Business Benefits research

Karl,

I had had a thought along the lines of providing a links page from the Business Benefits document that linked to articles or research (I have collected many already) that support the business benefits of WCAG1.0. For search engines there are many, eg. 
http://workz.com/html/495.html
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/features.html - which s/engines utilise metatags, alt-text, invisible text (table summary?), etc
http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/search_engine_strategies.html - alt-text, meta-tags, title-tag
http://www.goeureka.com.au/webmaster/prepare.html - checklist for submitting your page to an Australian s/engine
for starters from my paper filing cabinet. [Disclaimer - these links have not been checked for possible 404 errors (file not found)]

If others have links for any of the checkpoints mentioned in the draft at http://members.optushome.com.au/wai/busben.html please post them and I would be happy to collate them for a while and see what we get.

Cheers,  Andrew

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: karl.hebenstreit@gsa.gov 
  To: jmdamour@videotron.ca 
  Cc: Judy Brewer ; EOWG 
  Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2001 1:09 AM
  Subject: Re: Final Business Benefits document suite available


  How about the following?

  From a strategic point of view, anything you can do to increase the likelihood that your site will be found and distinguished from others is a positive benefit



  This sentence brought the topic of search engine relevance to mind.   Has there been any research/study that would verify a hypothesis that implementing accessible design would improve the public's ability to find your website (a correlation with search engine relevance rankings)?   I've made lots of contacts within the Search Engine community through attending the last two Infonortics meetings, and could make some introductions.  A good link to the Search Engine community is the Search Engine Watch (Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman):   http://searchenginewatch.com



  ____

  Yes, I'm still around, although I'm working on some other projects now, and haven't been able to participate as much as I'd like.   One issue that's heating up at the US federal government level is telework.  I'll start a thread on WAI-IG to identify people who have been working on this within the disability community.



  Karl



  "Jean-Marie D'Amour" <jmdamour@videotron.ca>
  Sent by: w3c-wai-eo-request@w3.org
  08/17/2001 07:43 AM AST

  To: "Judy Brewer" <jbrewer@w3.org>, EOWG <w3c-wai-eo@w3.org>
  cc: 
  bcc: Karl F. Hebenstreit Jr./MJ/CO/GSA/GOV
  Subject: Re: Final Business Benefits document suite available




  Hello all,

  Judy wrote:

  > * "From a strategic point of view, anything you can do to increase the
  > likelihood that your site will be found over your competitor's is a
  > positive benefit" This seems to imply that all Web sites are run by
  > cutthroat competitors, whereas hopefully the business benefits of
  > accessibility will appeal to non-profits and socially-minded corporations
  > alike. Can't figure out how to reword it. What about dropping it?

  I suggest: "From a strategic point of view, anything you can do to increase
  the
  likelihood that your site will be found over others is a
  positive benefit" or "found amog others".

  A socially-minded corporations want to be found over or among other
  resources. The word "competitor" is too strong but among all web sites on a
  topic, the corporation that develop and maintain a web site want to be seen.

  Regards

  Jean-Marie D'Amour, M.Ed.
  CAMO pour personnes handicapées
  www.camo.qc.ca
  Montréal, Québec, Canada