Why Accessibility Matters
On the Web Standards Group mailing list this afternoon (GMT) Jo Hawke of Viable Designs left an eloquent message about why accessibility matters and with permission I’m glad to share it with you. Thanks Jo.
“I had an accessibility issue just this morning, while trying to find out about filing an insurance claim on my husband’s car (which someone ran into in the middle of the night … and took off). In Firefox, my browser of choice, the text on the page I needed was overlapping, and many of the links were not ‘clickable.’ I switched to IE, and the page was totally fine; everything was in perfect working order.
“I couldn’t help but check the source code, and of course, it was designed using tables. There were 187 errors, according to the W3C validation service. I e-mailed the company and received a quick reply that they had recently discovered an error that was preventing ‘a small number of customers’ from accessing their claim information. Pretty generic, as expected.
“The company is customer-service based, according to its policies and my experience, so why would the powers that be within it not choose to make its Web site accessible to all? It’s not like they don’t have the money to make it happen. I propose that most people would choose not to inform them of the difficulties they have in the first place.
“It reminds me of the days (long ago!) when I was a waitress. Most of the customers who had a bad experience due to the food or the service (from other waitresses, of course!) wouldn’t complain or explain; they’d merely pay their bills and leave, never to return, intent on informing everyone they knew about that awful restaurant. And then I think about how many times I personally have chosen to just let bad experiences go in fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations. The girl who jerked my money out of my hand with a scowl on her face and no thank-you. The guy who took five minutes to wait on me because he was too busy on his cell phone. I have gone to the manager sometimes, but most of the time, I just consider it too much hassle and let it go.
“The same is surely true of Internet experiences, I propose, at an exponentially greater rate of occurrence. The next page is just a click away. If it’s a page that must be accessed, however, as in my insurance experience this morning, it’s a different story, of course. But most of the time, I personally simply leave the site and make a note of what not to do.
“I’m self-taught. I sorted through HTML as a sort of grief therapy when I’d lost my baby (and almost gone with him) in 1999 and was out of work for months. I began learning about CSS more than three years ago and only learned about accessibility/Web standards within the last couple of years. But I’m diligently learning as much as I can (with three kids and a full-time teaching job that invariably comes home with me most days…).
“I’m going to make it my personal goal to begin contacting the people who make sites that aren’t accessible to let them know in what way I had difficulty using their site. Not in a lofty, condescending way, but in a ‘I thought you may want to know’ way. Maybe they won’t care. Maybe they’ll be offended. Maybe they won’t get it at all. Maybe it won’t do any good.
“But maybe it will.”
Jo Hawke
Viable Design offers full-service graphic design for Web sites and print materials. We have more than 15 years of design experience and are dedicated to helping people like you create professional promotional materials. Whether you’re looking to define an image for yourself or your business, organization or band, we can help.
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