User Experience Monitor

Major Resistance to Web Video Captioning

We fight a lot of usability battles in our line of work, and one always seems to be making the Web more accessible.

Why is it so hard to get closed captioning on the Web?  This article from the New York Times details an issue that has been bothering me - making Web videos accessible:

On Web Video, Captions are Coming Slowly

It seems that even the large entertainment companies are laggards when it comes to Web video captioning.  Now, I can see a small organization balking at the time and expense to caption Web video, but why would a news site or a major service like Netflix have issues with this? It's only going to help their business (and their business' credibility) to have their material accessible to the hearing impaired. 

Justifying Accessibility in 2010

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has an excellent online article on the subject of:

Developing a Business Case for Web Usability

It covers the various factors in developing a business case for Web accessibility. You'd think this wouldn't be necessary in 2010, but believe me it is. I was recently in a meeting with a client who didn't see the need to make a site accessible, given that only a few of the site's users were likely to be using alternative browsers.

As shocking as this may seem to a usability professional, who has been seeped in the theory of Universal Design, this is not an uncommon point-of-view. With time and budget limitations, it may seem daunting to design (or redesign) a site to make it accessible.

What, then, are the best arguments for making a site accessible? Something to say to management, in other words?

It will depend on your organization, and whether social, technical, financial, or legal/policy factors are going to ring your management's bell. Corporations are likely to respond to different arguments than non-profits or educational institutions, for example.

If you need a good argument for an upcoming design or redesign, I recommend you take a look at this article first. The authors have a number of bullet-point arguments that are pretty much PowerPoint-ready, anticipating the need, as it were. Check it out.