The Ugly Face of Legislation
Posted by Mathew on October 25th, 2007
The mere fact that Target (a private company, not in any way owned or affiliated with the US government, or any public service thereof) has been in a long court battle over their site's inaccessibility simply strikes me as ridiculous. How does one legislate, especially when considering the abstract nature of web markup, site design? Will all business in California, and perhaps the greater United States, be required to pay design firms the capital required to update old designs to be compliant with some law that obviously spits in the face of free speech?
From a conceptual point of view, and as an amateur designer, accessibility is an important concept. Any company (Target included) is simply shooting itself in the foot by turning away the dollar and cents of the blind and otherwise handicapped population. With that being said, does a company not have a right to design a site how it sees fit? How can the government decree how an organization presents itself in the virtual world? Simply put, it shouldn't. The right of some organization to express itself in order to increase revenue via the web should be preserved, yet we seem to live in an age where threats to security, the overzealous need to prove one's self patriotic, and the age old question of what is and is not politically correct have, and will continue to eat away our rights to nothing. It will start with companies like Target, and trickle down to smaller firms, bloggers, hobbyists, and academic organizations, and clubs. If such a bastardization of our constitution were to come to pass, how long would it be before teenage bloggers find their sites condemned by some congressional oversight committee charged with monitoring how we are or are not allowed to design our sites? The thought makes me cringe. I truly hope that the public will come to see some sense in this, and quite simply if a store does not cater to your needs as an individual, shop somewhere else.
