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Reason 5: We’re Past Inventing, We’re Maintaining
As Joe Clark pointed out in his excellent book Building Accessible Web sites, it is a lot harder to retrofit an existing Web site than to start from scratch.

The Web is no longer new. Many companies spent a lot of money on their site, and it’s not always an option to start from scratch. Building an accessible blog or a 10-page brochure site is a lot easier than cleaning out a 200,000-page monster maintained in an eight-year-old content management system.

It’s even harder if you built the client’s site in the first place.

For years, badly planned and executed Web sites were sold at high prices. Now we have to tell businesses they’ve been had. Nobody likes to hear that they need to replace an expensive, functional product with a new one.

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For years, badly planned and executed Web sites were sold at high prices. Now we have to tell businesses they’ve been had. Nobody likes to hear that they need to replace an expensive, functional product with a new one.

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Now we have to tell businesses they’ve been had.

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ORIGINAL: Mojo

Good points all. But, I don't think this is fair:

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Now we have to tell businesses they’ve been had.

When it comes to accessibility most site owners were not had. Rather, times have changed, the internet has evolved and their 7 year old site that has survived with a spattering of patches has finally run the course of it's life.

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Reason 2: There Is No Immediate Benefit

There is no immediate, measurable benefit from making a Web site accessible. Web accessibility enthusiasts might point out that that is not true as accessible Web sites are automatically more usable, and search engines can index them a lot easier. That is true but the benefits of that do not show up immediately—if ever. A fancy microsite or a video ad for a product, however, can trigger an immediate, measurable response in the form of traffic or revenue.

Good usability is a very important element in customer satisfaction, but you will rarely find it on the agenda of a project in the scoping phase (unless of course the project is usability consulting).

The argument that search engines are “blind billionaires”—that they “see” the Web like a blind visitor—is also a weak one. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vast field and a lot of competitors fight dirty (e.g., link farms, bridge pages). Large corporations would rather plan for sponsored links and cross marketing than concern themselves with markup techniques to boost their search engine rankings.

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Reason 5: We’re Past Inventing, We’re Maintaining

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Reason 6: It Is Not Part of the Testing Methodology

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Accessibility issues that require human verification are harder to quantify.

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Reason 8: Nobody Complains

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Reason 9: It Requires Involvement
One reason our clients don’t care about accessibility is that it means that they will have to deal with their Web site.

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Send emails to companies every time it is hard for you to use their site. Point out that you will buy the product on their competitor’s site and why.

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So what can we do?

Gently prod clients in the right direction. Here are some ideas:

* Stop selling accessibility as a technical issue. Address it in the scoping and design phase rather than at delivery
* Make sure you’ve got your facts straight before releasing another “accessibility” article or blog entry (rounded corners in CSS do not increase accessibility, really, they don’t!)
* Make product presentations and assessments more fun by taking away the client’s mouse and changing monitor settings
* If you want to support disabled users, don’t stop at one group. “Skip links” helps blind users and keyboard/switch access users alike, don’t hide them!
* Send emails to companies every time it is hard for you to use their site. Point out that you will buy the product on their competitor’s site and why.
* Step away from the visuals. Embrace Web design as a mixture of good content, proper structure and nice visuals. Start developing sites in the text editor, not in Illustrator.

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* Send emails to companies every time it is hard for you to use their site. Point out that you will buy the product on their competitor’s site and why.