- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 11:23:18 -0800
- To: Access Systems <accessys@smart.net>
- Cc: Joe Clark <joeclark@joeclark.org>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
At 11:27 PM -0500 12/14/01, Access Systems wrote: >I think there is a business case possible. in fact I found that in the >Baltimore Metro Area using only minimum SS payments as the per person >income, which is low balling because some will be making more $$$ >and using that number and census data it was figured that there would be >over 7million dollars per month of disposable income by these persons. >How much do you (the business) want of that?? How much would it cost to get it? That's the business case. Business is all about spending your money in the way that generates the most money. If it will cost me $1M to advertise to blind people, and $25,000 to make an accessible web site, and there are only 20% of blind people online, then it may make sense to spend $1M to advertise to non-blind people who are online in greater numbers, and who constitute a greater percentage of the population. Business case statistics of "how much money are available" do not help the cause of accessibility, because from a purely business standpoint, unless you are going to be a business which caters in large part to the needs of the disabled, it's probably not worth the cost to meet those needs. If it were _true_ that meeting the needs of disabled people is the way to riches, don't you think we'd see it online and offline? The reason companies currently support accessibility is because someone made a moral (or PR, or government-driven) decision to do the right thing, not because there's billions of dollars to be made targetting people with disabilities. This is why I think that the business case argument is the weakest possible argument we can make, and why I think that efforts in that direction -- to convince someone that we know more about how their business should operate than they do -- are always going to be wasted. (A better business case is "hey, web design companies! if you write accessible HTML you might get government contracts easier!" -- but that is a 508 business case, not a general web accessibility business case.) --Kynn -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com> http://kynn.com Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain http://idyllmtn.com Web Accessibility Expert-for-hire http://kynn.com/resume January Web Accessibility eCourse http://kynn.com/+d201
Received on Saturday, 15 December 2001 14:24:55 UTC