[thelist] US Judge rules that ADA applies to websites

[Matt Warden]

On 9/12/06, alan herrell - the head lemur <headlemur at lemurzone.com> wrote:
> Cool for who? Certainly not cool for the company who has gone online to
> expand their business. Since their sites are not accessible in whatever
> degree, that closes the door on those potential sales.
>
> Remember where the money comes from for you to build sites.

While I agree largely with the spirit of your email, you have taken a
large industry and ignored all motivators except increasing sales.
This might not even be the largest motivator, in reality. Web
applications offer automation, which have to do with *reducing costs*
not necessarily increasing revenue.

I have dealt almost exclusively with increasing productivity of
employees. Now that I am consulting with public sector, this is 100%
of what I do. This is a very different goal, because the idea is to
squeeze out every bit of extra output per a given "man-hour". You view
ajax/dom as whizz-bang, for example, while I have used it to add
incredible productivity enhancements. The ability to do multiple drag
and drop actions with immediate ajax commits without having to
navigate away or refresh the page is huge.

The problem comes when I have to have an alternative solution to
comply with ADA. The productivity gains are not there, because I have
to use a series of long, complicated standard forms to replicate the
same semantics and behavior that can be represented with an ajax/dom
app with multiple draggable elements and multiple drop targets.

The original motivation to pay me was increase in productivity. So
where is the motivation to pay me to offer an ADA-compliant
alternative, if there is little or no productivity gain?

Avoiding a lawsuit, I guess.

-- 
Matt Warden
Cleveland, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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