- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 11:57:01 -0800
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>, David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
At 7:04 AM -0500 12/16/01, Charles McCathieNevile wrote: >More particularly, it is that the benefit of accessibility to >the bottom line is often simple to get and very good return on investment - >accountants might not know that, but will be interested in it if it can be >backed up. If this were the case then accessibility would be the standard, not the exception. The return on investment -- by which we typically mean "how much more money you make from selling to disabled people over the cost of retrofitting a site" -- is not "very good". It can't be "backed up" because it's simply not true. There are much better ways to spend your money to improve your bottom line than making a web site accessible to a tiny fraction of users. Plus, the big danger here is that even if you could POSSIBLY prove that there are some audiences which there is a benefit -- even if the numbers were "well, okay, if we spend $12,000 this year we can get $20,000 extra in business from blind folks" -- then you are subjecting the whole process to the same kind of scrutiny. What if it doesn't make good business sense to enable access by the cognitively disabled? What if their market value is far less than the market value of highly educated, computer-using, white blind people? Do you only target the latter audience and ignore the cognitively disabled one? What if your market research shows you that the cost of valid HTML isn't worth it, but the cost of ALT text is? Do we really want to reduce accessibility compliance to a simple business transaction? I hope not -- but that's what the business model rationale does. It makes an unsupportable claim -- "you will make more money if you take accessibility into consideration!" -- and it certifies the notion that accessibility should be based on whether or not it's financially lucrative to pursue certain audiences. I think the better argument is the "it's right" one. People who are blind, people who are cognitively disabled, people who are deaf, people who are unable to use a keyboard or a mouse -- those people deserve access to my content for the same reason anyone else does, not just because I am hoping they have a wad of cash and I can get to that untapped market. --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 Sunday, 16 December 2001 15:14:01 UTC