National Federation of the Blind v. Target

In May 2005 the National Federation of the Blind wrote to Target Corporation to say that Target.com did not work with screen readers and to ask it to fix that. Target was then the fifth-largest retailer in the United States, with roughly 1,400 stores and a website, launched in 1999 and rebuilt in 2001 on Amazon's technology platform, that was already doing close to a million visits a day. The talks ran for eight months. Target would not commit to a remediation programme. In January 2006 they ended.

On 7 February 2006 the NFB, its California affiliate and a 24-year-old interdisciplinary studies student at Berkeley named Bruce Sexton filed a class action in the Superior Court of California in Alameda County. Sexton, who is legally blind and uses JAWS, was president of the California Association of Blind Students. His own experience of the site had been an attempt to buy towels for his dorm room: the screen reader read out the image file names and reference numbers behind the pictures because there was no text to read. Target removed the case to federal court in March and moved to dismiss it in full, arguing that the ADA and the two California statutes applied only to physical places.

On 6 September 2006 Judge Marilyn Hall Patel refused. Her order is the origin of the nexus test: the ADA covered the website to the extent that its inaccessibility impeded the full and equal enjoyment of the goods and services of Target's stores, and did not cover whatever on the site was unconnected to them. The California statutes, she held, reached the site without any such limit. Target kept litigating and kept fixing the site. In October 2007 the court certified a nationwide class under the ADA and a California subclass under state law, and rejected Target's argument that the improvements had made the case moot.

On 27 August 2008 the parties announced a settlement. Target would pay $6 million into a fund for California class members, bring the site up to written guidelines of its own, have the NFB certify it, submit to three years of quarterly monitoring and annual training, and admit nothing. The court approved it in March 2009 and awarded the plaintiffs $3,738,864.96 in fees and costs that August. In February 2010 the NFB certified Target.com at its highest level. In 2016 Target became the first company in the NFB's strategic partnership programme. In 2021, on a broadcast about the Winn-Dixiereversal, the NFB's president went out of his way to say that Target had flipped the script.

The barriers were the ones that would be pleaded in almost every website case for the next twenty years, described here for what may have been the first time in a federal complaint about a retailer. Judge Patel's order summarised them; the Berkeley news office, the plaintiffs' expert and the developers who examined the site at the time filled in the detail.

Set against the five and a half years of Domino's and Winn-Dixie, this case was short, and the reason is visible in the sequence: the defendant fought the law and fixed the site at the same time.

Target ran the widest defence of the three cases on this site, and it is instructive because every argument it made was made again by Domino's and Winn-Dixie a decade later, with the same result. What Target did differently was to fix the site while arguing.

The five arguments

• A website is not a place.The ADA's twelve categories of public accommodation are physical, and the Ninth Circuit had held in Weyer that a place of public accommodation is an actual, physical place. The court agreed with the premise and rejected the conclusion: the statute covers the services of a place of public accommodation, not only services in one.
• Congress chose not to cover private websites. It had amended the Rehabilitation Act to require accessible federal websites and had not amended the ADA. The court found the silence proved nothing.
• The plaintiffs were not denied physical access. Nothing on the website kept them out of the stores. The court held that the ADA does not stop at the door; it guarantees full and equal enjoyment of what the place offers.
• The Unruh Act requires intentional discrimination, and neither California statute reaches websites. The court held that a violation of the ADA is by statute a violation of both, that Target.com is a service of a business establishment, and that no nexus to a store is needed under state law.
• Applying California law to a national website violates the dormant Commerce Clause. The court rejected both limbs, and in doing so took apart the assumption, common in internet cases of the period, that a website cannot know where its users are.

A year later Target added two more. The improvements it had made since filing had made the case moot: rejected, because voluntary cessation does not moot a claim and because only keyboard access had been fully fixed. And a class could not be certified because damages would need individual proof of intent: rejected, because intent is not required where the state claim rests on an ADA violation.

