Hi Joe, >Our clients don't care as long as it works. They do care that we care enough >to make them the best, most accessible site we can, but they could care less >how.
It's more of an issue when a website is maintained by the client. If they're not aware of the distinction between accessible and inaccessible markup, they'll be unable to preserve the integrity of the content. If they 'don't care' in this sense, then they won't take the time to add alt attributes, validate code, only use tables for data, etc. While some CMS's have measures to prevent contributors from unintentionally creating inaccessible markup, others happy proclaim standards compliance while encouraging/enabling content to be entered inappropriately or incompletely. For example, the use of <blockquote> to achieve a text indent (a 'feature' of a number of wysiwyg authoring tools). An informed content author would (of course) only use this feature to denote a quotation... The manufacturing industry provides another example of where standards are equally important. Screw threads, washer bores, etc. that are manufactured to a particular quality (as in materials or finish) or standard specification (size, weight) have a 'home' in the real world. It all depends on who the client is and what criteria they're using to assess potential development partners as to how relevant standards and accessibility discussions are. Legal precedents can also carry a bit of weight. Cheers, -- Andy Kirkwood | Creative Director Motive | web.design.integrity http://www.motive.co.nz ph: (04) 3 800 800 fx: (04) 970 9693 mob: 021 369 693 93 Rintoul St, Newtown PO Box 7150, Wellington South, New Zealand ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
