"can anybody help me understand where the idea that accessibility costs money comes from?"
It certainly can do depending on the content of your site and the target audience. I would concede that it probably doesn't cost more to produce a standards-compliant static website (i.e. has semantic structure and is valid HTML and CSS) but that is only the first step in making a website accessible. We've discussed many examples here, and I encounter them every day in our work. Obvious ones are the provision of captions, transcripts and audio descriptions for multimedia; that does not come cheap. It is not trivial to accommodate text resizing and screen widths ranging from less than 800px wide to upwards of 1600px while maintaining an acceptable layout. Especially so if someone else told you what the layout has to be. Converting artwork into accessible code takes more time than slicing and dicing a PhotoShop image. Making interactive content accessible (such as discovery-based e-learning applications) can be seriously challenging. And then there's the cost of maintaining the accessibility of a site on an ongoing basis when most CMSs don't enforce the creation of accessible content. Big sites might have many dozens of content authors, none of whom gives a monkeys about accessibility so you need periodic or ongoing testing and repair to prevent the accessibility from degrading. So yes, it often does cost more. These costs may well be offset to some extent by savings and other kinds of benefits but we need to be able to quantify this before we can make sweeping statements that it doesn't cost any more. Steve -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ian Chamberlain Sent: 04 October 2007 00:18 To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: A: [WSG] Target Lawsuit - Please Make Yourself Heard I must be having a stupid attack as I can't find anywhere on the site where I can register and then comment. As for the left / right - Accessibility/ Freedom agrument (it doesn't deserve to be called a debate) it leaves me with the feeling that I would not wish to be trapped in a lift (elevator) or even a medium sized country with most of these people. All that said; can anybody help me understand where the idea that accessibility costs money comes from? Agreed, updating an existing site may cost money, however creating a clean semantic and accessibile site can be done at the same price as a nasty old site and if we all take the semantic thing to heart who knows they should be less expensive than todays sites. The final puzzle is quite why Target are happy to spend more than they should simply to discriminate against a significant proportion of their potential market. Seems plain dumb to me. ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
