I suppose most of the people in Web Development world have heard about recent Target’s debacle with their website. For those who haven’t heard it, “a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that a lawsuit filed against Minneapolis-based Target Corp. by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) regarding the accessibility of the retailer’s Web site can move forward.” It has gained a Class action status. Read more.

In this post I will try to explain what is wrong with Target’s website in my opinion.

1. No Doctype. The website doesn’t have any kind of DOCTYPE declared. It is very important to place an appropriate doctype to ensure that web documents render and function properly in all compliant browsers. Read more about Doctypes

   

2. No Alt Tags (or so it seems). When user hovers over an image, normally a brief image description should appear within 5 seconds or so. For Target’s site it works in Internet Explorer 6, doesn’t work in Firefox, and partially works in Opera (opera shows address of a page).

   

   If you look at the source code there are alt tags for those navigation item. Note that majority of the navigational items are area maps.

   

3. No navigation available when images are disabled. Take a look at the snapshot of a front page below.

   

4. For the low vision visitors, it is NOT possible to increase the font size on this site! The reason is – the whole navigation system on Target’s website is comprised of IMAGES!
5. Here is a snapshot of a Screen Reader output (I used Fangs Extension for Firefox)

   

6. CSS does not validate. Some of the errors I would attribute to sloppy coding, for example: “.browse-leaf-addtocart-bottom {margin-bottom: 0 px}” – should be margin-bottom:0px; and “.whiteBackgroundColor { bgcolor:#fffff}” – should be background-color:#fff. HTML does not validate as well.

Anyways, those are just my thoughts on why Target’s website has created so much outrage among the disabled users.