Courtesy: Good Experience Blog
The number one reason to build an accessible website (or to be accessible, no matter what the subject): You lose money, and potential customers have bad experiences.
Good Experience Blog shows an experience at Bloomingdales when a father with a stroller asks a store clerk if there is an elevator. The clerk replies: “No. There’s an escalator over there.”
Why is this customer experience broken? Let me count the the ways.
• Bloomingdale’s, a major retailer spread across many floors, has only one elevator accessible from its Lexington Avenue entrance.
• The clerk, upon seeing a customer in need, suggests an irrelevant solution and then goes back to work.
• There is no acknowledgment that this is an inconvenience - not the clerk, not even the sign. Customers who can’t climb stairs or stand on an escalator - customers in wheelchairs, parents with strollers - are just out of luck.
This could be humorous, if it weren’t so despicable and thoughtless:
A wheelchair ramp goes to a landing with more stairs at a courthouse in St. Petersburg, Florida. Unfortunately, I have experienced these types of situations with family members who have been in wheelchairs.
How many websites do you know of that provide just enough accessibility to get to the inaccessible features?
Those are great examples of poor accessibility and horrible customer satisfaction. I have two little boys, so I know how it feels to go through lots of trouble to find an elevator (for a stroller). It feels bad!
Comment by Dennis at Web Axe — January 28, 2008 @ 5:35 pm
Education has to be the key here. We build small business websites and strive to make them as accessible as possible but it’s not really a great sales pitch from our end. At the low end of the market our ustomers, generally speaking, have no idea in the first place that someone might have difficulty accessing their web site. We generally ’sell’ it to them on the basis that ‘Google’ can see their site. This is generally enough to get them on board with the idea of it. On the positive side, certainly where we’re based in Bristol, there’s a lot of people with great markup skills.
Comment by Tom Holder — January 31, 2008 @ 5:57 pm
There’s a library near where I used to live that has a lift, which sounds great for wheelchair users etc, but then when you get out of the lift, you have to climb 3 or 4 stairs to actually get into the room!
I don’t know who came up with that idea but it’s incredible that it was ever allowed! I assume it’s been fixed now (this was about 10 years ago) since it would surely be illegal?
Comment by Gregor — July 25, 2008 @ 3:48 am
I’m not disabled but when I see stairs like this I start panicking about getting 3 kids + 2 strollers up there. It’s impossible!
Comment by Dr. Richard — August 14, 2008 @ 5:32 pm