[gui-talk] Unable to Access Target.com

[Steve Jacobson]

As you may have seen, I can access Target with IE 8 just fine now, but I couldn't yesterday.  In both cases, I was 
using IE 8 so if you can't access it yet you probably have some setting that it isn't handling correctly as I probably did 
yesterday.  If you can access it now, they probably had a problem.  Since I can access it today, it seems pretty clear 
that they are not trying to limit access to IE 9.  However, whether you or I like it or not, accessibility is not the same as 
universal access.  There are now many sites that don't work with IE 6, for example.  Also, there are settings that can 
affect access.  Try logging on to Wells Fargo, for example, with redirection turned off.  You'll wait forever.  Try surfing 
the web today with many older browsers.  We are stuck with living in a world where things change and are not always 
backward compatible.  If Target had blocked IE 8, I would be the first to say that would have been stupid, but mostly 
because they would have offended many customers.  However, this does not appear to be the case, even though I'm 
not sure of the exact cause.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson
partly because.
On Sat, 24 Dec 2011 07:12:49 -0500, Gerald Levy wrote:


>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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> gui-talk mailing list
>> gui-talk at nfbnet.org
>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/gui-talk_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> gui-talk:
>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/gui-talk_nfbnet.org/bwaylimited%40verizon.net
>> 


>_______________________________________________
>gui-talk mailing list
>gui-talk at nfbnet.org
>http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/gui-talk_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for gui-talk:
>http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/gui-talk_nfbnet.org/steve.jacobson%40visi.com