The Handicapper General targets Target
Topics: AA
03 Oct 2007
From: Ervan Darnell
> NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge in California certified a class
> action lawsuit against Target Corp brought by plaintiffs claiming the
> discount retailer's Web site is inaccessible to the blind, according
> to court documents.[1]
Though the story doesn't say, I presume this becomes a viable tort
because of the ADA. Not to diminish the tragedy of blindness, but it's
crazy to reduce the rest of us to some low standard of visual
information because of it. Not to mention that every website now just
got more expensive because of lawsuit insurance and/or defensive web
coding to make sure there are only 24-pt letters and no sidebars (or
whatever idiot standard the court ultimately imposes).
It's like the learning-disabled school case: an effort to bring the
lowest up takes no account of the cost, of how far down the best (or
even the average) are lowered.
Stepping back one level, I'd say the error is confounding equality of
opportunity with equality of outcome. This all started with wanting to
block racial prejudice from having an impact. But then disparate
outcome becomes proof of prejudice (e.g. hiring x% blacks is taken as
evidence of prejudice without norming for relevant factors, and thus
quotas are the natural response to create a legal defense). And here we
have the reducto ad absurdum where disparate outcomes for perfectly
obvious and non-prejudicial physical reasons are taken as a problem.
Then there is the capricious aspect of it. Why Target? Their website
is no worse than most other commercial ones (in terms of confusing text
boundaries, font sizes, etc.). And why only commercial ones? Why don't
they sue moveon.org? For that matter, why aren't symphony halls sued
for being unfair to the deaf? Speaking of which, can the blind lobby
sue the deaf lobby over their lawsuits that try to outlaw speaking
services in favor of visual ones?
If we really want to solve the problem of blind people shopping online,
wouldn't it be a lot easier for everybody if we just give them a
telephone number where they can call and talk to somebody about what
products they want to order? Oh wait, Target already has such a
number. What's the problem again?
[1]
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071003/wr_nm/target_blind_dc_4;_ylt=At5KBjUfSnVrXoSLNHSowS8E1vAI
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