Authority of developers

Actually, I recently advised a developer to remind teh commissioner of a
tender that under Australian law (applicable in this case) the site would be
required to be accessible, and that this was therefore included in their
tender.

I don't know if they got the job, but a reminder like that can demonstrate
that there are areas where it is important to listen to the developers. After
all, there is some kind of expertise being paid for, and it is up to
developers to work out what that should be to a large extent. (Note that some
professions have very successful unions - Lawyers and Doctors in Australia
have extremely strict requirements, builders less so, and bar staff almost
none. Organisations like the HTML Writers' Guild might be in a position to
collect the opinions of their many thousand members on what is a reasonable
level of professional knowledge, and provide customers of their members with
some idea of what they are paying for, when they should listen to a designer,
and when they should negotiate with a designer who is deciding what parts of
a design).

Cheers

Charles

On Sat, 12 Jan 2002, David Woolley wrote:

  Even those who are aware, rarely have the authority to change requirements,
  or spend additional time, to make sites accessible.  Developers do what
  they believe their bosses want, not what they think is morally right.


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Monday, 14 January 2002 08:00:22 UTC