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

Austin Harris austin at dotmail.co.uk
Tue Jan 23 06:14:16 CST 2007


Sorry, probably badly worded. My fault.

I agree with the "I only make valid code", (is there in fact a developer who doesn't say that?)
The issued being that where I am at the moment they don't fully understand why it is so important or how to make it valid.

The bit about the money was relating more to the fact that it does take that little bit longer to produce and therefore costs that little bit more. In an ideal world every web developer would be producing perfect beautiful code but at the moment, (or at least where I am sitting), that isn't happening.

This isn't for a specific build as such, more as a "oh, he is off and knows the stuff - we want his knowledge" type of thing*. (Along with what sales say to the client about accessibility so that they know what they are talking about.)

Austin

*At least they are interested in it. I have worked in places where you almost feel guilty for taking the time to put fieldset, legend & label tags in as in there eyes it takes longer to style up and might not look exactly how the pixel perfect design looks.

> 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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