CHICAGO — Three Illinois companies are accused of maintaining websites visually impaired consumers allegedly can’t use in an age when online shopping is as important as walking into a store.
A California woman has filed lawsuits against Kmart, Empire Today and Ace Hardware, alleging that running websites and mobile apps that blind and visually impaired people can’t read also means denying potential customers products and services, a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The three retailers named in the suits, filed this month in U.S. District Court in Chicago, join a growing list of big-name companies that have faced similar allegations, including Target, Netflix, and Illinois-based Grubhub and McDonald’s.
Passed in 1990, the ADA predates most internet operations. Now livelihoods often depend on the internet, and commerce increasingly is taking place online. Some say the law needs to catch up to that reality, and since it hasn’t, companies are leaving people out. Retailers, on the other hand, argue that constantly changing technology to keep websites accessible isn’t quite as easy as it sounds.
Blind and visually impaired people use a combination of keyboard functions and screen-reading software to navigate websites, according to the lawsuits.
If a website isn’t designed so that content can be turned into text — like graphics or buttons on a site that are incorrectly labeled or lack certain coding — the software can’t function.
Kayla Reed, the California woman who filed the lawsuits, could not complete a purchase from Kmart.com because the purchase process was not accessible, according to her lawsuit against the retailer, a subsidiary of Hoffman Estates-based Sears Holdings Corp. Additionally, links on Kmart’s mobile app lacked coding that would allow her to navigate, her suit says.
Representatives from Kmart and Oak Brook-based Ace declined to comment. Empire, based in Northlake, did not respond to requests for comment.
Reed was unavailable for comment, but her attorney, Marc Dann, said the issue is bigger than just the three retailers.
“The big picture here is that as commerce shifts from brick-and-mortar buildings to the web, access to visually impaired people becomes … just as important as the ability to walk into a store,” he said.
Each of the three lawsuits, which also allege the retailers violated California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, ask that the court order the defendants to change their policies, practices and procedures.
There are other methods for visually impaired people to read websites, said Luke Scriven, assistant technology manager at Chicago Lighthouse, an organization that works with the visually impaired. There are screen magnification programs that enlarge webpages.
But if the contrast of text is poor or the text is in cursive, for example, it might be difficult to read, said Scriven, who is not involved in the lawsuits.
Some large technology companies, such as Microsoft and Apple, take accessibility into account when they are designing programs and webpages, he said. But it’s an education issue, as most developers aren’t thinking about users who are blind and visually impaired when they design.
Making sure websites are coded properly is absolutely vital to consumers who are blind and visually impaired, said Tyler Bachelder, who works at Chicago Lighthouse. He was born visually impaired and uses text-to-speech software “pretty much exclusively,” he said.
This issue doesn’t just affect online shopping — it affects all aspects of life and work conducted online.
“Anything you use a PC for, I use it for the exact same purposes with different methods,” Bachelder said.
The problem, he said, is that everyone needs to be on the same page and they’re not. From management to web designers, employees need to collaborate to build company websites with blind and visually impaired people in mind, he said.
“Making a digital space accommodating is much easier than making a physical one accommodating,” Bachelder said. “It needs to be paid attention to, because this is an entire consumer base.”
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