[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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