Target.com is getting sued, this lawsuit will have worldwide implication for anyone selling anything online. That is scary both as a consumer and a web designer; but issues such as this can be avoided.
There are many ways to include good practice techniques to make your site accessible to the blind; here are a few examples:
- Adding alt and title tags to describe images and URIs
- Structure your site to present the most recent news/post first from top down when you view the source page of your site
- Avoiding pop-ups
Here’s an interesting article to make your blog blind friendly by the American Foundation for the Blind.
Emphasis on building sites that are not only standard compliant but also accessible for the blind will pay off in two folds:
- You will provide service to the 1.5 million or so blind web surfers in the US, who would otherwise turn to competitive sites
- Your site will be more search engine friendly, the bots that crawl your site pretty much follow the same flow technique used by the software that converts sites to voice interpretation
Those are just a few I could readily think off, but it really is not about the webmasters, it’s about the users. To check your site’s accessibility, try the Truwex (True Web Experience) test, believe me, I have a lot of work to do on my own site!
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