• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 25, 2006

A federal judge this week dealt a minor setback to advocates for the blind in their lawsuit against Target. The advocates charge the retailer with failing to make its e-commerce store accessible to the screen-reading software that people with vision impairments commonly use to navigate the Web.

While the judge already ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to e-commerce sites, this week the court declined to issue an injunction that would have required Target to immediately make changes to its site.

Fixing the site is a simple matter of placing alt-tags with the images, according to the National Federation of the Blind. Yet, for some reason Target resists the idea of revamping its site. Instead, the retailer argues that its site is accessible to the average blind person, according to a Reuters account. But other e-commerce sites--including BestBuy.com--apparently have taken far greater steps to code their pages for screen-readers, according to a recent Associated Press article.

Regardless, it's somewhat puzzling why Target is fighting so hard, forcing would-be customers to sue for the right to be able to shop at Target.com instead of one of its competitors. Surely, in the long run Target and its potential customers would be better off if the retailer figured out how to build a Web site that more people could access.