Accessibility should not be optional




In the pecking order of most website projects, the actual coding part gets top priority, then architecture, followed by testing, then usability, then lastly is documentation. There might be differences in the order of all those, as long as the actual coding part comes first. Oh, and there was one more piece - accessibility. That is something so low on the list of priorities that if it is ever mentioned, usually gets a response of, "What is accessibility? If I don't know what it is, it can't be important, and therefore we don't need it." I can't tell you how many requirements meetings I've been in where I am the lone voice of introducing accessibility concerns as a business requirement. Don't even get me started on multi-language capabilities. That's one for another day.

I find it very odd that it is so difficult to even get people talking seriously about making websites easily accessible to those who are visually impaired. It isn't rocket science to provide basic accessibility features in websites - it just takes some thought and planning. We're (hopefully) taking some time to design, so while we're at it, why not do a little extra work to open up a website to a wider audience? It takes just as much time to do something wrong as it does to do it right.

Comments

  1. Hi Jon. Another good one.

    It often takes MORE time to do something wrong and then need to spend extra time fixing it than it would have taken do it right in the first place.

    I think there's still room for improvement in the area of building accessibility features into both Web application frameworks and Web browsers. That would take some of the burden off of site developers for making sites more accessible.

    Even after such improvements come along and become mature, developers still will need to keep themselves continually aware both of the need for sites to be accessible and of the technologies and techniques available for making that happen. And then we must USE those technologies and techniques.

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