Why Accessibility Should Be Important To You – A Lesson Learned

Target recently settled a lawsuit for $6 million after being sued by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB). The NFB sued the mega retailer because their Web site was not accessible enough.

While I don’t expect all of us to be sued by advocacy groups, this example does give each of us another reason to begin pushing harder for concrete accessibility guidelines, and to continue working toward making our own Web sites accessible for disabled users.

For those of us in the public sector, accessibility is even more important, as we are actually governed by the SEC 508 guidelines. However, even those in the private sector, as evidenced by this lawsuit, should watch their backs and get with the times.

While there are no real guidelines for accessibility in the private sector, the SEC 508 guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are certainly still good things to strive toward.

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  • This may not be revelant but i figured i’d post this anyway. If you’re using ubuntu 8.10 you may be in for some issues with the network manager. For some unknown reason it stops functioning. You will need to manually set you’re resolv.conf with your ISP’s DNS servers. That file is located in /etc/network/resolv.conf