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Don’t Be Blind to Customer Needs
December 6, 2007
I saw the worst instance of customer service I’ve ever encountered this morning. I was in a drugstore that shall be nameless when two blind shoppers asked an employee where to find pet supplies. One had a Seeing Eye dog, the other a cane.
The [sighted] employee’s tone was courteous and his answer was prompt… and totally useless. “Right there,” he said, “aisle three.” Nameless Drugs aisles are labeled with signs hanging high above them. How are blind people supposed to understand either of his statements? The obvious choice would have been to take the women where they wanted to go, but an answer like “to your left about 15 feet” would have been a step in the right direction.
What this anecdote has to do with online retail is this: is your website set up for people with disabilities? Or is it offering the same kind of unhelpful help as that hapless employee?
Retailers who comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in their brick and mortar stores by providing ramps, handicapped bathroom stalls, etc., may not think about the Web having handicapped access concerns as well. But it does — and as Web design gets more complicated, they are growing. Assistive programs for blind people read the text on Web pages aloud — but they can’t read words that are embedded in graphics, animations, video clips, etc. Web designers can supply alternate text tags for these elements in the page’s code — but they don’t always bother.
This isn’t just a matter of lost sales or bad word of mouth, either: retailers who don’t make their sites handicapped accessible could face litigation. The National Federation for the Blind filed a lawsuit against Target Corp. for failing to make target.com accessible to the blind. The case is still pending, but so far the court has held that Web sites such as target.com are required by California law to be accessible, and certified the case as a class action under the ADA. — Meredith Schwartz
Posted by Virtual Merchant Today on December 6, 2007 | Comments (0)
