Feb. 9th, 2006

zdashamber: painting - a frog wearing a bandanna (Default)
Article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the head of the California Association of Blind Students suing Target for insisting on a blind-inaccessible website. Sez their laywer, "... it's completely unusable. A blind person cannot make a purchase independently on target.com."

Sez me: it's about damn time. Remember the old tagline, "DOS means never having to live hand to mouse"? A keyboard is not as clumsy or as random as a mouse; it's an elegant input device for a more civilized age. (Unless we're talking stave mice.) The article points out two ways target.com fails: for one, it apparently uses image maps without backup, requiring a mouse. What if you're blind? What if you've got Parkinson's? What if you're on a laptop and mousing accuracy ain't? But hey, some guy at Target thinks it looks snazzy.

The other failure of target.com mentioned is that it doesn't use alt tags on images. "Duh" can't even begin to cover this. How does a person even learn to put an image on the web without also learning about height, width, and alt?

Which is the main reason the article caught my eye, because I've been meaning to tout alt for a couple months now. See, I wrote a random post a full year ago in which I included a picture of the Barenaked Ladies. As late as December I was still getting comments on it from random-ass people. WTF? thought I. So I checked Google Images, and that written-on scan of a stepped-on postcard was 3rd on a search for Barenaked Ladies.

Because I had an informative alt tag on the thing!

how to use the img attributes, you know you want to ) Oh, and have you seen the Livejournal Image Generator? )
Page generated Jul. 9th, 2025 05:18 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios