[thelist] Top 10 reasons to make your page accessible...
Barney Carroll
barney at textmatters.com
Tue Jan 23 06:00:11 CST 2007
Austin Harris wrote:
> The horrible bottom line being;
>
> "Why should we pay for it when it makes no (obvious) difference?"
This is a weird one. I remember this conversation I had on another list
a while back where somebody came to a similar problem of "The client is
asking me to justify valid xhtml - what do I say?". Some people got
their teeth into it, but generally the conversation degenerated into a
cheap laugh - "Clients are stupid, they don't understand standards".
Eventually somebody had the wherewithal to ask the poster what the
circumstances were - were they asking the client for extra money to
validate existing work? Did they have a specific clause in the pitch
stating "Code validation - £1000"? Must admit I find it pretty amusing
to conceive of somebody offering a package without such things - it's
like saying, "Tell you what, it won't make my job any easier but if you
want a worse product just give me £500 less and I'll chuck in all sorts
of encoding errors and broken links".
When you put it like this, a little more context might be helpful: Are
you trying to propose a re-build of the site? Is that not already what
you are doing? What is the primary nature of the agreed-upon work?
In my experience I've always offered a solid package itemised only into
categories of conception/presentational coding/component engineering
etc. - accessibility is completely implicit in all my communication to
the client because the service my company offers is 'information design'
and the way we present ourselves makes it inevitable that the client
acknowledges they are coming to us because of our information design
philosophies based on strong principles. If they don't recognise that,
it's usually a sign that they're not valuing us for what we are and it's
generally an indication that they're probably a waste of time.
So if you could elucidate the situation...
Regards,
Barney
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