Target.com. What is their malfunction? Apparently it’s endemic too, judging by the slew of ignorant commenting on the news that Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, granted class-action status to the law suit filed by the US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) over the inaccessibility of the Target.com website. I previously wrote about the law suit back in February 2006 and several times since but Jeremy Keith has a good opinion piece in “Ignorance and inspiration” this time around.
It can be really depressing working as a web standards, web acessibility advocate sometimes, so it was a great shot in the arm when Roger Johansson posted a link to videos of people using assistive technology. This is why we do what we do.
The UK government’s Central Office of Information (COI) released a “Public consultation on Delivering Inclusive Websites” in which it re-iterates (amongst a lot of other stuff) that public sector websites failing to meet web accessibility standards will lose the .gov.uk domain name. Dan Champion challenges the COI with a Freedom of Information (FOI) request as to how many websites have had the .gov.uk domain withdrawn. That’s right, none. I couldn’t help but focus on Para 55 of the document though—perhaps a link to my article on the usefulness of accessibility evaluation tools or Grant Broome‘s excellent earlier work would help reinforce the point? The guidance certainly wasn’t arrived at without reading one or both—or another published source I’m not aware of.
Continuing on the theme of automated testing, Christophe Strobbe wrote to me to draw my attention to an important European Union (EU) project:
The EU projects combined in the Web Accessibility Benchmarking Cluster (WAB Cluster) have launched the Unified Web Evaluation Guidelines (UWEM) version 1.2 for a short expert review period… The review’s objective is to allow experts, who are not directly involved with the Cluster development of the UWEM, to indicate if they believe the document clarifies the WCAG1.0 document and in that way helps the harmonized evaluation of web content for accessibility in Europe.
Fortunately, the deadline for comments has been extended to 5 November 2007 so if you have an interest in this field please do stop by and contribute if you can.
CSS frameworks. Again! Jeff Croft and Blue Flavor come out in favour of Blueprint CSS and my CSS framework gets a link on CSS-tricks.com. Hello new readers! Please read the specific use case of my framework at that specific point in time. My general, (and unpublished) “framework” is not done the same way.
Pick of the bunch from this month’s del.icio.us links:
- Juicy Studio: Screen Readers and display:none.
- Videos on computer accessibility.
- PPK on the Professionalization of Frontend Engineering.
[tags]target.com, accessibility, assistive technology, css, blueprintCSS[/tags]
