Alice Bartlett – What is the Business Case for Accessibility? #fronteers15

Motivated for the moral of accessibility.
But it is a good question to ask about the business case
What is gov.uk
- Best place to find government services in the UK
- One single design of the government sites
- 9m visits/week
- 330 departments/organization
- saved £1.7 billion in tax money
- tried to make gov.uk as accessible as possible
- first: inaccessible prototype
  - Sent troubling message to users
- beta: built for inclusion
- aim: most easy to use and accessible website of a government that there has been
- regular research with people w/ disabilities
- screen reader tests
- hiring accessibility experts
- it is in the design principles
“What I mean by ‘accessibility’?”
- Four impairments:
  - visual
  - hearing
  - ???
  - cognitive
- Fonts are important, for example some people use the Open Dyslexic font.
- Some improvements are not technology based: color choices, information architecture, sentence length…
- Making the site accessible would mean supporting a variety of technologies
- Tricky decisions where you need to make a decision that helps a set of people but is not improving the page for other users
- Making sites accessible makes financial sense for governments.
  - PwD do get what they need anyway, for instance they might call which is much more expensive.
- Closed system in government
- But in private PwD can go somewhere else
Writing a business case for accessibility
- This is the magic answer how making your web site accessible will make you rich. – Naïve view.
- Good business case takes a problem that you have
- Come up to solutions to that problems
- Which solution is the best (will be accessibility because that’s what the talk is about ;-)
- We should solve X
- Anecdotal evidence: SEO, maintenance, revenue from PwD, older people
- Search for the most cost effective way to solve the problem. Is that accessibility?
- A good business case should find the most effective solution.
- Only real business case is litigation.
- Duty to make reasonable adjustments in UK law
- But most people don’t care about the UK
- In the Netherlands: AWGB (Algemene Wet Gelijke Behandeling) – Equal treatment act.
- Public sector: Webrichtlijnen – quite advanced
- No case has it ever made to court in the Netherlands
- In the UK usually settling outside of court to avoid embarrassment
- When in the US things are going to court, there are fines and embarrassment
- If low profile company the chances to get sued is quite low vs. the cost of making your site accessible
- Maybe no business case for accessibility for small companies
- But…
You don’t need a business case.
- If you build a site from scratch, why not just do it. It is not too hard. And, as Scott said, access is our job.
- Sneak it in, if you have to.
- 4 levels to how much you care or are able to care about accessibility
  1. Don’t screw up HTML
    - A lot comes with accessibility built in
    - Gets you 90% of the way – that’s better than 85% out there.
    - Headings are shown as an outline
    - PwD will often search for those headings or landmarks
      - There is quite a patchy understanding of landmarks by users, main is well known at the moment
    - Links need to be descriptive, or you just end up with a list of “click here“s.
  2. Check with tools:
    - WAVE or tenon helps you
    - WAVE: low effort, shows warnings and alerts inline
    - Tenon is an API, you POST to it, get JSON back. Integrates into the built process.
    - Example: Fronteers Website – 1 Error: A
      element that is empty (only inputs in there)
    - Tenon allows you to fix those and read about the reasoning and severity of the error
  3. Test with assistive technology
    - You’ll never get as good with a screen reader as a permanent screen reader user
    - But very interesting insights
    - Especially with interactive components
    - You want to test if your browser understands what you want to tell him.
    - Looks like JAWS won’t be the most prominent screen reader in the near future.
    - Browser and accessibility APIs are buggy
    - dd:first-letter {text-transform: uppercase;} caused Chrome+VO to read the first character another time.
    - In chrome there is an accessibility tab in about:flag
    - File bugs!!
    - So a visual style beaks the site for non-visual users
    - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  4. Ask an expert
    - Someone who is good at accessibility testing is very important – at GDS: Léonie Watson
- For most of those you don’t need a business case.
- „When accessibility becomes part of what you do, of course it’s free“
- Discussion: http://designpatterns.hackpad.com
Summary:
- Good business cases for accessibility are hard to write.