Re: How to Complain to a Webmaster

>        If you can identify who the actual technical developers are,
>        it's usually much easier to get the message across to them than
>        to go through the policy-makers.  Web developers are the ones

Unless you can get all of the developers, this will not work, as, whilst
one developer may code accessibly, without a higher level policy, the
next person that maintains the code will almost certainly break the
accessibility features (most web page coders consider themselves wage
slaves).  Even if you get them all on your side, if you don't get the
decision maker, they may be forced to implement some cosmetic feature for
which there is no simple fallback; implementors can only add unrequested
accessibility if there is negligible marginal cost in doing so.

>         Don't make any threats -- legal or economic or otherwise.  Your

It's not worth making threats, mainly because your bluff can be called.

>        "I'm going to boycott your site unless it's more accessible!"

I'd say that actually boycotting is probably the only thing that will
sway the policy makers in many cases.  The problem though is that they
need visibility of the boycott, and unless they are doing detailed
click trails and analyzing for splash or home page only accesses, and
premature aborts of the home page, they will only know this if they are
told that they have lost business.

The real problem in boycotting is that it is not something one can
normally do in a business to business context as the potential boycotter
probably doesn't have the autority to reject the potential supplier on
the basis of accessibility.  (Generally one also cannot complain in such
contexts, for similar reasons.)

Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2001 14:01:18 UTC