WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Jun 10, 2013 12:28PM

I've spent my career focusing on how design affects behavior and response, whether I've been practicing architecture, publication design, media design, industrial/product design, or advertising/marketing design.

Our community is going to have to survey people and learn why they're not making accessible websites. What are their barriers? Once we know that, we can then develop solutions for them.

I've heard a lot of reasons from my students and clients about why they haven't fully deployed accessible websites. Understand, these are not my opinions but theirs, so don't flame me for relaying them!

One note: a large US government contractor is scheduling a 1-day overview class in web accessibility with my firm. It's for a handful of their top website managers who oversee the main websites of 2 federal agencies (these are huge websites, millions of pages each).

The "students" are accomplished web developers and they can't figure out what they need to do. They've visited W3C, WAI, WCAG, etc. and found that information so overwhelming and intimidating that they got stymied. This large corporation's top brains can't put together an action plan for getting the websites overhauled. So for them, it's not a question of money or time, it's more that they don't know what to do.

Other comments I've heard (my paraphrased and summarized versions):

1. I don't want my website to be boring and ugly. I want a visually attractive design for my website, and accessibility ruins my design.

2. Oh god, please don't make me read WCAG 2.0.

3. WCAG. ARIA. DAISY. Etc. When will it end? Why don't they give us just one set of rules to follow? I give up. I don't know what they want.

4. We use (choose one) Drupal, PhP, WordPress, Joomla, fill-in-the-blank CMS technology and it's not accessible. We need to use this technology to meet our publishing/information needs and can't do without it. We've spent thousands/millions of dollars developing the website and are not going to throw it out because a small group of people might have problems using it.

5. My boss (or top brass) won't fund the cost and time to make our site accessible.

6. My boss won't hire the extra staff or contractors I need to make the site accessible.

7. We get dozens of Word and PDF documents every day that we have to make accessible because our office staff doesn't know how to do that. I can't keep up with that work, let alone get accessibility built into the website itself. There are not enough hours in a day to get everything done.

8. Why spend all that time and money for 2% of my website's visitors? I'll wait for the lawsuit.

So with these comments in mind, what can we, the WebAIM community, do to remove these barriers to acceptance? (And yes, the term used in the marketing and psychology industries is "barrier to acceptance").

We know there's a problem. What can we do to remove the barriers and get the problem fixed?