How much does accessibility cost?

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

The question of resources necessarily implies the question of budget, but not only that. It's just as much a question of staff training, individual determination and daily commitment to improving the accessibility of a site, an app or office documents over the long term and, once excellence has been achieved, to staying the course. Anything but self-evident.

The first thing to note is that the vast majority of these public administrations do not have a "digital accessibility officer". This task is therefore assigned to managers in the Communications department, sometimes in the IT department... who are not always familiar with the specifics of an area that many describe as complex.

"We thought we were accessible"

Especially as, in the case of the redesign of the vdl.lu and chd.lu websites, the 2019 law on digital accessibility of public sector websites and apps had not yet been passed. As a result, there was a certain amount of uncertainty as to which framework or standard to use as a basis. "We were accessible, yes, in a certain sense... but we didn't know exactly what we had to achieve", says Simone Hornick about the vdl.lu website launched in summer 2017, which three years later was judged not to be compliant according to the RGAA criteria in force at the time. This was a real "wake-up call", in the words of the manager, for whom "we thought we were accessible, but then we realised that the efforts we had made were not enough".

Two years later, the same site was audited, and its compliance rate was doubled, a sign that it had really taken on board the imperatives set by the law.

As for the Chamber's website, it was given a makeover while the 2019 law was being prepared. The objectives were then known and clear. However, the internal audits carried out prior to online publication showed that, despite the accessibility requirements set out in the specifications, the service delivered was not up to scratch. The site was non-compliant, and it would take half a year to make a host of corrections to achieve partial compliance. The team around Loïc Saint-Ghislain, who managed the project, did not stop there, and by 2023 the chd.lu site was in the top 5 most accessible sites among those audited by the SIP.

The accessibility expert, now a key player

If the project manager is not an expert in the field, he or she can call on the advice of professionals who will be able to provide the development team with precise guidance, cutting short the all-too-frequent "it's impossible to make this function accessible". This triptych project owner - development team - accessibility expert is increasingly used in web and mobile projects. This is the method used by the Grenoble metropolitan authority, which now prides itself on offering its users a compliant website that is 100% accessible.

These experts are valuable, but they also come at a cost. And here and there you can sense a certain weariness when, in order to launch new sites or new apps, the project owner must once again take up his pilgrim's staff to a land to be evangelised anew: "In 2015, when we started redesigning the vdl.lu site, accessibility was an unknown theme for agencies. I can tell you that it's not much better today," says Simone Hornick in an interview conducted in mid-November 2023.

Some of these agencies have only recently begun to promote their expertise in digital accessibility as a selling point.

Training is the key to success

Linked to the question of bringing agencies up to standard is that of training editorial teams: a key issue for the CTIE, which currently manages a catalogue of some 230 public sites, and whose accessibility scores are among the highest in the audits. While it is responsible for the architecture of the sites it manages, the CTIE also provides support to government departments in their day-to-day compliance with accessibility practices. An e-learning course is currently being prepared, which will focus on writing accessible content, with practical exercises. "The problems encountered are always the same: tables without headers, no alternative associated with images, etc.," says David Thomas, head of the CTIE's WebUX department.

5 to 10% of the initial budget

Accessibility requires a real investment on the part of the project team. But is the cost astronomical? In terms of the overall budget for the chd.lu website, it represents 5%: "No one had the idea of cutting back on this item", says Mr Saint-Ghislain. As far as the City is concerned, accessibility accounted for 7 to 8%. As a general rule, accessibility accounts for between 5 and 10% of the total cost of a project, and tends to decrease as the overall budget increases. However, this proportion is likely to fall once the principles of digital accessibility are fully integrated into the offerings of web and mobile development agencies.

More than a financial issue, it is also a question of commitment. It's interesting to see how the idea of a 100% accessible site has been accepted from the outset and will be maintained in the case of the grenoblealpesmetropole.fr website. In the same way, it is clear that it was on the basis of a strong political will that an accessible and eco-designed platform was created for the CAPB and the municipalities of the Basque Country.

Related motivations

Sometimes, the motivation is to be found in related projects: whether for the City or the Chamber of Deputies, one of the black spots remains the presence of PDF files, which are becoming more numerous and less accessible. But working with accessible files means that they can be read by machines, which means greater efficiency. This is the idea that the Chamber of Deputies is beginning to entertain in order to improve the transparency of the legislative process, whereas at present, exchanges between the government and the Chamber of Deputies are based on untagged PDFs.

Last but not least, name and praise is undoubtedly more effective than name and shame. Interest in the annual accessibility rankings for websites and apps published by the SIP has been confirmed, and by next year will give rise to a genuine digital accessibility observatory.