Target.com Sued Over Lack of ALT Tags (Attributes)

February 13th, 2006 by Loren Baker, Editor | 14 Comments

Target.com Sued Over Lack of ALT Tags

The National Federation of the Blind and a college student are suing Target and want to establish a class action suit over Target and its lack of accessibility for blind internet users. The suit is centered around Target.com’s lack of ALT text in its site’s images. Wonder who’s doing their SEO, as ALT tags (or ALT Attributes) are a very important part of all around site usability and relevancy.

Not to point fingers at the National Federation of the Blind, but if you scroll over the navigational images at the top of their site, there are no ALT tags to inform the user of those images either.

The suit specifically claims the following lacks of accessibility on Target.com

* Lack of alt text
* images maps that neither have alt text or a functional equivalent on the page
* requirement for a mouse to perform various functions on the site

One issue brought up on the Webstandards.org blog is who is at fault here? Target or Amazon.com:

Target.com is powered by Amazon.com, so who is responsible? are both responsible? a 50-50 split? 75-25? does the Amazon.com engine that is powering the site even allow Target developers make it accessible? Depending on the functionality of the Amazon engine, can it be considered an Authoring Tool and thus subject to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines? Did Amazon promise accessibility but not deliver? Did accessibility even make it on to the radar when building the site?

Comments

14 responses so far ↓

Matt Foreman on Feb 13, 2006 at 10:18 am

Could you please append the title of your article to read “…ALT Tags (Attributes)”?

There is no such thing as an ALT tag.

Thank you,
The Web Design Community
Loren on Feb 13, 2006 at 10:32 am

Alt Tags

But yes, I do get your point.
Lee Odden on Feb 13, 2006 at 2:55 pm

I believe it’s actually “alt text”, but I think everyone gets the point.

The fault lies with both Amazon and Target. One thing is for sure, their web groups will be looking at ways to add alt text.
Loren on Feb 13, 2006 at 9:42 pm

Sounds like a new argument in the SEO field Lee, the Tag Gang vs the Attribute Gang. Thanks for the comment.
Lee Odden on Feb 13, 2006 at 10:12 pm

OK :)
Here you go: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#alternate-text
Nathan Weinberg on Feb 14, 2006 at 12:23 am

Actually, there are ALT tags, they just don’t work in Firefox or Opera, just IE (and don’t ask me how they screwed THAT up).
Derek Andrews on Feb 14, 2006 at 8:57 am

Nathan, I have never heard of Alt tags for IE, but no doubt this is just another toy that Microsoft added in an attempt to win the browser wars. Any sensible web designer will ignore it and stick to standards compliant code that can be understood by any browser.
mors on Feb 17, 2006 at 9:31 pm

How about start suing ALL website that block browsers ?!? That would make more sense.
IzxVnaAkHJ on Feb 21, 2006 at 6:36 am

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joy on Apr 13, 2006 at 6:58 pm

You’ll want to change the webstandards.org link to http://www.webstandards.org/2006/02/09/taking-aim-at-targetcom/ for some reason, your original link merely redirects to their main page.
blake on Nov 17, 2006 at 2:20 am

IE wrongly causes ALT attributes to display in a “tooltip” style fashion. This can actually be annoying and even work against usability/accessibility but cover other information on the page. It is supposed to be an ALTERNATIVE to an image.

The TITLE attribute is the one that is supposed to (and does in Firefox and Safari) function as a tooltip.

I like mors idea. Let’s starting suing sites for being IE only and the like.

Ironically, a lot of the assistive technology that blind folks would use doesn’t support IE 7.
Nick Bostic - Real Estate Marketing » RMLS In Need of an Overhaul to Help Portland Real Estate on Jun 13, 2007 at 8:51 pm

[…] and it’s not accessible to those who may not be able to read the screen like many of us can. Target was sued because their site wasn’t accessible. This is the first step in an already confusing process and now blind people are being given an […]
Law May Require Webistes To Be Accessible To Disabled Users | SEOdisco on Oct 14, 2007 at 2:52 pm

[…] of accessibility to visually impaired internet users. Loren covered this issue last year over at Search Engine Journal: The suit is centered around Target.com’s lack of ALT text in its site’s images. Wonder […]
Sac ekimi on Jan 18, 2008 at 11:42 am

i think no one is responsible for this situation. I think they have just forgetten. Because their software is huge so they spent their times to flexibility and security, not for seo.

Mehmet