Accessibility Happenings Worth Noting

Over at Opera Developer Network (which is called ODIN, how cool is that?), Bruce reports that Target has settled in the class action brought by the National Federation for the Blind. In essence a good result in that:

Target shall ensure [...] that blind guests using screen-reader software may acquire the same information and engage in the same transactions as are available to sighted guests with substantially equivalent ease of use.

As Bruce points out, it's visual-impairment specific, so it's not a win for all kinds of accessibility. Though it does mention Jim Thatcher doing yearly assessments of their accessibility as well, and as far as I can see that looks more general. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this shakes things up stateside and if it has a wider impact (Target's e-commerce is provided by some outfit called Amazon).

In other news, it looks like JAWS 10 will support WAI ARIA Live Regions. Which is a step forward in accessibility for Javascript-based web apps and virtual-buffer issues. Of course it's the bleeding edge, so it'll take a while to trickle down to common usage... Another one to keep an eye on though. You can download the public beta and try it out (JAWS 9 license required).