----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David desJardins" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "AllBlachman" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 5:00 PM
Subject: Fwd: Do the Rights of the Disabled Extend to the Blind on the Web?


An article from the NY Times on the accessibility of websites to blind 
people.

----
November 6, 2006
E-Commerce Report
Do the Rights of the Disabled Extend to the Blind on the Web?
By BOB TEDESCHI

ACCORDING to an advocacy group, Target declined last year to make its
Web site fully accessible to blind people with specialized
screen-reading technology last year. If true — and Target has denied
the accusation in court — it was a public relations blunder, and it
may have been illegal as well.

The National Federation of the Blind sued Target, contending that the
company's inaction violated the Americans with Disabilities Act
because the Web site is essentially an extension of its other public
accommodations, and as such, should be easily accessible to people
with disabilities.

A Target spokeswoman would not comment on those assertions, but in
court the company offered testimony from three blind users rebutting
the federation's arguments.

On Sept. 6, a federal judge in California held, in a preliminary
ruling on the suit, that in some instances, Web sites must cater to
disabled people.

Legal scholars say the full reach of that ruling will not be clear
until the case is decided, if it reaches that point.

But in the meantime, the dispute shows that although commercial Web
sites have made considerable strides in serving this small fraction of
their customer base, there are still substantial difficulties on both
sides of the screen.

"Web sites are more useful than they used to be, but there are still a
few more hurdles than you'd like to have to go through," said James
Gashel, an executive director of the federation, based in Baltimore.

Mr. Gashel said that most sites accommodate screen-reading technology,
which tells blind users the layout of a Web page and describes images,
search prompts and other fields into which users can type information
to find a product or complete a purchase. (The most popular
screen-reading software, Jaws for Windows from Freedom Scientific,
sells for around $900.)

When sites do not accommodate screen-reading software, the online
shopping or browsing experience breaks down for the 200,000 or so of
the nation's 1.3 million people with vision disabilities who are
online, according to Mr. Gashel.

Most online stores go to great lengths to make sure that their sites
are accessible to people with disabilities, simply because it is good
business to allow as many people as possible to shop. And
online-shopping technology specialists say it is not so difficult or
costly a task.

"It's very straightforward to make a site accessible," said Dayna
Bateman, senior information architect at Fry Inc., which operates
e-commerce Web sites on behalf of large retailers including
Brookstone, Eddie Bauer and Spiegel.

Ms. Bateman said that the more software coding a Web site could offer
to help screen readers and other technologies navigate a site, the
more likely it was that the Web site would show up on search engine
results, because Google, Yahoo and others looked to the same coding
for clues about the Web page's content.

"So it's actually an advantage in the marketplace," she said. "I just
don't think a lot of folks are schooled enough in accessibility to
know that."

For advocates of people with disabilities, the most effective tool for
ensuring a smooth online experience has been the Americans with
Disabilities Act. But because the law was signed in 1990, before the
Web was in common use, its language offers little guidance on how to
approach questions of online accessibility.

A variety of lawsuits based on Disabilities Act provisions have been
brought against online companies, notably one brought by Mr. Gashel's
organization against AOL in 1999, but the suits were settled before
judges could offer clear guidance on how, or whether, the law applied
to Web sites.

In denying Target's motion to dismiss the suit two months ago, Judge
Marilyn Hall Patel of United States District Court in San Francisco
held that the law's accessibility requirements applied to all services
offered by a place of public accommodation. Since Target's physical
stores are places of public accommodation, the ruling said, its online
store must also be accessible or the company must offer equally
effective alternatives.

So what about online-only Web merchants like Amazon.com, BlueNile,
Drugstore.com and RedEnvelope as well as fast-growing young online
companies like YouTube and MySpace?

"That issue is still up for grabs," said Michael R. Masinter, a law
professor who specializes in Disabilities Act and civil rights issues
for Nova Southeastern University, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Mr.
Masinter said the Target suit, since it involved an offline merchant's
online operations, would not address that issue.

The case, though, is important to Amazon, because it runs Target's
online store as it does those of a handful of other big offline
merchants.

An Amazon spokeswoman, Patricia Smith, said that "as a matter of
course we work cooperatively with all of our retail partners to
develop and implement the tools and features they want incorporated
onto their Web sites." Amazon, she added, "is already generally usable
for people with screen readers." It has offered a text-only,
streamlined site designed for such devices (amazon.com/access).

Mr. Masinter said one potentially thorny issue in the Target suit was
whether phone services offered by online merchants were suitable
substitutions for the Web site when the site did not work well for
technologies like screen-reading software. Given the high cost of
maintaining phone-based customer service operations, the question
would be of particular interest to retailers and disabled people.

Companies in one emerging category of Internet commerce, online
education, have the most ground to make up in adapting their offerings
for the disabled, according to Jane Jarrow, president of Disability
Access Information and Support, an education industry consultancy.

Most online-only schools, Ms. Jarrow said, "are oblivious to the fact
that they have a significant issue here." Many online-only schools
rely on chat rooms, for instance, for class discussions, and
screen-reading software does not function properly with chat rooms —
nor can learning-disabled students often keep pace with the
discussions.

The issue has become critical because many online-only schools became
eligible this summer to receive federal student aid. But to get such
funds, organizations must adhere to regulations in the Rehabilitation
Act of 1973, which has been updated to say that all Web sites of
groups receiving federal money must be accessible to people with
disabilities.

Capella University, a Minneapolis-based institution known for online
courses, employs a full-time disabilities specialist, who, among other
things, has guided the school to avoid using online chat rooms for its
courses. Some online schools follow similar approaches, but most do
not, said Richard Allegra, director of professional development for
the Association on Higher Education and Disability, an industry group.

"I think people are starting to understand their obligations to make
their services accessible," he said. "The question they have is, how
to do that?"


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