Ever watched someone make a sales pitch for accessibility snake oil? I had the displeasure of doing so recently.

I wasn’t impressed.

Accessibility is, in my opinion, generally a vague idea driven more by good intentions than quantifiable outcomes in the web design community, which is a shame given it is based on such an important need - the need of those with disabilities or impairments to use technology that we take for granted every day.

That technology is of course the web for our purposes, and the usual accessibility concerns are to do with visually impaired users accessing the web sites we build. (I realise there are a number of groups with different accessibility concerns, but for the sake of this article I’ll stick to the visually impaired.)

Dealing with an impairment or disability is a strange thing. Imagine if you have trouble getting to, or finding your way around a supermarket to buy basic groceries. Or paying your bills. Or staying in touch with friends. Or finding others in a similar situation to you. The accessible web can and does play a huge role in everyone’s life to make these things easier, especially for those that really struggle with them.

Its unfortunate then to see that potential squandered through ignorance, incompetence, or both. I’m not talking about how accessible your design portfolio or blog is with its skip links and beautiful mark-up - I’m talking about your local bank’s web site, or online grocery shop, which tend to be uniformly dreadful.

But I digress. What really boils my blood is seeing someone making a sales pitch where they wilfully mislead the well meaning but otherwise-ignorant about web accessibility.

The snake oil salesmen I watched had perfected his pitch. It went something like this:

• I’ve ran your web site through a number of mark-up validation tools, and found 247 errors, which means your web site isn’t as accessible as it could be.
• [Big government organisation] got sued because their web site wasn’t accessible, and I’m sure you could be a big target if someone went after you.
• When search engines look at your site, and they hit one of these errors, they just stop and don’t go any further. This hurts your search engine placement.
• By fixing these validation errors your site will become accessible.

There was a technical argument (certain tools which adhere to authoritative guidelines found x errors), a financial argument (you could get sued), a business argument (search engine placement will suffer) and a moral argument (it helps people in need).

Pretty good pitch eh? Well it would be, if it wasn’t total baloney. Or a flat out lie - imagine if Google did stop indexing your page because you had a missing alt tag!

Surely this site that was tested must have been a huge mess of tables, spacer gifs, and other nonsense right? Wrong - it was well marked up transitional xhtml using CSS for layout and styling, with content first in the source.

What was the major failing of the site then? Who knows! Missing alt tags probably.

Ok so his pitch was bollocks. Sure, he’s not the first person to try and make a sale by fudging the truth (or flat out lying). But what is the real crime here?

The real crime is that his pitch almost worked. If I (or anyone else with half a clue) wasn’t there to shoot it down later, the organisation being pitched to may have invested a lot of time and money into “fixing” accessibility, and that would be that. Accessibility would be a non-issue for the life of the site. Alt tags would have been added to images, w3c validators would give the page the thumbs up, and everyone would have been happy.

Well, everyone except people who, say, used screen readers, because not once were they even mentioned. I asked very obvious, leading questions to see if the salesman would twig to the fact that there was more to accessibility than a machine validating mark-up, or if validation was just a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The result? He looked at me in a completely perplexed, confused way, as though I’d asked him to tell me the circumference of the moon right then and there, or something equally bizarre!

The big con is not just that valid code isn’t necessarily accessible code, which should be news to just about no one with at least a passing interest in these things. Its that average organisations only have so much capital to spend on things like accessibility, and if they use it on a certain project that does nothing in real terms for visually impaired users (or others), its gone, and those users lose the one opportunity they had for a more useful, more enjoyable, less frustrating web site. I think that is pretty unfortunate.

There is a broader point here too - to what extent is your average web professional, you know, you and me, guilty of the same thing? If we talk the talk, we have to be able to walk the walk, otherwise people with important needs miss out. Food for thought.

Thankfully the salesmen I watched certainly wasn’t your average web professional, and his pitch didn’t work, but the accessibility snake oil salesmen are out there alright!