Re: Costs of Accessibility?

Although I run a web design agency based in London, fluctuating exchange rate issues aside, these are the "loaded" questions that I am consistently asked and am loathe to answer broadly as these vary from project to project based on the complexity of the website's features, functionality, underlying technologies and the interplay between these and the conformance with the relevant areas of the WCAG.

As a rule of thumb, the creation of a standards compliant, accessible website should be the expectation that any client should have when commissioning a website from a good web developer. The only costs to be borne in developing accessible sites should be that of the agency: as is the norm in any reputable organisation, the responsibility for ensuring that staff are appropriately trained to deliver services to clients is the agency's responsibility and, as such, clients should not incur any additional costs.

However, in order to provide some sort of table of indices, may I suggest to set out a few different scenarios and provide associated cost ranges in order to demonstrate the sliding scale from a static HTML site to a transactional website that also captures personal sensitive data and a few other types in between?

I would be more than happy to throw some ideas together into a spreadsheet if this would be useful.

Kind Regards,

Sandi   

Sent from my iPad

Sandi Wassmer
Copious Ltd / digital agency
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On 5 Nov 2010, at 18:05, Lainey Feingold <LF@LFLegal.com> wrote:

> Dear WAI list:  In its Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, The U.S. Department of Justice asks a question about cost:  "Question 13:  What are the annual costs generally associated with creating, maintaining, operating, and updating a website?"  Please share any information on this, as well as any information on the additional cost (if any) of including accessibility!  (off list to LF@LFLegal.com)
> 
> I wrote about the costs of creating my accessible website at http://lflegal.com/2010/10/lflegal-doj-anprm/  More examples like that would be helpful to the Department. 
> 
> You can read all 19 questions in the full ANPRM at:  http://www.ada.gov/anprm2010/web%20anprm_2010.htm
> 
> Thanks, Lainey
> 
> Lainey Feingold
> Law Office of Lainey Feingold
> http://lflegal.com/
> 510.548.5062
> LF@LFLegal.com
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/LFLegal