7 Reasons Why Every Cloud Publisher Should Care About Accessibility – Part 2

Die faster: turn left into oncoming traffic now.
Photo credit: Leslie Shelman

This is the second installment of David Berman’s ‘7 Reasons Why Every Cloud Publisher Should Care About Accessibility’ guest post. Be sure to check out part one where he provides information on search engine optimization, temporary disabilities and accessible products that help everyone.

4. An accessible website will last longer.

   Very few foresaw how the iPad would transform how people use technology. And when it did most sites that relied on Flash content for their landing pages were in trouble.

   However accessible sites were already iPad-compatible, and the best way to future-proof your online products and documents is by follow device-independent standards such as WCAG 2.0. This version of the WCAG 2.0 standard will be with us for at least 10 more years, and it’s a rare hardware or software developer that releases new devices, operating systems or plug-in today without taking them into account. They know how to succeed in today’s market. Now you do too.

   We also know that, in this decade where the majority of humanity finally joins the Internet, innovation will continue to come at an ever increasing pace.

5. Building accessible products gives you a competitive edge.

   Learning to build online products that comply with accessibility rules can be a clear differentiator in the marketplace.

   Think about it: If you work all that into your pitch, and your competition cannot, won’t that give your products the inside track with potential customers?

6. Drive down costs.

   With a few exceptions, rigorously following the WCAG 2.0 guidelines can actually reduce development and maintenance costs, establishing discipline on many editorial, design, and developed phases that previously lacked discipline.

   A typical call to a call centre costs perhaps $25 to fulfill. A self-served help incident on a Web site instead costs under five cents.

   More broadly, if the development team uses a more structured approach to the basics, they can spend a greater proportion of their time on the strategic issues that are more satisfying, more profitable, and result in shrewder systems that are more robust.

7. Accessibility regulations and standards are here now.

   If no other argument moves you, building accessible websites is becoming the law in more and more jurisdictions and situations.

   The U.N. declared equal access to “information and communications technologies” a basic human right in 2006 in the [Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities].

I just completed an assignment for the World Wide Web Foundation for thewebindex.com which benchmarks, amongst other things, accessibility in 60+ countries. As I tested and reviewed government, banking, cellular, and newspaper sites in dozens of countries, I found that the entire world is clearly converging on the same WCAG 2.0 standard. Even the United States’ government’s Section 508 regulation will soon be updated to point to WCAG 2.0 … my best guess would be July 2014 for that to get through Congress.

Governments around the world now understand the need to make the web accessible to all. At first just for government products, but now groundbreaking laws in places like Ontario and Australia are demanding a minimum level of Web accessibility for private sector, NGOs and schools.

Some rules apply to public sector agencies, some to enterprises of a certain size. But there’s no doubt in my mind that if the previous decade was where green went from the edge to the mainstream of our societies, then the coming decade will be the one where universal, inclusive design will become how we roll. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s simply good business.

And the convenience of the convergence on one set of standards means that it has never been easier to learn how to make (and test) your products to be more accessible. The World Wide Web Consortinum (W3C) produced the first web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) in 1999. In 2008, these were updated to WCAG 2.0. (We also now have an ISO standard for accessible PDF files, called PDF/UA…that’ll be the subject of a future post!)

So why wait to be pushed into it by the threat of legal action? Get ahead of the curve, and start delighting more customers and driving down costs … you may even sleep better at night.