Alex Reid

A US federal ruling issued last week raises the bar for online businesses, requiring them to meet the terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) just as offline business have been required to do since the law’s passage in 1990.

It started when Bruce Sexton Jr, a blind University of California-Berkeley student sued Target last February, arguing its website (target.com) was inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violated the ADA , the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Sexton is the president of the California Association of Blind Students. His lawsuit was filed in conjunction with the National Federation of the Blind and they are seeking class-action status in their lawsuit.

The crux of the issue is the use of the “alt” tags on Target’s website. Alt tags are used to provide brief text descriptions of web page elements like images or hyperlinks. And since search engines rely on this information to be related to the image or the hyperlink, often Alt tags are misused to manipulate search engines. Hover over any photos on my website and often you’ll see an Alt tag related to the photo. On Target’s website, the alt tags were sometimes misleading or missing altogether. One crucial example is Target’s “Add to Cart” graphic did not include an Alt tag.

This isn’t the first time the question of accessibility has been raised. A few years ago, the same National Federation for the Blind sued AOL, but the case never went to trial after AOL agreed to make its sites fully navigable for the visually impaired. In 2004, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer pressured Priceline.com and Ramada.com to make their websites more accessible.

This is the first case in which a judge has ruled that the ADA covers a web site in addition to a bricks-and-mortar business. And that’s the reasoning for allowing the lawsuit through. By having a physical real-world location, the website is merely an extension of the business and the law applies to the website just as much as it does to the tangible business.