Why do clients hate web accessibility

One of the biggest challenges the digital community faces is getting clients to buy into accessibility.

Web developers, designers and user experience professionals alike have embraced website accessibility as a blessing and a challenge.

A typical scenario when talking to a client is the following: you start talking about the rationale of your designs with regards to accessibility and then ask what level of accessibility is required. The usual response is a confused look, the client perceiving it as a legal burden, or saying they do not have a budget allocated to accessibility, are not interested in it or simply are not aware of the benefits and social responsibility.

As professional designers and developers it is our responsibility to do our job properly. This means building accessible websites. In the business world, someone has to pay for accessibility and it is difficult to convince clients that they should extend their budget to pay that little extra for an accessible website. This article explores why clients still hate or are reluctant to champion accessibility.

Clients see it as legal hullabaloo, with no clear guidelines and precedents

The Disability Discrimination Act stipulates ‘reasonable adjustments’ must be made to make a service accessible. One of the problems clients face is determining what ‘reasonable adjustments’ are. What do they have to do to make their website accessible? From a client perspective, this is all too confusing and something they can do without. Furthermore there is no leading example on how a website should be made accessible.

The W3C have developed accessibility guidelines, but from experience, they are not always practical or easy to implement. The recommendations may not actually be useful for the target audience and assistive technologies do not always behave the way W3C want them to.

Moreover, a lot of companies promise their clients, that they can deliver 100% accessible sites based purely on guidelines. What they do not factor in is user interaction, design, and most importantly user testing with the target audience. All this accumulates to inaccessible websites being delivered and clients being left confused and disappointed.

It’s costly and hard to maintain

As the internet is no longer ‘new’, a lot of clients already have existing websites. Reworking hundreds and even thousands of existing pages to make them accessible is a tall order and not cheap. Furthermore, maintaining accessibility requires client involvement and is often seen as a burden. The content needs to be constantly monitored, tested and fixed. In addition, it cuts into the budget, which could have been used to create new and exciting functionality (which will get you all the accolades from your colleagues and seniors). For that reason accessibility is ignored, and besides, no one complains!

No immediate Return on Investment (ROI)

As a business, when you invest money in your website, you want to reap the benefits pretty fast. Especially when you spend thousands of pounds and all you get is a website that is certified as accessible, but without any means of measuring the impact it has on the business.

For commercial websites, clients want to increase sales and conversions. However it is difficult to measure if sales and conversion have increased due to accessibility. For some clients the money can be better spent on Google ads and landing page campaigns which have a high return on investment.

Perception that accessible website are boring and simplistic

The internet has matured in recent years. Complex and creative websites and desktop replacement web applications are being built using Flash and Javascript. With these advances in technology, client expectations have shifted. Clients want more interactive content that mimic desktop applications, have animation, and work without page reload.

Accessibility has had some bad press and has been viewed as a stumbling block for creativity and development of interactive websites. Interactive sites need to accommodate accessibility by providing a fallback/alternative version for users who cannot access interactive content because they do not use flash, have JavaScript disabled or have a text browser. Some clients see this as over-simplifying the product, putting extra strain on the budget and losing the ‘wow’ factor.

Conclusion

As a web agency, it is our duty to design and develop accessible websites as part of our work. However, as websites are becoming more interactive and sophisticated, more time is required at the design and development stages, thus the cost of accessible sites are on the increase – and the client has to pay for this.

So why do clients hate accessibility? Luckily the truth is that clients do not actually hate it, but that it is just low on their radar as there are other issues perceived to be more important. The major obstacles for clients buying into accessibility are:

• lack of understanding about accessibility and its benefits
• the cost and time it adds to the development phase
• the additional maintenance
• the lack of immediate short-term benefits

Additional legal requirements in terms of accessibility are a grey area, and accessibility seems to be somewhat mis-sold or not explained to the client properly, which often leads to unrealistic expectations.

The accumulation of all these factors are a main source of client frustration, confusion and lack of interest in website accessibility.

To change the perception of accessibility, clients need to be supported better. This can be achieved by ensuring clients understand what accessibility is, are aware of its real life benefits, and by making sure that the costs as minimal as possible, by:

• setting and managing client expectations
• setting clear goals for accessibility (both guidelines and real accessibility testing)
• designing websites or applications with accessibility in mind
• allowing ample time and budgeting for real user and accessibility conformance testing

More information about website accessibility and user testing.

Published: 12 Oct 2009

Tags: Customer insight