Blind Sue Target, Claim Web Site Unfairly Needs To Be Seen

A blind student in California has sued Target over the occularly-challenged unfriendliness of its web site.

In an astonishing Beatie-Boys-meets-The-Beatles style mash-up between pompous legalese and labored prose, his lawsuit claims: “”Target thus excludes the blind from full and equal participation in the growing Internet economy that is increasingly a fundamental part of daily life.” Right.

Dear Blind People – I know you can’t read this, with the egg-white film coating your unblinking eyes, but unfortunately the Internet is a visual medium. It is not alone in this. It’s sad, but true: humanity is hard-wired to see. You may think that a dead robotic voice reading you the contents of Consumerist is a rough equivalent to what the other sighted viewers enjoy, but trust me: you are missing a vast universe of truly atrocious Internet design, the likes of which — if you were to suddenly undergo an operation that restored your vision — would make you pluck the scalpel from your surgeon’s hands and double plunge it directly into your newly healed retinas.

Likewise, almost everything else — life is alternatingly beautiful and ugly, and most of it requires that you see. There is a vast array of useful information on the web that the blind should be able to access. But Target’s latest deals on bright yellow novelty speedos with the words “Banana Hammock” actually printed upon them is not part of that array. Given that, this sounds like the blind person equivalent of funky Unix fatties complaining that Shockwave’s web site doesn’t format correctly in Lynx.

As much as we hate Target — no sympathy for this little stunt.

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