Re: Accessibility as part of the process

Hi Tim,

I don't know of any published studies that have analysed this carefully  
(although I have a vague memory that one was done at some point).

It would be very useful information, but it is also quite difficult to  
get, because of the nature of the question. My personal experience in  
large sites has been in situations where it was a first-time exercise, so  
the costs included training and revision of existing work.

The figure suggested by SOCOG to revise their website to meet the  
requirements of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (in  
the 2000 Sydney Olympics Website case) was around 4% of the total. This  
figure was rejected as not credible in the findings, which declared that  
the suggestions of the expert witnesses provided by Bruce Maguire were  
more reliable and apparently better informed. Those figures were all  
somewhat less than 0.1%. The overall cost of the site was apparently  
around 50 million Australian dollars.

IBM did, in my opinion, a good job of resolving the same type of problems  
in the Website for the 2001 Australian Tennis Open. They may have done the  
financial analysis for that project, although the figures may also be  
considered commercially sensitive.

The 2006 Commonwealth Games have a person (Gian Sampson-Wild from  
PurpleTop) working on the website essentially entirely devoted to  
accessibility, and are taking the whole question extremely seriously. (But  
then, they are in Melbourne, and the SOCONG precedent is clearly  
applicable to them). I don't know if Gian is able to provide figures for  
that project, but they would be extremely helpful even as a single special  
case. (She said at a conference that the overall budget is around 10% that  
of the Olympic games. My very rough table-napkin arithmetic leads to a  
guess of maybe 2%, but this is really not much better than a wild guess.)

Sorry I can't help further.

Best regards

Charles McCathieNevile

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 07:51:37 -0700, Tim Harshbarger  
<tim.harshbarger.cqwg@statefarm.com> wrote:

>
> Greetings,
>
> Are there any published estimates on the percentage of the
> application/site development process  that accessibility takes when it
> is fully integrated into the process?
>
> I think either the percentage of time or budget would be the most useful
> stats to me at this moment.
>
> Thanks!
> Tim
>



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile - Vice Presidente - Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org                      http://www.sidar.org
     (chaals is available for consulting at the moment)

Received on Friday, 18 February 2005 11:58:58 UTC