The US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) brought legal action against the US retailing giant Target Corporation due to the inaccessibility of their website on 7 February 2006 after trying to negotiate a solution in May 2005.

From the 9-page complaint (PDF 76Kb):

“Target.com contains a variety of access barriers that prevent free and full use by blind persons using keyboards and screen reading software. These barriers include but are not limited to: lack of alt-text on graphics, inaccessible image maps, and mouse-only driven transactions.”

No alt-text? Surely even the most jaded of 1996-era web developers know this will book them a place in Hell? Never assume.

A day after Webstandards.org take aim, the mouse-only submit buttons on the Target Pharmacy sign in page were changed to address this issue - but if the fix was that quick to implement, why wasn’t it done 10 months ago? People’s continued lack of professionalism in this industry really astounds me.

What’s more worrying about this issue is the commentary elsewhere. I couldn’t believe the comments over at the Wall Street Journal.

“Next they’ll be suing banks, charging that the blind can’t use drive-up ATMs.”

“Instead, why don’t they sue the company that makes their reader software for not programming it to read Target’s website? Even better, shop somewhere else!”

A few of us set the record straight.

For more great comments head over to Overlawyered.com were accessibility advocates like Ben Henick, Isofarro and Brady J. Frey have put forward some well thought out and detailed comments to educate uninformed commentators - like Ted. I recommend you go read them.

Lamest comment goes to Bill Hobbs:

“Next they should sue the federal government because the that pretty view in the government-owned national park is not accessible to the blind.”

Nice one idiot.

Some of the arguments to be found in the various comments are based on the rights and wrongs of enforcing accessibility through legislation. Unfortunately that legisaltion must exist to combat unprofessionalism and disinterest amongst old school web developers, raise awareness with people commissioning websites for business purposes and remind people of their ethical obligations.

Further Reading

• Webstandards.org: Taking Aim at Target(.com)
• Webstandards.org: Staying on Target
• Derek Featherstone: Staying on Target
• Molly.com: Targeting Target
• Bruce Lawson: The Webdev Community’s Response to the Target Lawsuit. Good God, you must read this and associated links.

Every web page must have a title element in the head section. In this, the fifth article in my series “From the Top” we start to describe a web document via elements between the head tags. This article is not a discussion on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques although the guidelines offered may help (and ethically so) in that regard.

• The Title Element
• Writing an Accessible Title
• Conclusion
• Further Reading

The Title Element

Every web page must have a title element and it may contain two attributes, namely lang and dir. Titles may contain character entities for accented or special characters but not markup or comments. The text appears in the window title of the user agent.

Writing an Accessible Title

Whereas many people don’t read the window title, titles play an important role in bookmarking and finding the website in search engines. When a user bookmarks your website, the window title is used as the default bookmark name. Similarly, search engines will return the window title in search results and use it to determine relevancy with the search term. In order to be effective and useful (both for search engines and people), window titles should convey as much information as possible using the least amount of words.

1. Begin with the information-carrying word. Don’t start with useless words like “Welcome” or articles such as “a” or “the”. I don’t want all my bookmarks starting with the word “The”. Their inclusion makes search results and bookmark collections less scannable.
2. Begin with the subject of the page. This makes it easier to scan multiple windows, tabs or bookmarks and thus present the most important information first.
3. Include the website or company name. Not only is this important for branding or qualifying the subject matter, distinction can be made between different websites talking about the same subject.
4. Don’t include the top-level domain name. Unless this is part of a company name, such as “Amazon.com” it is an unnecessary word to include and creates an artificial distinction between a company’s presence on and off the web.
5. Don’t separate the subject from the company or website name using odd characters that cause screen readers to say out-of-context things. Make sure you read (and listen) to Peter Krantz’ article: The sound of the accessible title tag separator. So long as you haven’t already used the character in the title, In the past I’ve recommended a dash, colon or vertical bar ( | ) as a separator as they seem either to have the least impact or have a widespread understanding or acceptance of their use.
6. Ensure that there is white space on both sides of the separator.
7. Try to keep the length down to seven or eight words and fewer than 64 total characters to ensure they remain scannable and display adequately in user agents. At least get the subject displayed in full.

Conclusion

Use of the title element is required. Start the title with the subject followed by a sensible separator surrounded by white space and then the name of your company or website (minus the top-level domain name). Never leave it as “Untitled document”…

Further Reading

• 456 Berea Street — Document titles and title separators.
• Adrian Holovaty — Page titles on news article pages.
• Jakob Nielsen — Microcontent: How to write headlines, page titles and subject lines.
• Standards, Schmandards — The sound of the accessible title tag separator.

Next in “From the Top”

A double-bill this week, be sure to read the previous article in the series: “The Head Element”. Next week we will take a look at the inclusion of meta elements in the head section of a web page.

The Complete “From the Top” Series

• Document Type Definitions.
• MIME and Content Negotiation.
• Defining Content Language.
• The Head Element.
• The Title Element — this article.
• The Meta Element.
• The Link Element.