Author incentives for accessibility

On 18 May 2007, at 00:08, Ian Hickson wrote:

>> It provides accessibility.
>
> That's not an incentive, sadly. Evidence suggests that we should  
> design
> features such that using them in a way that results in a good  
> presentation
> is enough to get good accessibility.

What evidence are you referring to?

We can at least hope that when HTML5 comes out, this will work better  
as an incentive than it does today. IMO this alone means we should  
count it in.

>> Incentives include:
>>
>> - It is good business practice. People with disabilities comprise of
>> approximately 600 million or 10% of the world population that form a
>> potential market which is untapped.
>
> The Web clearly indicates that this is not an incentive. headers=""/ 
> id=""
> on tables is orders of magnitude harder than simple things such as  
> using
> <h1> instead of <font>, yet the Web is full of the latter.

I think that, due to projects like OLPC etc., the importance those  
10% will grow in the years to come.

>> - Access for people with disabilities to web sites is law or  
>> policy in
>> many places.
>
> It's not clear to me that this incentive is working either.

Does this mean it's unclear to you wether these laws/policies will be  
enforced and followed in the future?

> You provided a
> whole two examples of real world use of these attributes.

Arguing on the basis of small numbers of examples seems a little  
unfair to me. Access to this type of data is not equally distributed  
among people on this list. Is there any way we can get into more  
equitable positions on this?

> Furthermore,
> even the laws themselves, as your citations above showed, often  
> fail to
> follow their own rules.

So you think authors will ignore accessibility laws/policies just  
because they are poorly presented on web pages?

--
Henrik

Received on Friday, 18 May 2007 04:31:59 UTC