Archive for December, 2006

A Little Accessibility Snippet I Found

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

I recently was listening to the podcasts, finally, on the WaSP (The Web Standards Project) website and in the first one listed (created by Accesibility Task Force members Patrick Lauke and Bruce Lawson) they mention as I mentioned in an earlier post, developing for accessibility means that you’re going to get numerous beneficial side effects:

[audience comment]: We talked about visual impairments. Who is the biggest blind user on the web?

Bruce: Mister Google!

Patrick: (your mother) … have you seen her? [laughter] Ah, anyway …

[audience comment]: To sell accessibility, forget about visual impairment. Just say “If it’s not accessible, Google can’t see it.”

Bruce: Have you heard the stats that … the guy from Legal & General, the firm … the launch of PAS 78, they gave us some stats. Have you heard the stats they gave?

Patrick: They’re in the book! [laughter] Quelle surprise!

Bruce: Legal & General, with Mike Davies, who you might know as Isofarro, on accessifyforum, they made their site accessible because they were worried about the legal risk.

And they found as side effects: 30% increase in natural search engine traffic, a significant improvement in Google rankings for all their target keywords, a 75% reduction in time for pages to load, accessible to mobile devices, their time to manage content reduced from an average of five days to half a day per job, they saved £200,000 a year on site maintenance, they got a 95% increase in visitors getting a life insurance quote (which was the purpose of that site), a 90% increase in sales online, and 100% return on investment in 12 months. And that was the side effects of making the site accessible.

The podcast is full of tangent-based ranting (takes place in a pub; go figure), but at times comforting because you hear others mentioning that some ideals regarding accessibility just can’t be realistically applied in all cases.

Additionally, the point was often made that some of the browser deficiencies that we, as developers, attempt to correct for (usable ways to resize page text) really is something we should be pushing the browser manufacturers to begin being responsible for - bringing accessibility features to the surface rather than 5 levels deep under “preferences”.

Good stuff, check it out.

Posted in Accessibility | 2 Comments »

The Web Standards Advent Calendar - 24 ways, 2006

Friday, December 1st, 2006

Why have chocolates-based advent calendar again this year when you can suffice your daily craving with one that’s standards-based instead - yeh!

24 ways is brought to us by Drew McLellan - a web developer, author and no-good swindler from just outside London, England. At the Web Standards Project he works on press, strategy and tools. Drew keeps a personal weblog covering web development issues and themes.

Drew was nice enough to provide links to last year’s articles as well. These well-crafted articles are done by some of the most recognized in the industry.

On second thought, have fun with the examples while crushing a box of chocolates at the same time.

Posted in Markup, Accessibility, Usability | 1 Comment »