A good read from the latest ALA:
What does your website sound like? Turn off your style sheet and look at what you’ve got. Suddenly the person listening to a website with a screen reader is no longer different from you—your needs are the same. Achieving the highest level of accessibility makes a lot of sense and should be part of your design efforts for reasons you no longer need others to justify for you.
…accessibility is often assigned a low priority for the following reasons:
- We would like to create accessible content, but we only have a small team.
- Nobody ever really complains about inaccessibility, anyway.
- Accessible sites are less aesthetically pleasing and they limit our design options.
- We really don’t know what it takes to make our website/web application accessible.
- Our target user group doesn’t include users with disabilities.
Of all the arguments, number four is really the only valid reason why a website or web application should have accessibility issues. You can resolve this issue—provide your web designers and developers with some minimal and gradual accessibility training, and keep the discussion alive. As for the rest…they merely require a small, but powerful shift in mindset
