Re: Accessibility, discrimination, and WCAG 2.0

> means that you can't exclude specific disability types; they are
> part of your core audience.  (This is a stumbling block for many

What they do in theory is arrange the population in order of the likely
profit from each of them++.  That profit depends on their spending power
and the cost of selling to them.  They then define a cut-off after which
they reckon that they will make more money by investing in the next 
generation of product for the most profitable customers rather than in
reaching the remaining prospects with the original product, or will
lose the market to competitors because their development timescales will
be too long.

In practice, the process is much less scientific than this, with gut
feeling used to rank people, profits not properly balanced against
costs,  and heuristics, like the 80:20 rule, used to decide when to
consider the market sufficiently saturated.  Looking after the pennies
to save the pounds is an easy way of managing projects; it allows
decisions to be devolved.

Making sites accessible to the disabled is perceived as increasing costs.
The disabled are perceived of as being less affluent, and I think there
is a lot of truth in this.

(Businesses are probably a lot less rational than they would like to be.
One employee may over do the ornamentation, because they are fun for them,
and another may put in more accessibility than the brief calls for.)

++ You may end up with more than one dimension, which I'll ignore.

Received on Tuesday, 24 October 2000 02:48:37 UTC