These are some of the worst analogies I've ever seen. The target website is not a work of art, it's not a mountain, it's not a car, it's not a drive up ATM, it's not a building.
Not to mention the slippery slopes, like "Well if they force Target to fix their website, next they'll be forcing it on ALL websites everywhere!" and "Well if they force target to make their site accessable to blind people, what's next? People who can't speak english?" It's amazing how much these things sound like arguments, and seem to make sense, but every one of them is a logical fallacy of some kind. What we are talking about here, is a Catalog of products, using a technology which is inherently easy to make accessable. It does not require a huge investment of material. The catalog in this case, is used for online purchasing, or making purchasing decisions before entering a physical store. We're not talking about a grand visual experience, or a masterpeice of literature here, or any other such thing which would allow arguments about freedom of speach, or expression. Target is a business, and they ain't in the business of making art. We are talking about a business that, despite one of the comments on that blog, HAS made a concious decision to exclude a portion of the populace from using their website. I know this because I've seen the reasoning before. "Who cares about blind people? they're a small part of the population anyway. Let's just make the whole thing flash." So we're talking about target conciously discriminating against a portion of the populace from purchasing goods from their store, or finding information about their products, so they could have the perception of saving money, by not having to hire competant web developers. This is not a freedom of choice issue. It's an issue of choosing the illusion of money, over people. And as we can see now, it was a bad choice, not only because the money they could have spent on accessiblity will now be spent on lawyers, but they also lost the potential money from those lost customers. The money they choose truly was illusory. ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
