Blind Justice
Have you ever wondered how blind people use the web? Retail giant Target is being sued by the National Federation of the Blind for discriminatory practices. Their web-site, like most others, isn’t WC3 compliant and regarded as non-accessible.
Blind users use a type of software called a screen reader. It reads out the text on a screen from left to right, top to bottom. Coding an accessible site means writing the underlying code so that it’s simple to understand, then styling the site using style-sheets. Here at Civicnet we’ve been coding our sites to be WC3 compliant since early 2005.
You can check what your web-site looks like to blind readers by turning off the images and flash in your site and removing the style sheets. If it doesn’t make sense as you read through it one line after the other, you could be in trouble because denying customers access to your site based on their demographic isn’t just bad business,..
It could soon be against the law.