Page Accessibility Labs

Making a website accessible doesn’t need to be expensive. In fact, if it taken into account from the design phase of the project, it doesn’t need to add any costs. This is because W3C and Section 508 accessibility guidelines don’t call for extra pages or areas of a site, they don’t call for expensive technologies, or high bandwidth “disabled user specific” solutions. Most of what the guidelines do call for are the inclusion of code elements which make your pages understandable to a broader range of technologies; design considerations, such a simple navigation structure, that improve the user experience for all users who visit your site; and making sure information and site features are available to users with older systems. These are not onerous requirements.

In the real world, a company may well want an accessibility specialist consult on the design of their web presence and they may want independent testing and verification of the site’s accessibility once built. And, of course this will add some cost to the project. A general rule of thumb is that these could add up to about 5%.