Kevin Blake's Blog

My very poorly placed News of the World style headlines aside, I heard today that Target are being sued by the National Federation for the blind for having a site that is inaccessible by the blind, and other disabled groups. The story has been pretty well covered in the news, and consists of key points like:

• No alt tags on images key to the purchasing process
• No alternatives to image maps
• Orders require the use of a mouse for completion.

Today, I’ve seen far too many reactions of the kind, “blind people, using web sites? What are they doing on a computer?”. They’ve been mixed in with “well, go and shop somewhere else then”, and “they’re only in it for the money”. As a web developer – whatever the reasons for the lawsuit, anything to raise awareness in the area is a big plus. A well written web site is useable with any number of speech browsers, that convert the text into a form that blind visitors can use. They can’t do that without text to describe the images. This is day two of web design, we’re not talking about anything complex here.

So to everybody complaining that this is just a frivalous law suit… There are laws to protect all forms of disabled users, and Target have not been listening to them. Should you find yourself in a position later on in life where accessible web sites would be of great benefit to you, I would hope that you’d spare a thought for all those before you who didn’t have it that easy.

Not too many years ago, a friend of mine (Ben) was heading out to America for a year at a University where he could learn a few things more than Hertfordshire would provide. Important Computer Science courses such as The History of Communism. Part of the move held the obligatory leaving drinks, for which myself and three other friends clubbed together to buy him 4 cans of Tesco Value Bitter, for the bargain basement price of 99p. To cut a long story short, the drinks were a hit and we were all four heralded as the best friends you could ever ask for.

Feeding off of the success of Tesco Value Bitter, Asda have come up with the perfect card of choice for this year. So if you’re worried about how to tell that special someone how you feel about them on the 14th, but still keep to your budget this year – take a trip down to your local store today! Be warned, you’re still going to have to save money on those roses and chocolates somewhere, because the card is still going to set you back 8p.