Open for Business!

When approached by an advocacy organization, employee, client or customer, or even a business delivery like nAblement over accessibility challenges to your web site, it’s natural to be defensive, confused or even overwhelmed by the charge. Accessibility concepts, standards and approaches can leave anyone scratching his or her head – and we’re nearly ALL guilty of providing less than optimal access to our site for every prospective visitor. Candidly, we are concerned about some of the access challenges posed on our own site related to things like embedded media players, alt-text consistency and clarity, and captioning or transcription offerings. The key to strengthening your accessibility overall is in making the commitment to the process.

A trusted collaborator recently shared with me that “there is no perfection” when it comes to establishing and maintaining a perfectly accessible web site.  She then noted several highly transactional, public-facing sites that had major challenges. In fact, I would argue that there’s a natural tug-of-war between the desire to incorporate sexy new applications, functionality, appearances, and media on your site (depending on your audience and industry) and supporting the highest possible level of accessibility for any visitor to your site. Add to this dilemma the dizzying array of auditing tools, validators, approaches to architecting and development, etc. and the prospect of developing and/or maintaining a respectably accessible web site can be daunting.

A Strong Business Case for Web Accessibility

Daunting or not, however, there are strong business principles for making our web sites more accessible that should far outweigh any fears related to the ADA or its principles.

As background, electronic – or E – accessibility requirements are rooted in the Rehab Act of 1973 as amended by Congress in 1998 to compel all federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology (including Web sites) accessible to all – but particularly to employees or the public with conditions or disabilities that might challenge their ability to access such material. While the law clearly applies to federal agencies, the past five years have witnessed application of its tenets to state and local government as well as private industry – if only to pressure them to recognize at least an acceptable level of accessibility as a best practice for which to strive. For at least one major retailer, Target,  it cost a good deal of public face along with a $6M class action settlement to ignore its accessibility standards.

The real question, as crystallized by Matt May of the Web Standards Project in the above link, is what your tolerance will be as a township or village, county, state or private company or offering for the prospective criticism, and often lost revenue or customers, by failing to embrace all of the members of your target community.

Years ago I kept a hard-cover copy - a tome honestly – of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Titles as well as ADA Accessibility Standards in my office. I was the national sales development manager, and our focus was on addressing hearing and vision loss as related to telecommunications products. One of our staples was an all-in-one case of portable products to address hearing loss in an institutional or private setting – such as a hospital, hotel or cruise ship. The case included a portable TTY, various visual signalers, a portable phone amplifier, and related.

It’s hard to know the extent to which the cases were actually requested or used by guests or patients, but just as hotels must carry an ample supply of modestly priced shower benches for guests who cannot stand while showering, they must at least invest in enough of this equipment to comply with the ADA.

If requested, we would also provide a sign for the property featuring the iconic ear  - universally understood as an access symbol related to hearing loss.

It served as the property’s symbolic neon welcome sign. Managers took pride in posting their accessibility sign at the registration desk so that all guests, with or without hearing loss, knew that this property respected people with disabilities – and wanted their business!

Companies that make an investment improving their overall accessibility through their website are “posting their welcome sign” to all visitors, whether challenged or not. This is becoming a best practice, for business reasons – millions of them actually- and it just happens to be the right thing to do.