Hasta La Creative!

You may have seen yesterday that the lawsuit between Beastie Boys and upstart toymaker GoldieBlox over the unauthorized use of the Beasties song “Girls” in a GoldieBlox commercial has been settled. As a GoldieBlox spokesperson told Rolling Stone, “That settlement includes (a) the issuance of an apology by GoldieBlox, which will be posted on GoldieBlox’s website, and (b) a payment by GoldieBlox, based on a percentage of its revenues, to one or more charities selected by Beastie Boys that support science, technology, engineering and mathematics education for girls.” (We wrote about the case in November.)

Late yesterday GoldieBlox posted the apology on its website — but seems to have done so rather begrudgingly. For one thing, you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the homepage — below even the Frequently Asked Questions, Contact Us, Store Finder and Site Map links. The block of tiny type has no headline or other label, and, pointedly, it’s not actually text — it’s an image of text that’s embedded on the page. That means its contents are generally invisible to web spiders, such as those used by Google to index the contents of websites for search purposes.

When embedding an image, a webmaster has the option to include so-called “alternative text,” via HTML tags, to restate or summarize the content of that image. This helps not just web-crawling bots but the visually impaired who may use assistive technologies that read web text aloud. But GoldieBlox hasn’t included alt text for the image, and the name of the image is the inscrutable “announcement.png.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com