Organizations sometimes ask me about what they should be doing to help make their sites more accessible to people with disabilities. Actually, that's not completely true. What they usually ask me is "should our site be 'ADA-compliant?'" or "do we need to meet 'Section 508?'"

Although it makes me feel like a consultant, I'm always forced to answer. "it depends." What I usually respond is that unless they are a federal agency or are involved in procurement for the federal government, there is no clear legal obligation right now.

A more important consideration is your obligation to your users. What obligations do you have to your users to create an experience that is universally useful -- irrespective of the user's abilities, technologies, or other personal attributes? When creating or improving your site, you should use standards-compliant code and techniques, certainly. You should test your site with a variety of technologies and situations, definitely. But most important is to consider accessibility within the context of all of your users' needs.

In other words, for most organizations, you need not try to achieve some "official" accessibility stamp of approval. Attempting to achieve a label of "accessibility compliant" isn't much more useful than attempting to achieve a label of "usability compliant." Instead, you should take steps to regularly and gradually inch your site toward making it more universally accessible -- not just during a big redesign project, but everytime you add new content or a new feature.

For instance, if you have a large number of international users, they will appreciate when you add alternative texts to all of your relevant images. For many of them may be browsing over slow connections with their images disabled. Users who are blind will appreciate it too. If you have large numbers of users where English is a second language, they will appreciate it when you caption your video clips. Users who are deaf will appreciate it too.

I'm speaking about these web accessibility issues next week at the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference here in Washington. It's a great panel titled "With Access for All." The other panelists are Beth Finke of Easter Seals and Sharron Rush of Knowbility. Beth, who happens to be blind, will demonstrate how well her speech reading software reads -- or doesn't read -- the web when visiting various sites. Sharron is going to discuss accessible techniques for newer development technologies such as AJAX.

I'm going to talk about ways that web managers can think and rationally advocate accessibility-related best practices within their organizations without being branded a budget-buster or noodge. It's going to be a terrific session. If you are attending the conference, I hope to see you there!

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