[busterarm]

We contract a blind accessibility consultant to help us evaluate all of our websites (and we have a lot...) and educate us on best practices for making our sites easier to navigate.

One of the best choices that we ever made. We spend a lot of time on getting it right in our sites and have spent many hours in NVDA & VoiceOver with our eyes closed.

It's unfortunate how poor the experience still is on most websites and I wish our industry would spend a little more time trying to get this right. If you aren't using Semantic markup and ARIA, please start now.

You can't imagine how much worse the user experience is on mobile vs a computer.

[Bahamut]

As a maintainer of a major UI library for the web, I sympathize, but I also find that it also takes significant time to get accessibility done right as well. There is a lot of research involved for most people, precisely because they are not blind. I find that it is time consuming and doesn't offer as much bang for the effort, which is a shame & something I know I need to work on.

I wish there is a better solution here, but I don't know what it is. It does offer a good opportunity to make an impact though for any aspiring developers.

[hirsin]

Do any large companies use your library? If so, they likely have requirements to make their sites accessible. It may be worth finding out if they've modified your library in any way to make it accessible (or simply easier to make the end result accessible) and can submit the changes back. We're looking at doing that for a table library (slickgrid, e.g. [1]) we use, as we'd prefer to help an existing in-use library over doing more NIH work.

[1] https://github.com/6pac/SlickGrid/issues/37

[Bahamut]

They do - the library is UI Bootstrap: https://github.com/angular-ui/bootstrap . I know many Fortune 500s use it.

[hueving]

>that it is time consuming and doesn't offer as much bang for the effort

This is true for many types of disabilities. Unless people are personally affected, the vast majority will put in minimal effort.

I wonder if you could find some grant money to help fund work on it.

[phamilton]

How does this affect the bottom line? Is this a financially good practice? Or merely a socailly good practice?

[GabrielF00]

I have heard of cases where increasing contrast to meet accessibility standards resulted in significant boosts to sales. Proper contrast is beneficial to people with vision impairments, but it also seems to help people without vision impairments navigate a UI. I would guess that you could also see a big sales boost when you make your site fully accessible to the colorblind - something like 10% of males are colorblind.

When it comes to screen readers, the percentage of customers who use them is much smaller, but there are lots of business reasons to have a good experience for blind customers: it's important in markets like education and government, and it avoids bad PR.

[busterarm]

http://www.duanemorris.com/alerts/ada_website_cases_filed_fe...

http://www.fredlaw.com/internet_technology_trademark__advert...

[ChristianBundy]

For those that don't want to read two articles just to get the answer to the above question, both of these articles are cases where people are being sued for having websites that are inaccessible to those with disabilities -- the same way you could be sued for lacking a wheelchair-accessible entrance in a brick and mortar business.