RE: Censorship by laziness

I disagree with this comment:

<<It is NOT harder to maker a site accessible than to make it without 
caring>>

I've had to go to many web authors and tell them their accessibility issues.

Assigning someone to process all the images and add ALT tags is not trivial
on large sites.  Adding text captions for multimedia streams is incredibly
hard.  Creating text only, or frame/table-less versions is additional work.

To make a site accessible does take additional work, work that is often
punted in favor of meeting deadlines and/or budgets.

Our mission in the WAI is to work around these problems - making sure that
authoring tools automate the process as much as possible and point out ways
that make it advantageous to make a site accessible to all.

While it certainly better to do it from the start that to do it later, we
have to consider the fact that it is more work and it needs to be justified
and made easier.

Charles Oppermann
Program Manager, Active Accessibility, Microsoft Corporation
mailto:chuckop@microsoft.com http://microsoft.com/enable/
"A computer on every desk and in every home, usable by everyone!" 

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 1998 18:59:53 UTC