RE: Commercial Realities and Accessibility (was: Are Small Text butto ns level 2 compliant)

At 02:26 PM 9/26/00 -0400, Ben Morris wrote:
>So with one set of content, you can have versions of the site for slow 
>modems, screen readers, large print, or printer-friendly pages.

I don't mean this sarcastically but "Duh!" This has been what Universal 
Design advocates have been trying to get across for a very long time. The 
idea that "retrofitting's a bitch" and its corollary "programmers are 
cheaper than lawyers" are beginning to take hold and I hope your firm has 
the good sense to in fact charge extra if accessibility concerns are not 
addressed as a defense against future complicity negligence lawsuits. There 
is a legal theory that if you know you're likely to be advising (or 
agreeing to) breaking the law, you are liable for whatever occurs. Since 
most everybody in this trade can be shown to either know about these issues 
or should know, this could become a big factor.

At next week's "Device Independent Authoring Workshop" in Bristol we will 
be studying these issues in (I hope) great depth. We don't need a bunch of 
"separate but equal" Webs or Web pages. I hope we can reach agreement on 
the basic principles to achieve device independence - starting with the 
idea that a human user is a "device" in the sense we are speaking of.

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE