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I’ve had a few people ask me this in various contexts, and the answer tends to be a disjointed ramble. The long answer is a book, and there’s many out there, such as Accessible Web Sites or Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites or a website, such as the oodles of links I have compiled here. This is an initial stab at a subject I’ll be blogging more frequently about: accessibility, thanks to the encouragement of Sam Stephenson.

Evaluating a web site’s accessibility does involve code valiation, but true accessibility is the result of manual evaluation of content and testing with assistive technology tools and members of the community done in the context of an organization or sponsor dedicated to improving the accessibility of its products. The goal is equivalence of experience, and that often means providing additional information, contextual or semantic, to effectively translate one sensory experience to another. When we speak of accessibility we often imagine blind users, period.

However, there are a host of users with other impairments, such as people with motor impairments which require assistive hardware technologies or people with low literacy, who will also be affected by our content, interaction and coding decisions. To be accessible, we need to understand how our products may address their needs as well. In this regard, sometimes the most difficult aspect of accessibility is in determining the strategy your organization will take to create universally usable products. Today, we’ll examine resources and tools that may help you assess the impact of accessibility on your organization and your products.

Let’s start with the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. The fine folks at the WAI define the guidelines for accessible technology and the SGML extensions and methods that make it possible. Today, we’re focussing on policy and organizational issues the W3C addresses in their Resources on Managing Accessibility.

It is a rare and enlightened organization that seeks to improve its accessibility without legal requirements (such as a government contract) or oodles of bad press, a lawsuit, or both (see: ‘Blind student sues Target…’). Most of the time, the desire for improvement comes from those who understand the issues in either markup code or content, but not in terms of the organization itself.

This is where the WAI site comes to the rescue. If you are a coder, designer, writer or middle manager and are trying to make accessibility a priority of your organization, the WAI can help. On their site is this very handy web accessibility business case overview. From past experience, going through the factors they list—Social, Technical, Financial, Legal and Policy—gives you the clarity of thought and ammunition you need to tailor an elevator pitch for your C-level executives. The big guns you can fire away with are financial and legal. Executives like to hear they can save money and dodge a lawsuit. They will be sqeamish of the cost of doing the work, despite any potential future savings, so that is where the technical and social aspects of the biz case may be brought to bear.

Are there upcoming projects such as a site redesign or offering a version of your product as an API or web service? Are you about to internationalize your site? Piggybacking an accessibility initiative on to any of these projects may only slightly raise the price of such an effort while saving significant resources in bandwidth, maintenance, or employee productivity for content editors or authors.

Socially, if your organization’s product is consumer-oriented you can work with marketing or PR to emphasize the touchy-feely side of your product. The WAI site talks more about the digital divide and corporate social responsibility (CSR) statements, and then points you to the financial factor, that this will enhance the brand value, etc. I think arguing for accessibility in terms of corporate social responsibility needs to be carefully framed within your organization. The WAI version is more of a best case scenario to me.

CSR is not going to drive executives to commit dollars to doing work, especially if it is perceived to be done at the cost of projects the executives want done yesterday. Most companies have a CSR statement, none have their valuations determined by it. I don’t want to paint the situation as hopeless, since people are becoming more aware of corporate behavior and are attempting to influence it, but it is a long way off the executive dashboard. If you can get marketing excited about positioning your company as friendly and caring, you can point them at the executives and have them talk about how important it is, too. If your product serves a wide range of consumer and business customers, look for the potential for your organization to also reach into state universities or other government funded instititutions that require 508a accessibility.

You can get sales and marketing behind you quickly by pointing out how accessibility may open new markets for them to reach. Enlisting allies in a variety of roles in your organization, from marketing, sales, technology and editorial departments can help, as well. You’ll sound much less like some loony on the margins if the same message is being delivered by many people.

Executives may take a few rounds of convincing, since the easiest answer is always ‘no!’ but having the right information at your disposal and understanding their concerns allows you to make a better argument than “It’s the right thing to do! C’mon!” Going through the business case exercise will make sure you have that information and can address concerns when they arise.