• A California judge ruled in favor of allowing a lawsuit against retailer Target to go forward. The suit alleges that Target's Web site is not usable by blind patrons due to poor design.
  
  
• South Carolina has decreed that all state Web pages comply with federal section 508 standards for Web accessibility (http://www.section508.gov). This requirement affects Clemson University, where I work, which is a state agency. As a result of this requirement, all faculty and staff were directed to make any new content compliant, and a radio show produced on campus removed its audio archives from its Web site.

Contrast the old IOL pages (www2.informs.org/oldindex.html) with http://www.target.com. Nearly all the text on the Target site is rendered by images rather than plain text in the HTML file. None of the images provide alternate text. (The alternate text, which appears in a "tooltip" pop-up or in place of the image if the image can't be presented, can be read by text-to-speech tools used by people with vision impairments.) Most browsers can't resize images the way that they change font sizes.

The genesis of the Target lawsuit is interesting. A 2002 U.S. District Court ruling explicitly exempted the Internet from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Section 508 applies to U.S. government Web sites, not to non-government sites. But the judge in the Target case suggests that Target's Web services are an integral part of their "public accommodations." The goods and services offered on the Web but not connected to physical stores are not at issue. But presumably features like store locators, sale announcements, etc., would be covered.

Section 508 applies to U.S. government Web sites, not to private sites. Many states require compliance as well. INFORMS is not required to comply, but we have compliance as a goal to better serve our membership. Key points of Section 508 as it applies to "Web-based Intranet and Internet Information and Applications" include:

• Text equivalents must be provided for all non-text elements.
  
  
• Alternatives for multimedia presentations must be synchronized.
  
  
• Information provided through use of colors must also be provided through other means.
  
  
• Pages must be readable without specific style sheets.
  
  
• Image maps (pictures with the property that different actions are taken depending on where in the picture the user clicks) must include links or alternative links must be provided.
  
  
• Tables must have row and column headers. Headers must be distinguishable from table bodies.
  
  
• Frames must have titles.
  
  
• Flicker, flashing and blinking must be within certain limits.
  
  
• A separate text-only page may be provided to comply.
  
  
• Applets or plugins must comply.
  
  
• Forms must be navigable — in particular, fields and their text labels must be associated.
  
  
• Navigation bars must be skippable.
  
  
• Users must be able to control time-outs.

Most of these requirements can be met simply by exercising reasonable care in page design. Proper use of HTML tags, cascading style sheets and Javascripts take care of most problems, and separate text-only pages can be provided if necessary. Back-converting an existing site can be expensive, but once it's done, maintaining compliance requires only modest effort. The one area that is problematic for site developers is multimedia content.

Audio-visual content on a Web site qualifies as "non-text elements." As such, text equivalents must be provided. Video must include closed captions (switchable on and off), audio must be accompanied by transcripts, and text or audio descriptions of images (such as in a slide show) and video must be synchronized with the images. Captioning and transcripts add significant costs to the production of audiovisual materials, enough so that some providers may be unable to afford to offer such content. INFORMS offers videos related to the Edelman Awards, but it might not be able to afford to offer them with closed captions.

This situation can occasionally lead to awkward situations. For example, the radio show I mentioned above no longer offers Web archives of its shows. The original radio broadcasts were not accompanied by transcripts, but if the audio archives were offered on the Web, transcripts would be required. While transcripts certainly are a valuable extension of the service and expand the audience that can be reached, it seems to me that, as the only alternative is no archives at all, a valuable service for a significant audience has been lost.

INFORMS Online staff have tried to pay attention to accessibility guidelines on our pages whenever possible. It has not always been easy on the old IOL system, as every page had to be edited separately. On the other hand, we tended to use only fairly vanilla HTML, and we weren't tempted to try very many clever hacks that interfered with accessibility. Once the transfer of material from the old site to the new site is complete, the site could stand a review for Section 508 compliance. I will be encouraging my successor as IOL editor to undertake such a review.



Matthew Saltzman (mjs@ces.clemson.edu) is an associate professor of Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University and the editor of INFORMS Online.

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