5 ms·

Lots of good points, but misses one thing. If I have to sell accessibility to my boss, then I need to justify it in terms of RoI for the business, not avoiding

by tomjen3 10y ago

Lots of good points, but misses one thing. If I have to sell accessibility to my boss, then I need to justify it in terms of RoI for the business, not avoiding being called an "ableist" discriminator. So lay it out: how much additional time should we expect to pay? If videos have to be close captioned how long will that take? What kind of skills does that require? What is the typical cost of an ADA lawsuit? How many are filled a year?

SFJulie 10y ago
Old people (that have by sheer math of accumulation) a lot of patrimonial tends to be visually more impaired than average. That is the data you need to make a correct understatement marketing assessment of the lost ROI. Look at the age of MPs, owners, people with responsibilities. Look at the stats, they tend to be way older than the coders. Just doing «accessible» or at least «high contrast/big lettering/simple UX» websites just highers the probability of getting new «high profile» customers click from your home page to your «purchase» page and transform from suspect to customers... And, chances are persons without disabilities prefers simple ergonomic websites, and that it will cut on your operational expenses (sites that are accessible tends to use fewer CSS and less JS). It will also make you cut on the REST API bullshit crap, because GET/POST on accessible web pages tends to be easier to do than REST/XML.RPC/SOAP. You can also throw another overpromising/underdelivering JS framework and a lot of money at the problem, but I guess it will have less results than firing half of your devs, that if they have to deliver fast and correctly will automatically resort to do Keep It Simple Stupid kind of webpages, that are actually a good recipe for accessibility.
- SFJulie 10y ago
  PS recipe easily for accessible websites: - avoid JS to modify change the behaviour of element (see last point); - no JS for generating URL (see last point) - no IMG - ALT on IMG / use of captions - avoid significant information in IMG - if the sites renders on lynx it works on a braille terminal - avoid async - avoid table based presentation BUt use table for presenting table - avoid CSS contorsion (like presenting tables without using table) - fire designers, UX specialists - if JS is needed, jquery is the only js framework that took a great care in being accessible (non-obstrusive) Basically, anyone reasonably competent in HTML should be doing an accessible website by default. If your site is not, your devs are just craps.
vegetablepotpie 10y ago
The Diane Rhem Show did an episode about this topic last year (http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-07-13/the-americans-with-disabilities-act-25-years-later http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-07-13/the-americans-w...), I recall one of the guests saying “you can make your own website accessible if you take a little bit of time. It's not a big deal.“ I haven’t made web videos in a while, so I’ve never looked into this, but your post caused me to do a bit of research. My conclusion is that it doesn’t look so easy, you either need to pay for a license for software that can do it, upload your video to a 3rd party web app, or learn about captioning formats in various codecs. There's some free options listed here http://www.washington.edu/accessibility/videos/free-captioning/ http://www.washington.edu/accessibility/videos/free-captioni..., but they require you to upload videos to their website. There is an application on Debian called ksubtile, which allows you to add SRT subtitles for the Matroska container, but it’s in the unstable repo. I really wish there was a free, GUI based, cross platform application, that supports many common codecs and containers out there, but my short search hasn't found any. I took the liberty of looking at the webpages of a few of the Diane Rhem guests through the lynx web browser, Ironically it looks like some amounts of content on one of the guests pages are completely inaccessible to the blind due to embedding text into images without using the alt tag. http://lennarddavis.com/ http://lennarddavis.com/ So I wouldn’t feel bad. Apparently web accessibility is an issue disability advocates are having trouble with too. I wish there was specific guidance on this issue. If someone finds any I’d like to see it.
- Grangar 10y ago
  I´ll look into this, thanks. I brought accessibility up in the last dev meeting, and it got dismissed for the same reasons as in point 3 of the article. Really frustrating.

by tomjen3 10y ago

SFJulie 10y ago

Old people (that have by sheer math of accumulation) a lot of patrimonial tends to be visually more impaired than average. That is the data you need to make a correct understatement marketing assessment of the lost ROI. Look at the age of MPs, owners, people with responsibilities. Look at the stats, they tend to be way older than the coders. Just doing «accessible» or at least «high contrast/big lettering/simple UX» websites just highers the probability of getting new «high profile» customers click from your home page to your «purchase» page and transform from suspect to customers... And, chances are persons without disabilities prefers simple ergonomic websites, and that it will cut on your operational expenses (sites that are accessible tends to use fewer CSS and less JS). It will also make you cut on the REST API bullshit crap, because GET/POST on accessible web pages tends to be easier to do than REST/XML.RPC/SOAP. You can also throw another overpromising/underdelivering JS framework and a lot of money at the problem, but I guess it will have less results than firing half of your devs, that if they have to deliver fast and correctly will automatically resort to do Keep It Simple Stupid kind of webpages, that are actually a good recipe for accessibility.

SFJulie 10y ago
PS recipe easily for accessible websites: - avoid JS to modify change the behaviour of element (see last point); - no JS for generating URL (see last point) - no IMG - ALT on IMG / use of captions - avoid significant information in IMG - if the sites renders on lynx it works on a braille terminal - avoid async - avoid table based presentation BUt use table for presenting table - avoid CSS contorsion (like presenting tables without using table) - fire designers, UX specialists - if JS is needed, jquery is the only js framework that took a great care in being accessible (non-obstrusive) Basically, anyone reasonably competent in HTML should be doing an accessible website by default. If your site is not, your devs are just craps.

vegetablepotpie 10y ago

The Diane Rhem Show did an episode about this topic last year (http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-07-13/the-americans-with-disabilities-act-25-years-later http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-07-13/the-americans-w...), I recall one of the guests saying “you can make your own website accessible if you take a little bit of time. It's not a big deal.“ I haven’t made web videos in a while, so I’ve never looked into this, but your post caused me to do a bit of research. My conclusion is that it doesn’t look so easy, you either need to pay for a license for software that can do it, upload your video to a 3rd party web app, or learn about captioning formats in various codecs. There's some free options listed here http://www.washington.edu/accessibility/videos/free-captioning/ http://www.washington.edu/accessibility/videos/free-captioni..., but they require you to upload videos to their website. There is an application on Debian called ksubtile, which allows you to add SRT subtitles for the Matroska container, but it’s in the unstable repo. I really wish there was a free, GUI based, cross platform application, that supports many common codecs and containers out there, but my short search hasn't found any. I took the liberty of looking at the webpages of a few of the Diane Rhem guests through the lynx web browser, Ironically it looks like some amounts of content on one of the guests pages are completely inaccessible to the blind due to embedding text into images without using the alt tag. http://lennarddavis.com/ http://lennarddavis.com/ So I wouldn’t feel bad. Apparently web accessibility is an issue disability advocates are having trouble with too. I wish there was specific guidance on this issue. If someone finds any I’d like to see it.

Grangar 10y ago
I´ll look into this, thanks. I brought accessibility up in the last dev meeting, and it got dismissed for the same reasons as in point 3 of the article. Really frustrating.