Re: Some questions from CHI-WEB people

Hi Scott,

Obviously it depends how much the designer actually understands Web
Technology already - if they know how to get something to work in FrontPage,
but don't know what it is doing, my experience is that they need to spend
several months learning, because they often need to unlearn some
misunderstandings, which is hard, and they need to learn some things that
take them a couple of weeks to get the hang of. If they are an experienced
and skilled designer, my experience is that they need to spend several days.
If they have never done any of it before then my experience is that it takes
about one month of learning to be reasonably competent, but without more
experience people will work more slowly.

Of course each of these can be amortised over several projects to some
extent. But it is important to spend a small amount of time on continuous
education in accessibility - just as it is important to spend a larger amount
of time (in general I would suggest a full day each month as an absolute
minimum)  keeping up with advances in Web technology.

cheers

Charles.

On Sun, 23 Dec 2001, Scott Luebking wrote:

  Hi,

  I believe the purpose of the question was not quite understood.  The
  question was asking how much additional work does a web page creater who
  starts with no backgroup in accessibility guidelines will need to put in
  to making a a new web page which is also accessible as compared to if
  the new web page need not be accessible.

  Scott

  > >
  > > 1.  Has any experimentation been done to get a sense about how much longer it
  > >     takes a developer to learn accessibility issues and create a
  > >     web page which can be considered accessible?  For example, one experiment
  >
  > Accessibility needs to be introduced above the developer level.  If the
  > person commissioning the page imposes a particular visual presentation,
  > the designer has to find a solution that simultaneously meets the
  > accessibility requirements and the apperance requirements, even though
  > the appearance may not improve usability for any class of user.


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Wednesday, 26 December 2001 23:01:48 UTC