- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 00:06:40 +0100 (BST)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> 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