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Re: Dealing with accessibility issues in web development service contracts

for

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Feb 12, 2012 12:30AM

Birkir,
Was accessibility explicitly stated in the contract? Was it stated
what it meant for the site to be accessible? Was it stated that the
contractor would submit a document detailing the accessibility of said
website? Was it stated that the organization will verify compliance
prior to payment?

--
Ryan E. Benson



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
>