The first interesting and well conceived Vitanim article in a long while caught my eye today, arriving as it did at just the right time. “How do you get your line manager to buy into accessibility?” is basically the question it answers.
The problem I’ve recently faced as a Web developer who reports directly to a line manager or director (as apposed to working for an agency and dealing only with your project manager) is figuring out how I can take the ideals I built on as part of my agency experience and apply them to working for a company directly.
As a Web developer working for an agency, and especially one with a project manager you’re able to make judgements based on your own skills and experience, because the marketing professional who has hired your company affords that company a certain level of trust: they don’t need to know the nuts and bolts, just that it works for them.
These judgements are largely invisible to the client and are often to do with a perceived level of quality: of code, logic, markup or data structure. An agency developer may choose to sacrifice certain “flashy” functionality for the sake of accessibility or use CSS and XHTML for layout rather than dropping images in place of text, sacrificing time but gaining flexibility in the long run.
Contrast that with working directly for an organisation that doesn’t necessarily have a marketing department and that level of trust changes. It doesn’t lessen, but rather tightens. Although your manager will trust you to develop pages with your own judgement in play, because you’re working for them (whether as a contractor or a permanent employee) you’re expected to whistle to their tune. And that’s fine: they’re paying your wages after all.
But what do you do when your manager doesn’t care about accessibility? It can be costly (under the time = money rule if nothing else) and the benefits are mostly to do with gaining kudos amongst a community that will probably never buy the product or service your employers are selling. So do you tell him he’s wrong? Do you ignore him and carry on, choosing to justify yourself if and when the time comes, or do you try and work accessibility into your practice without throwing it his face?
Although it could possibly go a bit further into providing provable key points that professionals can understand, the Vitamin article on accessibility shares some great starting-point links, one of which being Google’s easy-to-follow Webmaster Guidelines page.
If you’re planning to march into your manager’s office any time soon, preaching the gospel according to Tim, stop, breathe and read Accessibility In Suit and Tie.
