As some of you may know, Target has been involved in a lawsuit with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) over their website not being accessible to the blind.  This started back in 2006 and they just settled out of court for $6 million.  In Target’s case, the problem was they didn’t have proper alt tags throughout the site.  This is a relatively easy fix, and as part of the settlement, Target has to pay for the employees that work on the site to get training in making it accessible.  For far more sites out there, the issue may be much more drastic. 

Any sites out there that are not section 508 compliant are vulnerable to this type of lawsuit.  Section 508 is the handicap accessibility standard on the web.  And it is something that we are going to see more and more of as a standard practice moving forward.  The foundation of accessibility is having your site programmed in tableless CSS, which separates your content from the presentation of your site in the code.  There is more to it than just that, but if you don’t start there, you are only going to run into problems.  Using only HTML just isn’t going to cut it anymore, for accessibility or the search engines. 

If you’re looking to start a new website, or revamp your current one, make sure Section 508 compliance is a service offering of whatever company you go with.  Keep in mind that the software that blind people use to search your site for content has the same goal as the search engines:  To easily find your content for the end user.  While there has been a lot of grumbling around the web about what this settlement means for eCommerce as a whole, the fact that accessibility compliance will also help with your natural search engine rankings should, at the very least, soften the blow. 

Let us know what you think about Target’s settlement!

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Tags: Handicap Accessibility, Section 508, Tableless CSS