As a developer, can you weigh in on why you think it might be hard for small businesses to make their web sites accessible? Are there inherent technical challenges that make it difficult to make accessible websites? Or is it that there's a constant churn of new front-end technologies that typically treat accessibility as an afterthought, and typically leave accessibility as an afterthought that will finally get properly nailed down just in time for the next new technology to come along? Or is it business problems such as the client demanding some overdesigned user experience that can only be accomplished by manually implementing non-standard input elements?
You don't need any non-standard input elements to make web site accessible. In fact the opposite is true: if you only use standard HTML elements, chances are your web-site is going to be fully accessible. It is when developers decide to use some fancy javascript instead of a standard button, or some other fancy form controls, with tons of javascript, this is when screenreaders tend to have problems trying to figure out what's going on.
For small businesses I imagine the biggest problem is that they only have only one engineer to support a web site, and he is not familiar with accessibility standards (justifyably so, because there are so few blind people out there), and he'd have to learn these standards and test the web site for accessibility problems - all these actions require time.
Yeah. Sorry for being unclear, but that's what I was thinking: My hunch is that standard HTML elements tend to be accessible almost by default, while non-standard JavaScript-heavy things are more likely to be inaccessible by default.
And my other hunch is that using standard HTML elements is actually a less expensive way to build websites. But I'm not sure on that. I haven't touched front end in a long time.
