[gui-talk] Unable to Access Target.com

[Gerald Levy]

It should not matter which browser you use to access the Target site.  This 
violates the principle of universal access.  Does Microsoft restrict access 
to its site if you are using a browser other than IE?  Of course not.  Does 
any other retailer restrict access to its site based on the browser you are 
using?  None that I know of.  Only Target seems to be engaging in this 
practice.  So while they may not be in violation of their settlement with 
the NFB, they still don't take accessibility very seriously.  I have seen 
complaints on other blind-related lists about the difficulty of navigating 
their site, so although it may now be accessible to blind consumers, it is 
certainly not blind friendly by any stretch.  Besides,if they decided to 
reneg on their settlement agreement, who is going to stop them?

Gerald


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis" <bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com>
To: "Discussion of the Graphical User Interface, GUI Talk Mailing List" 
<gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2011 6:10 AM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Unable to Access Target.com


> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Gerald Levy <bwaylimited at verizon.net> 
> wrote:
>> As I said , I am using IE 8, latest build, so there is no way that my
>> browser could have been misidentified as IE 6. This is obviously a
>> deliberate effort by Target to restrict access to its site to consumers > 
>> who use IE 9 with Vista or Windows 7.
>
> It's not "obviously" anything as the sort.
>
> Please understand that it's actually quite hard to determine what
> browser you're using from a user agent header string, so you're wrong
> to assume it's hard to misidentity your browser.
>
> Here's an example IE8 user agent header:
>
> Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0;
> SLCC2; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8)
>
> Notice how it kicks off by claiming to be the Mozilla browser. This is
> typical of the confusing nature of user agent strings. Worse still,
> there are multiple variations for the same browser version. Here's a
> list of different such strings for IE8, and they are only examples:
>
> http://www.useragentstring.com/_uas_Internet%20Explorer_version_8.0.php
>
> --
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
>
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