It’s a potentially controversial question I know….
Our blog is definitely lacking in accessible content and it’s something I am hyper-aware of. Primarily this is because that as a web developer I view any restriction on user base as a bad thing, a mindset which has helped me to convince clients and users of the benefits. That said, rather than becoming easier, I am finding it harder to justify the extra work (and it is) to provide a really accessible site.
Where is the extra work?
Well, it’s in checking, changing, re-checking, validating, usability testing etc etc. I can make a site that looks the way I want it to look in a far shorter time than I can make it 100% (or near as dammit) accessible and compliant. This cost has to be transferred somewhere and unfortunately it’s the customer who takes that hit. My main justifications (in the order the customer normally cares about most) are:
- It aids in SEO and placement within search engines as the spiders can more easily navigate and digest your content
- It may be a legal requirement depending on location and or business sector
- You may be opening your business up to an untapped sector of society
- It’s good practice
In honestly, my experience is that most businesses and individuals don’t really care about restricting the people who can use the website they are providing. If however, you offered them a ground floor accessible building with wheelchair access to all areas they would tout that as a real feature of their offices compared to the 5th floor office with stair access only.
It’s hard to change this mindset and is something I have been trying many approaches on over time. I liken it to the frontpage debate. I’ve said before, I hate it. It turns every home user into a “web designer” with terrible coding, no compliance, no interoperability and just plain looks hideous (assuming you are using the built-in frontpage “features”)…. it gives people a total misconception which they feel is completely justified. In a word it looks OK in general but the scaffolding holding it up is made from chewing gum, spit and paper. Accessibility is a strong scaffolding but noone ever sees it (unless you really need it).
With all that said, I can also see SOME of the points of view offered by the customer. Noteably, that the cost outweighs some of the immediate and direct benefit. It can be difficult to justify spending more when you can’t always see the benefit yourself. It’s not like offering them some funky new state of the art functionality for a bit of extra cash. A lot of the time it’s the code and the non-obvious stuff which costs them the money.
I like to think that through CSS/XHTML standards driven development I am doing what I can to confirm to at least the most basic of accessibility requirements even if our customers point blank refuse to pay for more accessible development. I also know that I’m sure many high-horse developers will be tsk’ing at me not producing completely accessbile designs by default and this is one area where I have to agree with my customers…….the cost for me to cover the development of accessibility would reduce my business to very little if the costs weren’t being covered by the customer. On that basis I think education, profile and selling the benefits are my key tools. If you encounter similar situations and/or use other arguments when discussing accessibility I would really like to hear them. I’m sure I am not the first and I definately won’t be the last to have those sometimes difficult conversations.
June 20th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Technically, the development of an accessible, everyday Joe web site shouldn’t cost any more than developing the average site. That’s because of what you said: If a developer follows best coding practices and avoids deprecated coding as recommended by the W3C, then accessibility will follow naturally.
I think what hurts most projects is not taking full advantage of the planning and execution stages. Having the big picture in the architecture and coding stages takes care of most issues. So, like you said about following standards, if the site is produced in layers–code (HTML/xHTML), content, presentation/typography/layout (CSS), dynamic functions (scripting)–everything will still work if the “non-essential” layers (CSS and scripting) are removed. And we all have to do basic validation anyway, so most developers are covered.
In my experience, when most clients hear the words “usability testing,” they’re expecting to pay big dollars. Considering usability can be quite informal and done cheaply, it’s not even a big deal.
For budget conscious clients, I just have a few friends or colleagues (who are unfamiliar with the project) over for dinner and site surfing. I ask them some questions about finding info and using the site (I’ve prepared some scenarios in advance), and I pay attention to *how* they use the site. All the while, I take notes and see what I can improve to make the design and info architecture more intuitive. I also do a “card sorting” exercise: I ask those same friends to sort through index cards that list all the site’s topics, and have them group the cards in piles according to where they’d expect to find info. Both exercises make a really inexpensive, but effective, usability study.
If I can get my clients to commit to an extra week for quality assurance in the project, since they know it will improve the outcome, they rarely refuse.
Some media rich projects, however, are another issue altogether … ! ;’)
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Thank you for such a well thought out and described comment. I really like the idea of a small family/friend focus group. It’s not something I have considered but I can see it being really informative (particularly for testing sites aimed at inexperienced users).
Whilst my comment around standards development is fine in principle, I do find (perhaps due to my self-taught development methods) that the validation and iterative developments towards accessibility do take longer and therefore cost more in time if not in direct money.
On a personal level, I am happy to spend a little extra time, ultimately I run a business…if a client doesn’t wish to pay for accessibility conformance and testing, should I not do it? To date I have done it regardless on the mostpart, not really a sound business decision….
Thanks again, I really appreciate you taking the time to be so descriptive.