McLaughlin, Gail G wrote:
We always ask the client if they require that the site comply with accessibility.
Why not say "Would you like a shitty website, or a good quality website"? Well-made shouldn't be an extra feature...
In fact, since its clearly cheaper and easier to make a crappy website, why don't you just mock up pages in Illustrator, save the whole thing as an image with no alt attribute, and use that instead of a real page? Thats real cheap and easy. Heck, there are people that actually do that! Most people will never know!
I cannot tell anyone how to run their own business, or design a website for that matter, but I want to state for the record that anyone on this list should be doing there very best to make the best sites they can. Adding alt attributes to images and doing other minor things that make pages more adaptable to devices and more user-friendly is the right thing to do.
Blind people? Accessibility is not about blind people.As a designer/developer I don't really care about blind people. I don't consider them (gasp!).
I do consider PDAs, cellphones, text-only browsers, screenreaders and google. I take the responsibility upon myself to deliver a product that works on all of them. I also make no guarantees. I don't mention accessibility or other browsers, etc to the client since the aren't considered with the computing world beyond their own desktop for the most part.
Those who do ask get the speech of the year and come away knowing that it's a major part of my methodology. I do it for my own satisfaction. Each site is a little better than the last and comes a little closer to being the perfectly marked-up document that it should be to properly function of all devices.
Does this take longer or cost more? I'll say not. My PHP coding goes 10 times faster since I use the codeigniter framework to handle the typical BS, my javascript goes 10 time faster since I use jQuery to handle the typical BS, and I have written enough sites that I have a pretty good process going, the result being a better site put together more quickly.
For some developers it will take longer and cost more. I know people that shudder to think of making a navigation bar by hand, forever stuck to dreamweaver's horribly bloated javascript rollover menu. For them its simply not an option.
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