As a web developer who focuses on accessibility, why is it so goddamn hard to get buy-in for accessible design?!

If you design to be the most accessible possible regular users benefit from an experience that works, for as many people as possible, in more situations than most test for normally!

Because most people just buy shit that looks good, and not something that's practical. Sadly.

@areimus Fair point. But I'm more alluding to the notion that our marketers would rather something look pretty but function horribly rather then sacrifice some minimal aesthetics for it to function well for all of our users.

I find it hard to sell any time spent on accessibility... in saying that I probably don't focus on it as much as I should.

@Vip3rDev have any specific examples of non-accessible design choices you've had to deal with?

@Vip3rDev agreed, there should be a balance between aesthetics and accessibility. have you tried showing them instances where "x" changes, made "y" difference in a quantifiable manner? (although the correlation may sometimes be dubious, marketers love anything with a percentage on it)

these marketers should (i hope) also understand "user retention", and that it costs a lot less to retain an active user, than it is to acquire a new one. it's really the equivalent of trying to collect water in a bucket with holes.

@not-the-droid yes, quite a few.

They constantly ask for things like jQuery lightbox sliders or accordion content sections and then don't plan for how a keyboard user might have to navigate through the slider or in/out of the accordion content.

Lots of accessibility is writing solid, symantic markup using proper elements when available. Can't count the number of vendors who said they understand accessible design and then deliver just totally shit quality code.