RE: Costs of Accessibility?

Katherine,

If you look at trying to do everything at once you will probably not make much headway, but if you look at one design group or part of the website it will be more manageable to make some changes.

Every company has its own values and processes, so if you are large company things are not going to change overnight.

I suggest that you start small and build upon the experience of success to improve accessibility incrementally.

Try to pick a group or part of the website that is considered a model that other people in the company try to emulate and have them get the resources they need to become more accessible, ideally during the design phase of their next project.

Developers rarely like to work on old websites and retrofitting accessibility will probably not be a good model that other people in the company would want to emulate.

If that group is successful you will have some experience to base costs on scaling accessibility to the entire company and hopefully some allies in making the case to management.

Jon



From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Katherine Mancuso
Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 11:24 AM
To: Sims, Glenda L
Cc: Lainey Feingold; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Costs of Accessibility?

Hi everyone,

I want to point out that it is very nice for folks who don't work in very large shops to say "well it just should be designed as accessible, there shouldn't be any extra cost."

But realistically, even if we are talking about deciding that our new sites should be designed as accessible as opposed to remediating old sites, there is a cost of staff training, there's a cost for enterprise compliance software and a cost to integrate that into continuous deployment systems, there's a cost for the resource person at a large shop (which often means an FTE as someone said), there is extra time to be spent in QA to check these new guidelines . . . granted, while those numbers might be quite big, these costs are still quite small in proportion to our overall budget, but it's a sum of money that has to come from somewhere, and it's an estimation problem.

For me as a staff person at a large company, what I really need to understand is: "What will the training cost look like per person in job function x?" "What will the costs of accessibility look like for the initial projects (which will probably require multiple cycles of develop - qa - remediate to get up to standard), and how will this cost decrease over time?"  "What is my expected ROI on this effort?"

Katherine
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 6:53 AM, Sims, Glenda L <gsims@austin.utexas.edu<mailto:gsims@austin.utexas.edu>> wrote:
Lainey,

You likely already have this data in your brain...but just in case you don't.  I love the "Case Study of Accessibility Benefits:  Legal & General (L&G) article posted at http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/legal-and-general-case-study

Accessibility changes


*         Measures taken:


o   Accessibility audit and usability testing of existing site

o   Market research from the existing customer membership

o   Incorporation of the accessibility needs of the target audience most likely to be excluded or obstructed by inaccessible websites

o   A new site was designed and built, seeking to ensure conformation to all relevant accessibility standards, successful passing usability testing and evaluation by users with disabilities5 before going live.

Results

*         Within 24 hours natural search engine traffic saw a 25% increase, eventually growing to 50%.

*         Significant improvement in Google rankings for all target keywords

*         Reduction in maintenance costs by 66%

*         Site visitors receiving quotations doubled within 3 months

*         100% return on investment (ROI) in 12 months

Additional benefits


*         Average times for content maintenance jobs reducing from 5 days to 0.5 days, saving £200,000 GBP per year

*         Page loading times reduced by 75%

*         Positive customer feedback on noticeably improved performance of site

*         Inaccessibility complaints reduced to zero

*         New site is accessible to mobile devices

I think an example of the concrete ROI data you seek can be found in this research.

Looking forward to seeing you at AccessU West in January 2011.

Best,
Glenda

glenda sims   |   university of texas at austin   |   accessibility and web standards advocate

                  web for everyone. web on everything. - w3 goals

From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org> [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org>] On Behalf Of Lainey Feingold
Sent: Friday, November 05, 2010 1:05 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Costs of Accessibility?

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<mailto: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<mailto:LF@LFLegal.com>
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LFLegal



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Katherine Mancuso: crusader of community art, social technology, & disability

Current work:
Walt Disney Imagineering & Parks and Resorts Online, Intern (work: accessibility evangelism & interactive projects)

Research:
Center for Assistive Technology & Environmental Access (http://www.catea.org)
Georgia Tech, Digital Media (http://dm.gatech.edu)

Community:
The Vesuvius Group: metaverse community builders (http://www.thevesuviusgroup.com)
Gimp Girl Community Liaison/Research Fellow (http://www.gimpgirl.com)
Alternate ROOTS: arts*community*activism (http://www.alternateroots.org)

Contact in the web, the metaverse, the world:
http://twitter.com/musingvirtual
http://muse.dreamwidth.org
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kathymancuso
SL: Muse Carmona
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