What lame excuses do you hear used a lot?
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As developers who are always tryig to get people to make their work accessible, you must have come across some rebuttals in your time about why you do it. Like the simple "Yeah, that's all well and good but we're doing work for an Intranet so why should we bother making it work on screen readers when no-one uses them?"
I'd be really interested to find out some of the lame excuses that you hear regularly or have heard in the past. I'm in the process of reinvigorating awareness of the issues here at work and am trying to prepare for these kinds of comments. Forewarned is forearmed and all that!
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"IE doesn't support it" is an excuse I hear a lot. But it's not a lame excuse, imho._________________
My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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"The proportion of relevant users doesn't warrent a redesign."
The reason this is lame IMO is that if you showed the same people the same site bugging out badly in Safari, they'd want it fixed. Despite literaly ten times as many potential users being affected by the access issues.
But hey, I make lame excuses all the time. Part of life in practice.
I prefer to focus on the fact that we hear fewer, if more diverse (I think), excuses as time goes by. I hope.
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creator of Talklets
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"It costs to much" - is the classic. I do not agree that it costs more when built from the start... but yea if you have to change it after the fact...
Followed by "accessible sites are ugly" which is lame because that is just the designer not bothering to really try, a lack of talent and not a real issue. That was why I created DarkShadow-Designs.com to show that accessible sites can look good, I just prefer more simple designs personally. Now I just need to find time one day to do a light version of it for those with problems with the dark, but a light colored gothic design is not simple to figure out when you are graphically challenged as I am.
"I know my target audiance, it is not an issue" - this is lame because 18 - 30 year old snow boarders (as an example) can pe Dyslexic, can be epyleptic, can be color blind and can break their arm and not be able to use a mouse to navigate with.
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Kyle J. Lamson
Analyst/Programmer III, State of Alaska
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LSW-WebDesign.com & DarkShadow-Designs.com
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Good point, lsw. I broke my right arm twice when I was young. I learnt keyboard shortcuts to keep programming and customised game controls to keep playing. Even cool cookies like me have been disabled for a while. 
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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"I doubt disabled users are going to come to our sporting site"
Heard that one last night from the sporting club I'm doing a site for
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"Blind people don't buy our products."_________________
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WVYFC chose the Yorkshire Air Ambulance as the main charity to fund raise for in 2006
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"Its only staff that see this bit."_________________
creator of Talklets
Talklets ,
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"None of our students are blind and neither are their parents."
I consider this lame because:
- New students arrive each year, sometimes in the middle of years.
- Parents and guardians are sometimes changed (divorce, re-marriage, etc).
- A school website isn't just for those user groups. There are:
- older/younger siblings;
- friends;
- grandparents;
- employers;
- sponsors;
- government workers;
- and so on.
- older/younger siblings;
- Anyone can become blind at any time.
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
Last edited by Ben Millard on 25 Jul 2007 11:22 am; edited 2 times in total
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"You can't have a sexy web site that is accessible"
Never sure whether to laugh or cry................
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If it can go wrong it will. So don't worry about it.
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@ Cerbera
and its not just blind users they are legally obliged to cater for.
If they have no kids or guardians with SpLDs which effect literacy acquisition and skills, then they are VERY weird.
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creator of Talklets
Talklets ,
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Yes, in principle you can replace "blind" with any other disability from that excuse. But the topic is about excuses we've heard rather than excuses which are along similar lines to ones we've heard. 
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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Only last week I heard "we'll build that in later on, when we have time."_________________
Matt Machell
Web Design and Development Blog
Member of the Multipack
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| Robert Wellock wrote: |
| "Blind people don't buy our products." |
I absolutely love this one. It makes it that bit more satisfying when you ask them if they've ever sold one of their products to somebody who's colour-blind.
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Often heard on Project Gutenberg:
"We provide a plain ASCII text version -- they'll just use that."
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