF?  FSU?