Financial Note to Business Case for Accessibility

Executive Summary

Accessibility is building a web site and operation to make web content and applications available to the broadest possible audience, browsers and devices. A strategic objective is to minimize the operation, maintenance and rework costs. The requirement to implement accessibility can be driven by business, policy and external requirements. The business requirements may be driven by business development, marketing, or sales and may include the loss or potential opportunity revenue, a change in customer needs, and new technology directions. Policies and external requirements may be Federal, State or local Government laws and industry or corporate standards.

Once a strategic decision is made to scope the level of effort, the deployment will need to be translated into to operational requirements with costs applied. The costs will include training, design, quality assurance or test processes. The impact to current projects will also need to be assessed.

Accessibility Implementation Strategy?

There are several conditions that will determine implementation strategy and costs. Implementing accessibility may involve just operations or both business and operations. The key to implementing universal accessibility is to realize economies of scale where business and operational changes can be incorporated.

This can be accomplished by:

• Specific regulatory timeline (enforcement dates)
• Incorporation into current redesigns proposals (information and project schedules)
• New web applications
• New business requirements or strategy
• Technology implementation choices (applets, flash, frames, client vs server, etc.)
• New operational requirements (incorporation into current hardware, software or infrastructure upgrades)
• Availability of tools and resources
• Mandated requirements may burden operations and a project assessment will need to be made. This may impact to current projects
• Business costs associated with risks factors of liability
• Initial spike of costs verses maintenance costs
• Short term costs verses long term costs
• Additional accommodation costs for employees and customers if the accessibility requirements are not implemented

Once a decision has been made to implement accessibility, the next decision is when to implement and this will be driven by the requirements timeline.

Costs and Revenue Enhancements for Web Accessibility

Cost Categories:

• Accessibility assessment
• Accessibility architecture (modeling? framework? guidelines?)
• Management awareness training
• Document author training
• Developer training
• Subject matter expert time
• Materials, equipment, tools and assistive technologies
• Developer time
• Quality assurance and testing
• Travel
• Changed transfer rate costs
• Number of pages- dynamic vs. static
• Contingency
• Variations in user agent support
• Development of content checking process or tools
• Process for managing inaccessible legacy content
• Site updates

Benefit Categories:

• Speed of transaction
• New services for government will lower cost of services
• Accessibility architecture (modeling? framework? guidelines?)
• Potentials for economies of scale
• Savings in hardcopy/multimode document delivery
• Increase portability to new devices and technologies
• Market share
• New market opportunities
• Corporate image improvements
• Product branding enhancements
• Increased usability
• Reduced life cycle development, operational, and maintenance costs
• Trained corps of developers
• Reduced costs of alternative format production and distribution
• Content that is better indexed and easier to search/mine/find