Wendy Chisholm

My husband and I have been role playing – heh. He’s an executive at a manufacturing company and I’m a universal design/accessibility advocate. We have mock conversations where I try a new sales pitch and he tells me why it won’t work. Yesterday, I thought I had the perfect pitch – he wasn’t shooting it down and was asking great questions, until wham! I veered off into technobabble about CSS. “You had me until you started talking technical. Frankly, I don’t care. I have people for that. I am putting out so many fires each day that you need to make this one of the hottest or we won’t get to it. I want to look at my site, see what’s wrong, and know what needs to be done to fix it.”

And, that’s the issue that we – accessibility advocates – have faced for….ever. Today, as I read Launching Your Online Community: How Not to Get Killed, I realized that we need a ten-second test or at least a ten-second pitch that will sell an executive on the idea of standards-based universal design….or at least be interesting enough that he or she will put someone to work on it. The quest continues….