What it said in public

Target's public statements never conceded the site was inaccessible. In March 2006 it strove to make its goods and services available to all guests. In October 2007, the day after a nationwide class was certified against it, its spokeswoman said the company believed its website was fully accessible and complied with all applicable laws. In August 2008, announcing a $6 million settlement, another spokeswoman said the site was accessible and compliant with all applicable laws, but that there were improvements that could be made. The president of Target.com said the company had made significant enhancements as its online business evolved.

The September 2006 order is usually cited for the proposition that websites are covered by the ADA. Read in full, it is at least as much a ruling about what is not covered. Judge Patel started from the Ninth Circuit's rule that a place of public accommodation is a physical place, declined to follow the First and Seventh Circuits in reading the term more broadly, and then asked what a physical place's services are. Her answer split the website down the middle.

Three things follow from this that are still true. First, the nexus test began life as a limitation on a plaintiff's claim, and it has stayed one: it is the reason a purely online business is treated differently from one with stores in most of the country. Second, the same order is the reason the Ninth Circuitcould find Domino's covered in 2019 without deciding whether websites are places, and the reason the Eleventh Circuit majority in 2021 thought it could reach the opposite result for a site that sold nothing. Third, California law was broader than federal law in 2006 and remains so, which is why the state accounts for a large share of website filings and why the damages in every one of these cases come from Sacramento rather than Washington.

The class certification order a year later added a fourth. Bruce Sexton, the named plaintiff, could not show that the website had denied him access to the goods and services of a store, so his own ADA claim failed and the court ordered a replacement class representative for the federal claims. The case he started outlived his part in it. He remained a plaintiff under state law and received $20,000 in the settlement, which he said he would put toward founding a nonprofit for blind Californians.

Five points where the outcome was still open. The notable thing about this case is how many of them the defendant took, which is why it lasted three years rather than six and why the company is now cited by its former opponents as the model.

This case predates most of the platforms where accessibility cases are now argued in public. Hacker News did not exist when it was filed and had no discussion of note when it settled; Reddit was a year old. The developer debate happened on Slashdot, twice, and it is the same debate that would be had about Winn-Dixie in 2017 and Domino's in 2019, with the same positions in the same proportions.

Slashdot, September 2006 and October 2007

The first thread followed the September 2006 order under the headline that sites could now be sued over their design. Its best-rated comments were technical: that the important things on Target's site were lists of stores, hours and phone numbers, none of which needed pictures; that Target had turned plain text into GIFs, making the site five hundred times bigger and unreadable at once; that the Web Accessibility Initiative's guidelines had existed since the late 1990s and professional ignorance of them was untenable. Against that ran the arguments that would become standard: that compliance costs small businesses years of profit, that a blind customer could go to a competitor, that the judge should have asked Congress to extend the ADA rather than extend it himself, and that professional disabled litigators would make a racket of it.

Two comments cut through. One, rated informative, simply reported the facts that the story had omitted: the NFB wrote to Target in May, negotiations broke down in January, and the suit followed. Another, from a commenter who identified as disabled, said he did not find the ruling foolish at all. The second thread, on class certification a year later, added a developer's description of the actual defect, a checkout button that was an image hotspot unreachable from the keyboard, and a commenter with a degenerative condition who wrote that voting with your wallet works only up to a point, because 99.9 percent of companies would never willingly cater to disabled people.

The plaintiff

Unlike the plaintiffs in the two later cases on this site, Bruce Sexton spoke for himself, repeatedly. To Berkeley's news office in March 2006 he said that people thought he was radical for suing Target and did not try to understand what it was about, and that he was not lawsuit happy; the point was to make a point. At the settlement he commended Target for committing to be a leader. Fifteen years later he was on the panel discussing the Winn-Dixie reversal, by then a disability rights advocate at Syracuse University's Burton Blatt Institute.

