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Re: Dealing with accessibility issues in web development service contracts

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From: Elle
Date: Feb 12, 2012 12:15AM

Birkir:

As you can imagine, the answer to your question will differ according to
the organization, its structure, its commitment to accessibility, and the
strength of the procurement or vendor management process. If you're going
to CSUN / Access U, I'd like to sit down and chat with you about our
experiences at my company, as I think it would involve more than an email
to properly answer your question. And, of course, it will help you if you
hear more than just one perspective on this topic. I also encourage you to
seek out several others at CSUN who face this issue on a regular basis.



Cheers,
Elle



On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 6:35 PM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
>