Last month a federal judge in San Francisco in the USA ruled that a lawsuit brought by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) against Target USA could proceed. The case argues that the Target USA site is discriminatory in that it is un-usable by non-sighted people. The ruling, the first against a non-government site, has sparked much debate but it is clear that websites will come under greater scrutiny when they ignore visually impaired and disabled visitors.
Read what the Web Standards Project site and the CNET site had to say about the Target USA case before the recent ruling was handed down.
Admittedly, the Target USA site is EXTREMELY bad and all the sites we develop at Lateral Systems are built with good accessibility in mind, however, there are always ways to help improve your site's accessibility including:
1. Using text based navigation rather than images.
2. Adding alt tags to all images
3. Only using flash for additional or non-essential content
4. Using CSS, not tables for layout.
5. Using descriptive text links like "read about this article on coffee" instead of "more"
Good accessibility isn't hard, it just requires some thought at all stages in the website planning process and you should always have your target audience in mind.