This case is older than most of the people now citing it, and the version in circulation has drifted from the record in predictable ways. Eleven claims are common enough to answer directly, each set here against what the orders and the settlement actually say.

The 2006 order is still cited in nearly every website case in the country, on both sides, because it gave each side half of what it wanted. The company that was sued is now the field's standard example of the other way to respond. And the site itself, unusually, can be measured before and after.

Did the site get fixed?

Target.com in 2006 was served as plain HTML, so the Internet Archive's captures contain the markup a screen reader would have met. We measured the home page at five points between six days before the complaint and three years after the settlement, and then the live site on 2 September 2026, counting the defects the complaint named: images with no alt attribute, image-map areas with no alt attribute, and links with no accessible name.

This is the clearest before-and-after in any of the three cases on this site, and it is worth being precise about what it shows. The site went from more than half its images unlabelled and every image-map hotspot unlabelled to zero of each inside two years, and it has stayed there through a change of platform and fourteen years of redesigns. What the count cannot show is whether a blind customer could complete a purchase; the court's own finding in 2007 was that keyboard access was the one barrier fully fixed by then, and a page can be labelled perfectly and still be unusable.

The company since

Target's accessibility statement today names WCAG 2.2 Level AA as its measure, describes work with advocacy groups, specialists and disabled people, offers the Aira visual-interpreting service free in its stores, and describes an accessible self-checkout kiosk it showcased at the NFB's national convention. Its live home page measured clean on the counts above. It runs no accessibility overlay. Three things distinguish it from the other two defendants on this site: the standard it names is current, the plaintiff organisation vouches for it, and it has kept the arrangement for seventeen years after the order that required it lapsed.

What to take from it

• The nexus test is a limit, and it was written by a court that ruled for the plaintiffs. Anyone citing this case for the proposition that every website is covered is citing the half of the order that went their way.
• State law is where the money is. The $6 million, the $4,000 in Domino's and the zero in Winn-Dixieare all explained by one fact: Title III of the ADA has no damages remedy, and California's Unruh Act does.
• Fixing while fighting shortens the fight.Target's case ran three and a half years to the fee order; the two defendants who fixed nothing until ordered to ran nearly six.
• Your platform vendor is not your defence.Target fixed Amazon's markup. A court will treat the site as yours because it is.
• A written standard of your own is only as good as its auditor. The settlement used Target's guidelines rather than WCAG, and it worked because an independent organisation tested against them every quarter.

Rulings, procedural facts and the terms of the settlement are drawn from the two published orders and the settlement agreement. Statements by the parties are attributed to the release or report that carried them. Where the record is silent, notably on Target's own costs, this page does not estimate.

Primary

• Memorandum and order on the motion to dismiss, 452 F. Supp. 2d 946 (6 September 2006)
• Order on class certification and summary judgment, 582 F. Supp. 2d 1185 (2 October 2007)
• Class settlement agreement (2008)
• District court docket, No. 3:06-cv-01802
• NFB settlement announcement, Braille Monitor (October 2008)
• UC Berkeley news release on Bruce Sexton (20 March 2006)
• NFB Nonvisual Accessibility Web Certification granted to Target.com (February 2010)
• NFB Strategic Nonvisual Accessibility Partnership programme
• Target accessibility statement, checked 2 September 2026

Reporting and analysis

• Associated Press on class certification, with Target's and the NFB's statements (3 October 2007)
• Associated Press on the settlement (27 August 2008)
• Baltimore Sun on the settlement and Bruce Sexton's award (28 August 2008)
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, “Target Corporation: A Cautionary Tale of Inaccessibility” (archived, 2009)
• Loeb & Loeb on the September 2006 order (November 2006)
• Disability Rights Advocates case page
• Supermarket News on the end of the Target.com and Amazon partnership
• ADA Live transcript, with Mark Riccobono's remarks on Target (21 April 2021)

Community

• Slashdot discussion of the September 2006 order
• Slashdot discussion of the October 2007 class certification