WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Creating Valid Code

for

From: Elle
Date: Sep 8, 2011 9:30PM

Ryan:

If it helps, I can give you my perspective at a large company with over
30,000 employees. Until just last year, we were struggling to justify the
effort to insist on W3C valid code. Most of the concerns involved increased
development costs, additional testing, and blowing up project time lines.
Keeping in mind that not all companies have the same challenges, most large
organizations also outsource a great deal of development to contracted labor
who may or may not be familiar with W3C standards. So, there's an undeniable
cost to establishing web standards like W3C valid markup. And what did it
really get us? That was the main question that needed answering.

When we were building our web accessibility program last year, we decided to
use that moment to incorporate W3C validity* into our accessibility
requirements. As John said, "code validation, in-and-of-itself, may have
very little impact on true accessibility." But, it does represent a paradigm
shift for IT teams: semantic markup matters. Previously, like many fast
moving big companies, we would build (largely ASP.NET) web applications
rapidly with wireframes and visual mock-ups for agile requirements. There
wasn't much consideration or scrutiny over what was "under the hood" when it
came time to show our business partners what we had created for them, as
long as it performed as was requested. Web accessibility changed all that,
as it has a way of getting up close and personal with an individual's source
code. Accessibility requires transparency. So, while we're under the hood,
why not create a stronger foundation for cross-browser operability and
device independence? We figured if we did it right, we wouldn't have to
continually chase the latest browser versions with code updates.

Since that time, we've found that creating this base level requirement (all
code must validate through W3C with a testing artifact that's loaded into
our Software Development Life Cycle) has streamlined our development process
and reduced the pesky defects we used to encounter during user acceptance
testing. That's a quantifiable cost savings. Progressive enhancement and
MVC as a design pattern have made that easier to achieve and even cheaper.
We do have exceptions for third party source code (example: vendors who
supply scripts), but that's a different battle to fight.

Hope that helps,
Elle

--
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide
the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and
endless sea.
- Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince