Categories
expert law nfb

NFB vs. Target Lawsuit is Settled!

Big news! The NFB versus Target lawsuit is settled! As expected, there are good points and bad points to the settlement. You may read an excellent summary of the settlement by Jared Smith of WebAIM in the blog entry Target lawsuit settled. Some of the wins from the lawsuit are:

  • Target will pay NFB $90,000 for the certification and first year of monitoring and then $40,000 per year thereafter.
  • Target’s web developers will receive at least one day of accessibility training, to be provided by NFB at a cost of up to $15,000 per session.
  • Target will respond to accessibility complaints from web site users.
  • Target will pay damages of $6,000,000 to the class action claimants, or at most $7000 per claimant, and will pay $20,000 to the California Center for the Blind.

If you’re really interested, you may read the actual NFB vs. Target Settlement from the Northern District of California. (I find it ironic that the HTML title of this page doesn’t pass accessibility guidelines; it says “Untitled Document”.)

Addendum:
Here’s a press release from NFB from last year (October 7, 2007) with more background on the lawsuit:
Court Ruling Says California Disabled Rights Law Applies to the Web

Addendum:
More on this subject from Accessify, Bruce Lawson, and Access Matters:

Categories
"assistive technology" conference

Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference

The 11th Annual Accessing Higher Ground conference, subtitled Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference, will be November 11- 14, 2008.

The University of Colorado at Boulder is hosting the event at the beautiful Millennium Harvest House hotel in Boulder, Colorado.

I may be speaking at this conference so I hope you can attend!

More about Accessing Higher Ground, in their words:

Accessing Higher Ground focuses on the implementation and benefits of Assistive Technology in the university and college setting for sensory, physical and learning disabilities. Other topics include legal and policy issues, including ADA and 508 compliance, and making campus media and information resources – including Web pages and library resources – accessible.

Categories
review

Is the Olympic Games website accessible?

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games’ official web site is now web accessible, or is it? In the article Those who can’t see can surf, it appears the answer is yes. In the article Beijing Olympics: Revisiting The Errors Of The Past (E-Access Blog), it appears the answer is no. But, as with any website, there’s room for improvement. Here are some of my findings after a little closer look.

Improvements:

  • Need to add skip-to links.
  • Remove bullet characters in two unordered lists.
  • “Schedules by Sport” should be marked up as a heading.
  • Unordered list for language selection has extra line items; a heading is needed; should be towards top of content.
  • “More” links should each be more descriptive.

Good:

  • Turn off JS and it looks great.
  • Overall, web standards are used fairly well.
Categories
event expert podcast validation

Podcast #65: Top 10, SXSW, Nikita, and Joe

Dennis and Ross discuss a variety of topics including web accessibility news and events, a top 10 list, SXSW 2009, Nikita the Spider validator, and our friend Joe Dolson.

Download Web Axe Episode 65 (Top 10, SXSW, Nikita, and Joe)

Chatter

News

Top Ten Tips?

Ten Top accessibility developer tips from Epic (UK)

SXSW Panels 2009

Nikita the Spider

Joe Dolson

Categories
testing

50 Useful Tools for Evaluating Your Website

Some good web accessibility tools are listed in the post Is Your Site Hot or Not? 50 Useful Tools for Evaluating Your Website. Look under the heading “Accessibility & Usability”. Other good tools are listed for SEO, stats, performance, and code validation.