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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."
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Friday August 24 2018, @04:39PM
I would say that's from a couple years back. Now it's more like "Our websites are optimized for mobile devices with tiny screens. It will only work with an up to date Safari on iOS or Chrome on Android. What's Firefox? Our webpages are nothing but huge clickable elements for people bluntly poking at 6" screens with their finger, and we don't care that if you're using a mouse you'll endlessly be clicking on these damn things by accident (though we do love all ad revenue these clicks bring us). If you view our webpage on on a desktop monitor it'll be 80% whitespace surrounding the content, which by the way the whitespace is still a clickable element anyway just to piss you off and we don't give a shit. Oh, and when we said optimized for mobile, we meant just the way it looks, we don't care that all that scripting will bring your phone's weak ARM processor to its knees, kill your battery, and blow up your data plan. It looks great on our shiny iPhone X and that's all that counts!"