[thelist] Top 10 reasons to make your page accessible...

[Christian Heilmann]

I am bored to tears with these "people will find you and you make
shitloads of money and you won't be sued" accessibility talks as they
tend to breed companies that love to tick boxes on a bobby report
rather than really do something about accessibility. There is no such
thing as white hat SEO, period.

I've given some highly successful talks lately (next on Monday in
Paris at the Braillenet conference) by turning the whole situation
around and flagging up how creating accessible products in the past
have helped us all.

- The speaker and subsequently the phone was invented by someone who
was hard-of-hearing
- OCR scanning was invented to help a blind person and now helps us
all archiving data
- Currently there are university research programmes that rely on
blind people to recognise the important parts of documents to
automatically cut down information of web sites for mobile use.

I have to check with the legal team here, but I can send you the
presentation as a pointer.

We need to get accessibility out of that "we have to do something for
handicapped people" - as in creating a habitat for them - to seeing
accessibility testing as an incubator for overall better products.

Other than that it is a good idea to know the pain of the people you
try to sell accessibility to:

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/ten_reasons_clients_dont_care_about_accessibility/

And to point out the main mistakes:
http://www.digital-web.com/about/contributors/christian_heilmann/

HTH
Chris

-- 
Chris Heilmann
Book: http://www.beginningjavascript.com
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/