10 reasons why our clients don’t care about accessibility and remote commenting

This morning Digital Web finally released the article I have been promising people at @media in July this year: 10 reasons why clients don’t care about accessibility.

The article describes reasonable facts that prevent us from reaching our goal to sell and maintain accessible web sites. I collected these from client interaction in the last three years with clients reaching from Blue Chip down to internal products.

Apart from the normal reaction whenever one of my articles gets released – groupies storming my flat, people offering their firstborn and donating thousands of dollars via paypal – I was also very happy to get lots of good comments.

Being yet another vain web publisher, I also checked who is linking to the article and to me, and found out about a phenomenon I had encountered earlier with other articles (insert thunder and lightning effect here):

Remote Commenting

What that is – and yes, I just made that term up – is the phenomenon that great comments about a certain publication tend to be made anywhere but where the publication lives. In this case, Roger Johannson’s blog got some really good feedback which would have been more beneficial at Digital Web itself.

It is not about the poor writer hunting for other feedback – or even accusations she cannot justify – it also is about the quality of the discussion.

Many a times an A List Apart article had the better solutions to the problem it discussed in the comments, and they are still available years later. If your valuable input was published somewhere remotely, nobody will ever find it once the article became old news.