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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-seeing-it dept.

Apple, which prides itself on design, faces a lawsuit alleging that its web page layout violates the law.

In a complaint [PDF] filed on Sunday in a Manhattan district court, plaintiff Himelda Mendez claims that Apple's website, by virtue of its availability in Apple Stores, violates Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).

Mendez is a visually impaired and legally blind person who uses a screen-reader, which can translate written website text into spoken words or tactile Braille.

The National Federation of the Blind estimates there are about 7.3mn people age 16 or older in the US with a visual disability.

According to the complaint, Apple's website code lacks alt-text attributes that allow screen readers to convey textual descriptions of graphics. Apple.com webpages, it's said, contain empty links with no text, which confuses screen-readers and those using them.

Then there's the issue of redundant links next to each other that all point to the same address, a situation that can be difficult for users of screen-readers to understand. Also, Apple's linked images, it's claimed, lack alt-text tags. That means screen-readers have no way to tell users the function of links.

"For screen-reading software to function, the information on a website must be capable of being rendered into text," the complaint says. "If the website content is not capable of being rendered into text, the blind or visually-impaired user is unable to access the same content available to sighted users."


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by jlv on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:47PM (1 child)

    by jlv (3756) on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:47PM (#724665)

    Reading the PDF of the complaint helps to highlight some of the abuses the ADA helps foist.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @03:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @03:10AM (#725038)

    I think the problem is that we all know who will be blamed for the complaint: IT.

    We all know who should be blamed for the complaint: the small-minded chauvinists in Marketing who overrode and disregarded IT's objections every single time. Ownership as well for not valuing their IT department's advice and concerns because IT isn't diverse.