Web Development Live

The descriptive line of text is extraneous information for most web shoppers. But for an increasingly vocal group of web users, the text tag means the difference between comprehending what is shown in that image and being left in the dark.

Screen readers, purchased and owned by individual users, transform visual information into audio information. They also assist blind web users, who use keyboard commands instead of a mouse to navigate web pages, to move around a site, by recognizing and reading headings on a web page. The user can then respond with keyboard commands that move the cursor from element to element.

It further charges that because the site requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, blind Target customers also are unable to make purchases on Target.com independently.

In October, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted class action status to a lawsuit against Target. The judge also ruled that e-commerce sites are required by California law to be accessible to blind shoppers.

National Federation of the Blind president Marc Maurer called the granting of class action status to the suit a tremendous step forward for blind people throughout the country.

With the outcome of the Target case pending, it remains to be seen just how motivating a ruling in favor of the National Federation of the Blind would be to retailers whose sites are not now accessible.

One retailer not waiting for that outcome to take action is Amazon.com. Though it provides text tags with images on its home page, it has more work to do in achieving full accessibility.

SALT LAKE CITY A private equity group and a Middle East partner are coming to the rescue of SCO Group, a Utah company that made headlines for its legal assault against IBM and the open-source Linux operating system.SCO - which since 1995 has claimed to control licensing and development of the Unix operating system for corporate servers - sued IBM for allegedly donating its Unix code to the worldwide community of programmers who develop Linux.SCO filed for federal bankruptcy protection in September after a federal judge here ruled that Novell Inc. owns copyrights covering Unix - not SCO. The ruling effectively gutted SCO’s Linux claims against IBM and others.U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball’s decision also leaves the company potentially liable to Novell for millions of dollars in licensing fees. A four-day trial on that issue is set to start April 29.On Thursday, the company said a Middle East partner it would not identify and New York-based Stephen Norris Capital Partners will finance SCO’s comeback with up to $100 million.Executives with SCO and its new partners believe Kimball’s decision will be reversed if they appeal it to a higher court.”It’s a bit of a mixed bag, but we see a business opportunity beyond that,” said Stephen Norris, co-founder and former president of the Carlyle Group. “You can get a legal opinion on all sides of this thing. Everyone in the tech world has an opinion. But some of the court rulings on this just don’t make any sense at all. We think the case has merits.”Norris disputed an earlier statement by a person close to the company that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was involved in the deal. The prince, who is a member of the Saudi royal family, had previously partnered with Norris on major investments before.”We will have very deep-pocket investors,” said Norris, declining to name any of them.Norris previously teamed with Alwaleed in a $590 million restructuring of Citigroup Inc. that returned a $15 billion profit, according to Norris Capital Partners’ Web site.SCO said the new financing will position it to resurrect its legal claims.”It also marks an exciting future for our business,” Jeff Hunsaker, SCO’s president and chief operating officer, said in the statement.SCO’s core business remains licensing Unix, but it also sells software for group communications on cell phones.Novell bought Unix from AT%26T Corp. in 1992, and SCO has said its predecessor, Santa Cruz Operations Inc., paid Novell with 6.1 million shares of SCO stock valued over $100 million for Unix rights in 1995.