Sometimes I read blog articles that just make me smile, and this continues today with each article I have been reading about the class action lawsuit against U.S. retailer Target. Being one who often attempts to build business cases for accessibility to a room of suits, this has been a long time coming.

I have recently had to build one of these business cases for a company-wide guidelines website at the large company I work, involving standards in search engine optimisation, web accessibility and web development best practice.

I have no problems projecting potential earnings for increased traffic for SEO enhancements, and I also can give a fair estimate of the potential savings gained by more efficient workflows that occur when developers have standards and code libraries to work from at the start of a project.

Where my argument gets a bit thin is when I am still forced to quote the legendary SOCOG vs Bruce Maguire lawsuit to justify my arguments on why all of our websites should be accessible. Even I had to admit that, from a business perspective, this seemed a one off and the probability of getting sued by a customer are quite slim. I continue to push ahead with this example anyway as it’s the only concrete example we have that really hits home with Australian corporations.

Target’s situation opens those doors for us all to start pushing once again. The “you could get sued” can now turn into a “when we do get sued” with just a fresh taste of reality backing it. New numbers can be crunched and that is what makes things happen in larger companies and moves accessibility concerns up the ladder of priorities.

Even better, is the fact that this is now not limited to government websites under California law. Every private commercial website running under this jurisdiction will have to closely pay attention to the voice of many disabled users attempting to use the web, just as we do everyday.

Why should SEO be the only reason I can get things done on my company websites? I currently use SEO to push my accessibility and web standards agendas, but imagine in the near future if I could use the word accessibility in the same threatening (or perhaps we should say persuading) context?

Accessibility would move one step closer to pushing through that checklist mentality (which I don’t even think it’s entirely reached yet) and begin it’s journey into more mainstream awareness and user testing with disabled users would just become another part of the web design process.

It’s an interesting stage in accessibility and I think we really needed this one. Companies will not do things because it is right, that just doesn’t cut it with the bottom line. It has to be a legal mandate with financial consequences for these incentives to begin to cut into the large corporations and the mainstream.