Universal Design for Web Applications

Early and Often

Shawn Henry writes in her book Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design (http://www.lulu.com):

When accessibility is considered early and throughout design, it can be seamlessly and elegantly integrated with overall product design. Incorporating accessibility early decreases the time and money to design accessible products and increases the positive impact that accessibility can have on design overall.

History has shown that products designed for universal access make services easier to use for everyone. Many watershed products were inspired by disability: the phone, the typewriter, speech recognition, optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis, and curb cuts.

Oftentimes, universal design and accessibility are one of the last things checked before a product ships, at which time they are usually put off until a future version or “bolted on” with predictably poor results.

When you don’t include universal design early and often in a project, not only are you missing the opportunity to create an innovative product and increase your user base, you will likely spend 50–200 times more to retrofit the product than if you had included it in the project’s specification.^[11]

^[11] Based on figures in McConnell, Steve. Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. Microsoft Press (1996). as referenced in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model.