Actually Joseph, we're in (near) total agreement. I am not arguing that these things should not be done. I do them every day and advocate to others that they should be done. I am merely saying that there is a cost associated with doing them. Accessible, standards-compliant design does cost more at the point that you do it, and this may or may not be outweighed by benefits (many of which are unquantifiable) in the future.
Where we differ is that in my opinion a fixed-width layout is not an acceptable or accessible solution. A few years ago I would have said it was, but not now. With regard to CMSs, you have a lot of choice if you're building small websites. You may have almost no choice at all if you're building a very large one, and none whatsoever if you have inherited an existing system. The industry is crying out for plausible costings to justify adherence to web standards and accessible design. All we have is heresay. Companies (especially large ones) are not simply prepared to take our word for it. They want proof, and we can't give it to them. Steve -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joseph Ortenzi Sent: 04 October 2007 12:16 To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: A: [WSG] Target Lawsuit - Please Make Yourself Heard Sorry I have to disagree some of these points. Comments among your text >> On Oct 04, 2007, at 01:56, Steve Green wrote: > "can anybody help me understand where the idea that accessibility > costs money comes from?" > > It certainly can do depending on the content of your site and the > target audience. I would concede that it probably doesn't cost more to > produce a standards-compliant static website (i.e. has semantic > structure and is valid HTML and CSS) but that is only the first step > in making a website accessible. ...but a very big one IMHO. > > We've discussed many examples here, and I encounter them every day in > our work. Obvious ones are the provision of captions, transcripts and > audio descriptions for multimedia; that does not come cheap. ... but do provide value! And you can easily separate crucial information, like a user's manual, from advertising, "our widgets are 20% better than theirs!" and prioritise the crucial translations (but you KNOW they will prioritise the non-crucial at times don't you ;-)) > > It is not trivial to accommodate text resizing and screen widths > ranging from less than 800px wide to upwards of 1600px while > maintaining an acceptable layout. Especially so if someone else told > you what the layout has to be. A fixed layout solves this and this is not an accessibility issue exactly, more a design and usability one. > > Converting artwork into accessible code takes more time than slicing > and dicing a PhotoShop image. Making interactive content accessible > (such as discovery-based e-learning applications) can be seriously > challenging. Yes, but the experience makes the site much better, so it has a return on the investment. > > And then there's the cost of maintaining the accessibility of a site > on an ongoing basis when most CMSs don't enforce the creation of > accessible content. Big sites might have many dozens of content > authors, none of whom gives a monkeys about accessibility so you need > periodic or ongoing testing and repair to prevent the accessibility > from degrading. we build our own cms's -and cms's can also be hacked if they truly are template based. Separation of structure from content os one of the cornerstones so you should not be choosing CMS's that won't let you do this. > > So yes, it often does cost more. These costs may well be offset to > some extent by savings and other kinds of benefits but we need to be > able to quantify this before we can make sweeping statements that it > doesn't cost I remember reading some people putting a cost value on this but forget where I read it. You can bet Target have a very clear understanding of the value of accessible design right now. > any more. > > Steve > ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
