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Dealing with accessibility issues in web development service contracts

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Feb 11, 2012 4:36PM

Yea wise people.

I was wondering if there is any guidance to be had on the following issue:
I am involved with an organization that outsourced web development for
its website to a third party.
The party uses the DevExpress datagrid to develop the website, and
there are significant tweaks and work-arounds necessary to ensure
proper accessibility for many aspects of the page.
The developers are pretty interested in making the tweaks, but they
charge for every additional hour of work to fix accessibility that was
implied in the original contract (I was not involved in the original
contract work though).
I've seen the same done elsewhere.
It seems that accessibility is solely the responsibility of the
website host, but for the web developer, it is simply a lot of extra
income, due to the additional hours needed.
This often puts the website way over budget and accessibility
obviously suffers as a result. Similarly the web developer contractors
are not particularly interested in inclusive design or development
from the ground up, as the extra work really just means more income
for them

In your experience, what is the share of additional expense between
someone who wants to create a website and those who do the programming
when it comes to accessibility.
Is it usually the sole responsibility of the hosting company, not the
developer, or is there any standard contract language or expectations
that help clarify this and split the cost/responsibility?
I am looking forward to attending the Access U, as I expect these
issues will be touched upon, but any perspective, especially from
those outside of the U.S. would be very interesting.
Thanks
-B