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Re: Elevator speeches about accessibility

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From: Karen Mardahl
Date: Jun 11, 2012 5:21AM

Today at work, a colleague and proud dad showed me the website that his
19-year-old son had coded for a small business.
It seemed attractive enough at a visual level, so I promptly replied, oh,
nice!
Then I tried to navigate it.
The top navigation was not keyboard accessible. The drop-down menu items
needed a click. On one of them, I managed to drag the mouse outside the
path so that I lost the path; you had to drag the mouse down and to the
right to access that menu's sub items.

I said you cannot get at these submenu items with a keyboard. That is not
good. He's a young kid. He should learn about accessibility.
The proud dad replied that I was the only one who cared about accessibility
- no one else did. He does sling out many statements in a joking fashion,
but I wasn't going to be dismissed that easily. I said that knowing
accessibility would be good for his career. "There's money in it", I said,
"and he can lead the field". I had hoped those comments would inspire the
dad and soften the criticism I was giving. Oddly enough, the dad did
dislike those types of menus, but I don't know why. It didn't seem to be
due to accessibility. At least not in his mind.

"There's money in it" is a vague generalization, of course. It was the best
I could reply if my reply was to be snappy and attractive to my audience.

That made me think of writing in here and asking - do you have a stock
reply for various, shall we call them anti-accessibility conversations - or
"meh" accessibility conversations?

Snappy, constructive, and educational are the best qualities for such a
reply, I think. They might also be elevator speeches. I think "making the
world a better place" is too vague and will be forgotten seconds after as
well as earning you the label of "loopy" or something similar.

So... how do you reply? (Especially if shock or insults are involved.)

regards, Karen Mardahl
http://flavors.me/kmdk