“You’ve seen it at all the design conferences. It’s showing up on contracts and RFPs. They’re asking for it on your resume’. This accessibility thing sure is catching on. And it’s ready for prime time.“  from Accessibility From The Ground Up, A Primer for the Web Designer published by Digital Web Magazine

Web accessibility can be loosely defined as the practice of creating web pages that all people can read - including those that are accessing the site with an alternative to the standard desktop browser - such as a screen reader for someone who is visually impaired.  For a more precise description, see the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Accessibility seems to be a popular subject in the web design community of late, as in addition to the Digital Web article linked to above, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has published Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users Who Work With Screen Readers - which contains some great (and previously unavailable) real-world data from the folks who actually use websites with the devices that the W3C’s guidelines are written for.

But what about the “view from the trenches” - those of us working in the local/regional web design market, mainly rebuilding small and medium-sized business websites?

Honestly? 

We’re not seeing it on contracts.  We’re not seeing it on RFP’s.  No one from the business side of the table is “asking for it” in any way, shape or form. 

When we present the case for accessibility (and it’s something I always bring up during the research phase of a new project) generally the response from clients is “that’s great if you can build it in during the development, but don’t spend any extra time or money on it”.

There are a couple issues at work here.  First - if we’re being called in to revamp a website usually it’s because the current site is in such a state of neglect that it isn’t useful for anyone.  From a client’s perspective, they want the biggest bang for the redesign buck - so first investing in work that will be useful for the largest target audience.  If they can pick up small advances in accessibility along the way that’s fine, but it’s not a focus.

Second, web accessibility won’t truly “catch on” until it’s legally mandated (whether that’s actually the current situation is arguable, in my experience business folks aren’t feeling threatened so it’s not a mandate for them).

I apologize for sounding cynical, but I’m looking at history here.  Would we be building accessible physical buildings if there wasn’t the threat of legal action for not doing so?

At some point it will be a strong legal requirement to build websites in an accessible fashion - I’ve been waiting for that shoe to drop for around 4 years now.  When it does, there will be much work in the web design community and very “Y2K-like” many sites will get totally revamped as a result.

But until then, I don’t expect accessibility to catch on as a grassroots movement.

So what to do in the meantime?  I’ll continue to champion building in accessibility on web site projects.  Besides being “the right thing to do”, my hope is that when having an accessible site becomes a necessity from a business perspective that clients will remember me talking about it and call me back for the work.