WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Off-left vs. block/none oddity.

for

From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Feb 3, 2006 11:15AM

Ok, this is getting off-topic and I am not here to be personally
insulted and marked as a traitor to the accessibility cause. You don't
know me and obviously didn't grasp any of the questions I had. I
_want_ to get UCD and accessibility out into the big money market, I
_want_ to have a budget on every project I start that covers testing
and compliance. Arrogance and Ignorance will not get us there.

Nothing of what you said about me or my company was true or even
partly true and if that is a general notion I really begin to wonder
why I even bother trying to talk to enterprise level clients about
these issues or tell developers who consider a blog or a 10 page
brochureware site that it will be hard to implement the same in a
large web site that has been around for years and has 300 different
people contributing to it.

Advocating web standards and accessibility so far gave me the notion
in the company of the stick in the mud preventing the design team to
go nuts and do whatever the client marketing team wanted to have
implemenented. I spent hours in meetings with upper management to not
do a certain kind of work as it is simply shooting ourselves in the
foot when there will be legal repercussions because we did not deliver
an accessible product. I spent a lot of my freetime talking to other
developers and evangelising the cause at trainings in .NET
technologies and technical abominations (CMS) delivering table layouts
and considering accessibility compliance adding a spacer gif as a skip
link.

Maybe you are right, and I should just sell out and shut down all my
free scripts, articles and tell the likes of evolt, digital web,
alistapart and sitepoint to show me money for my contributions. Maybe
I should just go for the MCSE or sell a CMS as AAA compliant although
I know it isn't.

If you look through the archives of this mailing list you'll find that
I had a lot of discussions where I showed your point of view -
defending it as vehemently as you do - and all it got us to was
bitching and sometimes even getting moderated.

I sincerely think that there is two sides to every conversation. There
is your assumption of what the other person thinks and there is what
he really thinks. In an impersonal media like email (where most human
conversation is not given - body language, tone of voice...) you can
easily start to insult or hurt people - sometimes even without wanting
to.