My original point in this blog entry was that Target could have avoided the entire mess — with little or no additional cost — simply by using best practices from day one. After all, it really doesn’t take much effort to make your materials accessible at the most basic level.

I went looking for information about what other “professionals” thought about SCORM and found a lovely rant on whiney liberals and demanding minority groups. Could we keep the political and social bias at home and just talk technology, please? It helps not to say things online you wouldn’t have the guts to say in a room full of people.

Anyway…as to the issue of accessibility… I don’t think there’s a need to guess or hope you’ve discovered what users want. It seems really simple to me: create a 508 Info section on your site and discuss what you’ve done to offer accessibility, what you’re looking into, what isn’t currently feasible from a business standpoint and allowing people to offer suggestions. That would go a long way toward chasing away the trial lawyers and you’d set a good precedent for other developers to follow.

Just as someone who couldn’t reach the top shelf at Target would “get some help,” so can we do the same by ASKING OUR USERS what they think we can do to improve accessibility. There is no one-size-fits all approach but at the very least you address your own constituency. In any business, if you want to increase sales to your customers, you ASK them what they want. Why should it be any different with respect to accessibility.

As for the fear of developers being sued – Let’s bear in mind that Target has over 1,500 stores and over $59 billion in ANNUAL revenue… I don’t think lawyers are going to be tripping over themselves to sue Joe Developer Six-Pack over accessibility issues. It’s simply not worth the cost.

So by that logic – let the lawsuits stay virtual. Or bring things inline… This is a thinly veiled attempt by the legal clans of America to wring another buck out of their frightened prey.

508 opened the door for litigators to poop on the system. Whiney liberal BS that dictates that everyone (and particularly minority groups) can voice their grievance and act as they want to and everyone else just has to BOHICA.

I’ve argued that why use multimedia at all if we can describe something in text adequately for a screen reader to ‘get the point across’ let’s just rewind the freaking clock back to 1984 and be done with it. That was sarcasm… but isn’t there a point there?

I, for one, am getting pretty tired of this garbage rule that says everyone has to be happy with everything. And forget about the fact that we have no idea how many people in our audience have impairments or what their needs are. Nor do we have great models for implementation of ’508 compliant stuff’. So we are stuck ‘guessing’ at what people are going to need, stabbing at the generalized rules and hoping that someone isn’t going to beef about it.

On the other hand, there are SO MANY good reasons to build tools and information in cleanly accessible ways. And I’m not talking about appeasing the groups of folks that might or might not exist with impairments (or their legal representation). Better reasons… Like future proofing deployments and making things usable for EVERYONE.

Good point. As we all know, we can’t please everyone. Where do you draw the line?

Ideally, lawsuits wouldn’t happen. If they do, I hope they’re only allowed to proceed if the course/site/LMS developers haven’t made a good-faith effort to make their work accessible. The question you ask is: how accessible is enough? My personal feeling is that a developer should follow basic web accessibility best practices, but leave the really detailed and ‘beyond the call’ stuff up to the developer’s preference.

Regarding fairness, what’s not fair for many developers is that many of the assistive browsing devices are (according to articles I’ve read and seminars I’ve attended) not robust enough to handle functionality “Web 2.0″ websites. Many would argue that web developers wouldn’t need to worry about accessibility if the companies that manufacture assistive devices/software would make their products more robust. (Cognitive accessibility is a whole other topic.)

In the end I think it’s a 50-50 responsibility. All I’m asking is that people at least think about accessibility and make a good-faith effort to clean up their code and use basic web accessibility best practices.

OK, so people will ask: What constitutes “basic web accessibility”? Start with little things like using alt tags, not using tables for layout, using semantic markup, avoiding inline CSS and JavaScript, using progressive enhancement principles, and perhaps providing alternate stylesheets for low/high contrast or larger fonts. This is not an exhaustive list (I’m no expert on the topic), so for anyone interested in learning more, just google it.

I work in developing software for people with severe behavioural and learning difficulties. As such the accessibility options covering switch-access control, visual impairment and cognitive learning difficulties and many other accessibility issues.

I enjoy this work and get immense satisfication in help people who are less able. But, I am deeply worried that I could get sued for not making my software accessible to a certain individual’s needs.

For instance, this could lead to ANY website being sued by the Motor Neurone Disease Association for not including switch access control with pre-acceptance delay options.

If this sueing happens more, I think developers are going to be very scared to do anything, it will stifle uniqueness and creativity, and everyone will need massive amounts of imdeminity insurance.

Its all really depressing as I can’t do a perfect job and yet could be sued for trying.