US retailer, Target Corporation has agreed to make its web site fully accessible to blind customers by February 2009 and pay $6M in damages to Californian vision impaired customers. The case is similar to the 1999 one concerning the 2000 Olympics Web site, which I was an expert witness for, but on a larger scale. Note that the Target Australia Pty Ltd web site is not necessary covered by the US legal decision.
For those interested in how to create accessible web sites (and which also work for mobile phones) see the notes for the course I teach on this at the Australian National University: Website Design, For Information Technology Professionals, for "Internet, Intranet, and Document Systems" (COMP3400/COMP6340).
By the way the Target Australia Pty Ltd home page passed an automated accessibility test at Level A. It had four Priority 2 and one Prioritise 3 issues. This is a relatively good result for a commercial web site. I was unable to get the test system to work with the USA Target site.
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