I used to think that my web sites were all good. I didn’t care that x% of users couldn’t see the pictures on my site. I wasn’t concerned about 25% (although it’s now closer to 5%) of users that didn’t use IE. The other 75% was enough.

However, having worked closely with some users I now see my mistakes. There are still people out there on 9600 dial-up connections, IE4 or NN4 on 486 hand-me-down PCs (no, I havn’t forgotten about macs, they just don’t get given away).

Farmers around New Zealand have to cope with all sorts of connectivity issues. I was amazed that less that 20 minutes drive from home it is virually impossible to get on the net at faster than 32000

While these people are a minority they are significant, as are visually-impaired users. The analogy that Mark Harris from the eGovernment Unit uses is a comparson of the number of legally blind people in New Zealand to the population of Hamilton (I would use Tauranga, it does’t have the same negative connotations). The Government can’t afford to ignore a population the size of Hamilton so have developed the (excellent imho) Web Guidelines.

Taking this analogy further, and applying it to business, do you know any nationwide bricks and mortar organisation that would deliberately ignore a whole city? Imagine for example if a bank closed all of its Hamilton (or Tauranga) branches.

This is why from now on all of the websites that I build, Government or not, will comply with the eGovernment guidelines.

For those that want to build a business case <isolani /> has a great starting point.