Lastest Buzz from the Web Standards project says that the The US National Federation of the Blind has been filed a lawsuit against Target for the inaccessibility of their website. This is big. Although there is legislation which addresses the need to address accessibility on the web, it is not enforced. This lawsuit could bring about the beginning of the end of inaccessible websites. If Target is forced to fix their broken website, a lot of organizations will surely follow.
What’s big about this is that for those of us who have been evangelising standards and accessibility for years, we are armed with the skills to manage the demand when it comes. The problem is that skills aren’t always enough. You may be able to walk the walk but you need to be able to talk the talk. Accessibility can mean a variety of things and the message needs to be clear when you deliver it.
Christian Heilmann has written three articles on Digital Web which may prove to be helpful in developing your own version of the message which are worth a read. The first article, 10 Reasons Clients Don’t Care About Accessibility, brings several good points about why organizations don’t care about accessibilty issues. These may help you develop your own reasons why they should. Internalizing these points can help the Standards evangelist in all of us prepare for the accessibility conversation.
Heilmann’s second piece is a two part article discussing Seven Accessibility Mistakes (part 2). All seven points he makes in this article are important to the idea of accessiblity. Something which caught my eye though was at the end of Seven Accessibility Mistakes Part 2 when he writes, Start a catalogue of success stories of user-centered design for all your projects. You might be able to implement one bit in each of those and assemble a good portfolio to show new prospects in the future.
This is equally important when it comes to evangelising accessibility and standards because people love to follow in the footsteps of success.
The point here is that although talking to clients about accessibilty is akin to talking to your kids about sex, if you are prepared for the conversation it will be easier. Knowing why a client should, or should not, implement a particular feature or trick on their site before the conversation arises will help you to avert the crisis.
Three years ago I worked for a company that created browser-based healthcare assessment software. This was the early days of Zeldman. I remember bringing up issues of accessibility and being told directly to my face (and this is an exact quote): “That goes in the nice to have category, but it’s not really essential.”
Great stuff, Tim.
It’s a bit odd that a blog advocating accessibility has a ’security’ feature that makes commenting inaccessible to the blind (and not too easy for the sighted, I might add).
JoJo,
Unfortunately, you are correct. We were having a major fight against comment spam. Everyday we would have 15 to 20 spammed comments. I personally instituted the security feature you are talking about. I have to do my research on a better way to do this. Wordpress 2.0 has a new feature that will help us fight against blog spam and will let us keep our accessibility.
One of the other ways we can stop blog spam is to have every person register with us before they can post a comment. I didn’t see many people doing this. You didn’t even supply a real name, email, or site. Who wants to remember another login and password? Most people don’t.
We take your comment to heart and I assure you, we will find an accessible solution soon. I am apologetic for the Band-Aid approach I took to fight blog spam.
That may not sound too interesting, but for anyone who’s struggled with “binding” a result from a database to a class that, say, renders an HTML table, this will likely put a very big grin on your face.
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