RE: Accessibility: Good or bad for business? (Was: Public list or not?)

Hi,

You are categorizing a wide variety of people as people with disabilities. I
don't think all old or foreign people consider themselves disabled.

Would you say any person in a minority that does not have the things they
want are disabled?

How many and what types of disabled people do ALL sites need to accommodate?

Who is going to QA all of this?

To me, it seems we are still in the pioneering phase of the web. Companies
are mostly clueless on how to make it work *for them* so many things are
tried and tossed. Why do they (we) need to be burdened by providing for ALL
accessibility needs when a site could be gone in a year? Should we try to
survive first? Have you noticed the economy is smoking a turd?

Should the pioneers who are blazing new trails be forced to make them
wheelchair accessible? Or should that come later?

What is more likely?
1. People will address all usability needs in their websites (hopefully you
are not asking the government(s) to enforce this?)
2. Some companies will see enough of a market to create a good reader for
people with disabilities

best,
-Rob

p.s. I try to make my sites accessible as best I know.


-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of C.Bottelier
Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 4:05 AM
To: www-tag@w3.org
Cc: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: Accessibility: Good or bad for business? (Was: Public list
or not?)



>For example, which studies have examined the costs of staff time getting up
>to speed with accessibility issues, time and costs of setting up SOPs etc
to
>ensure that a chosen level of compliance is implemented and shown that
those
>costs are less than the increased sales produced by addressing
accessibility?

This question is based ion the idea that creating an accessible website
requires a lot or even an extreme amount of time and effords. This is
only
partly true when an inaccessible website has to be convefrted into an
accessible one page by page. For new development It only requires the
awareness and a few minutes to take in account 'how accessible is this
idea
in my head, and how do I put this in practice'. The though is already
there
on how to take in in practice. Onl the initialtep -- becomming aware --
costs time and efford. By either taking some advice, a small cource, few
the
tutorials, and make some contact with the en-users of the web.

Mostly one of the arguments of the to be or not to be accessible take
only
1 group of disabled people in mind; the blind. What about near sighted
people,
the elderly, foreighn people, or people being dyslectic? And not to
forget
all the 'normal' people with an accessible site they will find it easier
to get the information they want, and are more heppy to go to you.

Christian Bottelier

Received on Wednesday, 21 August 2002 08:29:17 UTC