There is no business value to excluding any segment of your visitors, because
a customer left in the cold will simply go find a competitor that accommodates them.
WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES
40
Stay out of the courtroom
The precedent for accessibility lawsuits has been set in the United States. Southwest
Airlines, among others, was sued in 2002 for not accommodating disabled users, but the
case was later dismissed. In early 2006, another lawsuit was filed against Target, which was
accused of violating the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, the California Disabled Persons
Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act because of simple accessibility failures like not
providing headers in the page, failing to include alt attributes for the images, and producing
an inaccessible imagemap-based navigation.
There are few greater headaches for corporations than lawsuits, especially ones that could
have been easily dodged. The laws governing accessibility are a bit nebulous and vary from
country to country, and we will go over them later in this chapter, but it is easy to err on
the side of caution. There is no reason Target should have been sued; by planning to build
accessibility into their markup from the beginning of the development process, they could
have avoided a snowstorm of bad press.
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