business

Months after the issue was raised, Target Corp. finds itself locked in a legal battle over access to its Internet shopping site for the blind -- a group of customers expected to grow as baby boomers age.

A California lawsuit by the National Federation for the Blind against Target gained class-action status earlier this month, and the two sides remain at loggerheads over Target's website.

Target insists its site is fully accessible to the blind.

"Target is committed to serving all of our guests," the company said in a statement. "As our online business has evolved, we have made significant enhancements to improve the experience of our guests who use assistive technologies."

The federation for the blind says that's untrue. While Internet access for the blind might sound like a difficult proposition, the federation says standard screen-reading devices can read Web pages aloud to users. The problem is that those devices don't work appropriately on Target's site, the group contends.

"We frequently get to this point [with other organizations]," said the federation's John Pare Jr.

"Virtually all companies say they are willing to make changes to fix that. It's usually inadvertent," said Pare, director of strategic initiatives for the federation. "We contacted Target and they said they would not fix it. As a last resort, we brought them to court."

The federation has not surveyed all of the nation's retailers to see how many have websites that are accessible to blind people. But, Pare said, the organization is regularly approached by companies to get their sites certified as usable by the blind. The list of certified companies ranges from General Electric to Wells Fargo to Legal Seafood. Wal-Mart's website is accessible to the blind, the federation adds.

Target counters with an internal federation e-mail produced in the discovery phase of the suit that praises Target's website. "I wouldn't have believed it, but they have indeed made some rather drastic improvements," says the e-mail between federation officials.

In granting class status on behalf of all blind Target shoppers, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel denied Target's motion to dismiss the case. However, she noted in her ruling that Target has taken steps since the suit was filed to make its site more accessible to the blind.

Target said it intends to request a review of the judge's ruling and called the class-action designation "a procedural ruling" that "in no way addresses the merit of the claims."

In court papers, the federation said it has 50,000 members, with many thousands more blind people who could be affected by the lawsuit. The group is not seeking monetary damages, only access and the cost of its legal fees.

Like visiting a store?

At the heart of the suit is the contention that online shopping is an extension of physically visiting a store, where disability laws require retailers to make accommodations for the handicapped.

The screen-reading devices that blind people use to access websites have been available for years and cost about $1,000. But Target lacks the code needed to interpret and read graphic images and icons, according to the lawsuit. The suit also says that blind users need to have key-stroking ability rather than a mouse to click on selected items and to complete purchases.

"This isn't high-tech stuff," said federation attorney Dan Goldstein, noting that blind computer users were surfing the Net well before laptops and Windows became the standards for use. "When DOS was king, the blind could use everything, then along came Microsoft and added all of those images to the screen."

Goldstein said people with vision problems will become a larger segment of the shopping public in coming years as the ranks of the nation's elderly begin to swell.

"You're talking about a market that likes to use the Internet," Goldstein said.