It seems at times there is a disconnect or misunderstanding of just how to balance these areas of Web Development. In my experience I have seen accessibility consultants tout the finer points of accessibility when asked for a section 508 evaluation and do so with a lack of understanding of the company's product. Such paid for advice often leads to a quandary on the hiring company's part as they strive to comply with section 508 requirements (because they have or are persuing government-connected contracts). It's not always the case where a company has a User Interface Engineer on staff, let alone one who understands these subjects well enough to see that they are integrated into the Web system successfully without sacrificing or threatening business goals. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe these cases are rare - that would be a good thing. Either way, it's valuable to explore how all of these parts of a system relate to one another.
First, Web Standards. What are they - exactly? And why are they important? This section question is easily answered by looking at just about any other industry. A familiar example is the international effort to standardize traffic signs, in particular shapes and colors. The creation of a Web standard specification (http://www.w3.org/) in a nutshell provides a system that can make the Web "cross-user-compatible." Users with special needs benefit, search engines bots can more easily index the Web, developers are provided a foundational framework that allows a greater potential for creativity and invention. The list of benefits goes on and on - its many points the subject of another day. For more reading, I highly recommend The Web Standards Project Web site (http://www.webstandards.org/).
A subset, or a benefit, depending on your view point, of Web standards compliance, then, is accessibility. "Accessibility" is an umbrella term for the effort to allow for a greater ability to access the functionality and benefit of various systems such as buildings, public sidewalks, or the Web - the system we are talking about here. Though accessibility is a term when used that invokes thoughts of aiding persons with special needs or disabilities, it is a mistake to think that such efforts do not, in the end, benefit all. This has commonly been referred to as the "curb cut effect" and, in the sense of the Web, the "electronic curb cut effect." When, back in the 1970's, city municipalities began making street corner curbs accessible to persons in wheelchairs, it was eventually found that many others benefited e.g. persons pushing strollers, roller skaters, etc.
Accessibility guidelines (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/) have been written by a consortium of persons of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) (http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/). These recommendations cover the whole of "all things accessibility." The focus of their efforts is to make Web content more accessible to a wider range of users with special needs and disabilities. These recommendations can be considered comprehensive. While in a perfect world it would be wonderful for every one to comply with these guidelines, they have yet to be adopted in total into law. For now they remain guidelines. That being said, various laws have been put into place by various countries (Section 508 in the U.S. and DDA in the UK for example) who base their regulations on these guidelines - if not directly, then indirectly. Since any focus I have on compliance with accessibility laws concern section 508 compliance, that is where I will focus my discussion here in regard to legal compliance.
To review for a moment, then, section 508 requirements fall under the larger umbrella of accessibility guidelines in their entirety. When trying to incorporate compliance into your Web system, it is important to understand this distinction.
How does usability fit into the above painted picture? This is a tough question to answer. Usability vs. Accessibility is a huge subject that has been, and continues to be, debated for some time. Some say that one threatens the other dependent on the particular application of each. For instance, if using Flash to render a particular set of content makes things more "usable" but may threaten the accessibility of the content, which should take precedence? This debate is outside the scope of this article to answer in any definitive way, but I think I can help pull it into a context that makes the decision making process a bit easier.
In all of the research I do online regarding Web standards, accessibility including legal compliance and usability matters, I rarely see these subjects discussed in the context of business goals. Certainly no one would argue against the fact that an accessible site increases your potential user-base, or that a Web standard site not only aids accessibility but aids better search engine friendliness, or that a usable ("user-friendly") site helps ensure user retention - these are all business "reasons" for employing these strategies.
I drew a picture above where accessibility is an umbrella to legal accessibility requirements i.e. 508 compliance. If we continue this metaphor, let's just say that Web standards is an umbrella above the generally equal (and sometimes competing) subjects of accessibility and usability. In my opinion, then, business goals is the umbrella above all of these. Let me try to explain what I mean.
You've built a site on good Web standards practices. The site is very user-friendly and your user testing has shown so through hands-on user feedback. Now you are testing the site for 508 compliance and over all accessibility. You have a potential government contract, which of course demands you are compliant with regulations. So you have hired a contractor to perform an audit and you are now staring at her report which reveals a number of holes. Now you have to figure out how to move forward to fix these holes by retrofitting the solutions into your existing site.
So which do you fix? Well, the 508 non-compliance issues are a must. What about all of the other accessibility issues? Here is where I leverage business goals. Before answering this, you need to ask a few more questions:
How much expense will it require to address accessibility issues that are not compliance related? How will fixing these affect the usability of the site (which you have already determined is high)? Are the issues pointed out by the hired contractor focused on a single assistive technology (e.g. Jaws reader)? It is a mistake to focus efforts on a single assistive technology every bit as much as it is to focus on "pleasing" only one browser. The key here is cross-technology compliance or the "highest common denominator" you can achieve to make everyone happy. Will fixing these issues, in the end, present a potential for increasing sales or our user-base (i.e. the potential for more sales)?
This list of questions should be tailored and added to for your particular scenario. I hope the point has been made clear though. Whenever you make decisions about your site, its content and its functionality, you should always filter them through this line of thought. The biggest point I am attempting to make is that we should keep the scope of our decision making always inclusive of the larger goals of the business - to increase business. If we don't, we run the risk of shoring up our online presence with weak girders that can threaten its stability and bring our business crashing down (okay maybe just make it suffer).
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