Teaching | Web Standards Documentary Project | Holli Smith
Holli Smith: My name is Holli Smith and I am an Associates student in IMD. I work for a major bank in Atlanta. I have worked with them and talked to them about W3C Standards and Section 508 Standards, and especially with the Target lawsuit that's going on presently.
They did take action on it and research into it, but they decided it wasn't worth their resources to make their web site accessible, the reason being, they use a templating system that is already in place, and to change their code and make it accessible they would pretty much have to start from scratch and build their way all the way up to where they are presently at again, and to them that wasn't... maybe the amount of users that they might get--even though I don't think they realize how large of an audience that probably is, since people who are blind probably can't drive to a branch, would probably be more likely to go to online banking and do their banking online. So they just didn't think it was worth the audience they were losing to go through the effort to make their site more accessible and to follow W3C Standards.
Aarron Walter: So how many people are on their site on a regular basis?
Holli: I don't know the exact stats. I do know that there are, I think the last number was like 75 percent of people who have accounts with our own, their web site.
Aarron: So did you make the argument of how they could save money on bandwidth and server costs by decreasing the volume of code? Roughly 700 lines of code per page. It really could be more like 80 to 100 lines of code.
Holli: Right. If it was accessible, it would be a lot less code, and that's something I should bring up to them, I haven't. It never occurred to me, just because I don't work closely with the Internet as much as I do with their Internet. I don't think they will do it, because the money they are saving by, they have already bought their content management system, and I think they have licensed it for so many years, so that being said, to them it is cheaper not to have to start from the bottom.