WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Cost of Web accessibility, yet again

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From: Hall, Kevin (K.M.)
Date: Oct 7, 2004 8:53AM

My numbers may be a bit large, I was making a few unstated assumptions (perhaps making a you know what out of u and me)... that the web site was reasonably complex, that there was little experience auditing sites, and that the client would be a serious pain to deal with - all worst case scenarios. Additionally, I always make it a practice to provide detailed recommendations for fixing any problems I find. Sometimes this involves a bit of work when there a serious or obscure problems involving the markup or code used.

I've found that after time I was getting through reviewing pages and writing a detailed report in about 20-30 minutes per page for complex pages and less than that for simple ones. That includes validating the code, using the Firefox Developers Toolbar by Chris Pederick to run a bunch of quick check s on the page, and manually inspecting the code. I then include all of my findings and recommendations in a detailed report. It starts to go pretty quickly once you are in the groove of things.

I think that a good accessibility audit will:
* identify the guidelines that are being violated
* where problems occur in the site
* what the effect is on users
* how to fix the problems

Julian, I like that you are emphasizing educating the client. That is crucial if you want them to make any difficult changes that you recommend. The more you can make them understand the cost and benefits of accessibility the better off you will be.

As for estimating the time to fix the problems you find, you are reducing it by providing detailed recommendations. However, I think that until you have an understanding of how drastic the changes are that must be made, whether they are semantic or syntactic changes, and how they will be made (templates, hand coding, etc.) it is impossible to give even a rough estimate of how long fixing the problems will take. Things like page size and number of pages will also have a big impact on the estimate.

I hope that this helps out a bit.

Regards,
-Kevin Hall