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Re: Blatant abuse of the term 'accessibility'

for

From: Denis Boudreau
Date: Apr 1, 2010 8:39AM

Morning,


On 2010-04-01, at 7:32 AM, Geof Collis wrote:

> I'm not sure what can be done but up here in Ontario with the new law
> governing website accessibility expected soon people who have no
> business calling themselves web accessibility professionals/experts
> are popping up like dandelions.

We have the exact same thing happening here in Quebec. Looking at all the companies that suddenly claim to have the expertise, you'd think that accessibility is just as recognized and has been around for as long as programing or design... :/

No doubt, the upcoming mandatory standards are attracting a lot of hungry people who want their piece of the pie (and yours also, if they can grab it). Nothing new here. We've seen that happen countless times before.

Like you, I also feel these people threaten the credibility of the field we work so hard to promote. The risk here being that their lack of expertise could hinder the credibility of web accessibility before we even have the chance to really build it.

I doubt anything can be done to stop this, but it can probably be controlled in some way: what we are doing in Quebec (as we are quite visible and recognized from the government's perspective) is create an accreditation/certification program surrounding the expertise on web accessibility.

Thanks to a government funding, we're working on establishing ourselves as the PMI <http://www.pmi.org/>; or Six Sigma of accessiblity in Quebec. As a non-profit organization, we have nothing to gain from this really, besides protecting clients from clueless consultants and sharks (therefore, trying to protect the reputation of accessibility). We expect to launch the program within the year as our standard is coming to.

We're thinking about putting together a checklist of measurable things a would-be expert needs to be able to do, as well as regular training sessions and activities. We're thinking some sort of profesional order, with a recognized/able logo.

We also intend to promote recognized experts from different profiles through a categorized listing freely available on our website, so people who need an a11y expert could come and "shop" for one, with reasonable confidence that the person they select will be able to do the job.

In order to ensure the expertise, we only plan on working with individuals, not companies. That way, a company will be able to present itself through their resources and not the opposite. As we all know, people come and go, so a company that has 5 experts could lose them all in one day if its resources all decided to go work for the competition. We feel expertise is never (or rarely) about the company, but always about the people working for it.

We know that most people that are new to accessibility will do their best to do an honest job but might learn as they go. It'll cost extra, but someone will have to pay for the learning curve. That's part of reality whether we like it or not.

But others, a small portion of people with debatable ethics, will only see this as an opportunity to make money from just-as-clueless clients. These are the people we work to counter with such a program.

By doing this, we hope to be able to control part of the chaos, but we know it will only be able to do so much.

I'm guessing usability experts have had their share of this chaos in the past 10 years or so.

New field of expertise, same old battle.

--
Denis Boudreau
www.twitter.com/dboudreau