Taking a Leaf out of an old book

With awareness of standards and accessibility being raised by groups such as WaSP, companies and organisations across many sectors have adopted standards. Sometimes their decision to do so might have been commercial, other times out of a need to comply. I know that sometimes no clear decision was taken and that the adoption was made possible thanks to internal evangelists and at other times by chance through choosing the right agency.

But the growth of adoption can be fragile. When internal enthusiasts change jobs or clients choose new suppliers, this hard work and our shining examples can disappear overnight. Of these examples, enough is never enough and today we still need more organisations to light the way, not by accident but by design. The question is how to achieve this and I wonder whether my experiences in the early days of professional digital photography might somehow provide a strategy?

Digital photography will never become a reality

Back in 1992, digital camera maker Leaf introduced the Leaf DCB (digital camera back). With digital cameras and camera phones now household items, it may seem hard to imagine that back then the Leaf DCB was truly groundbreaking, despite being incapable of capturing moving images in colour. The original Leaf CCD chip made colour images by taking three separate exposures through a colour filter wheel containing red, green and blue filters rendering it useless for capturing anything but studio still-life. It captured only a 12Mb file, cost over £40,000 (without a camera body, lens, Mac or software) and was the size, shape and weight of a house brick.

During these early days no one was buying digital cameras. Professional photographers, renowned for their adversity to spending large sums of money, considered the DCB too expensive and too limiting. They argued that since their clients were not asking for digital images that they need not push the new technology on them. Repro-houses and printers who made their fortunes scanning transparencies and the old-fashioned analogue film-to-film workflow saw digital photography as a major threat to their business. They crossed their fingers, smiled and lied that digital photography would never become a reality. Clients were in the dark too, hemmed in on all sides by disinformation and were left with no confidence that digital images were either reliable nor desirable, despite their obvious benefits of reduced costs, greater flexibility and improved quality from capture to print.

Silicon Imaging

Digital cameras did not sell in any quantity worth noting and responsibility for the DCB passed from Leaf to Scitex (who had bought the company) and on to reseller Silicon Imaging (now Lastra) where I worked for a number of years with two inspirational people, Jo Simons and Mark Middlebrook.

Jo was a master strategist and realised that not only could he use digital cameras to change the photographic industry, but that digital photography would also usher in a new era in colour repro and print. He decided to target not grass-roots photographers but instead the top clients in four market sectors, (mail-order catalogues, high-street retail, supermarkets and food). Not selling equipment to them directly, but demonstrating the clear benefits to them and encouraging them to ensure that their suppliers gave them these benefits.

Within two years Dixons, BCA (World Books), Sotheby’s, Christies, Cadbury’s, Nestle and more were either shooting digitally themselves or demanding digital images from their suppliers. Supermarket giant Safeway were so convinced of the benefits that they commissioned Silicon Imaging to work with all their photographic and repro suppliers to adopt a digital workflow. Within these two years, digital camera usage mushroomed and there was no looking back.

Can the same strategy work today?

The genius of Jo’s strategy was in taking a top-down approach, creating a demand by focussing our attentions on the client and convincing them of the benefits of new approaches and technologies. Can the same strategy work today for the adoption of standards and accessibility? To create a more stable and sustained expansion, should we now be focussing our attention on the leaders on particular sectors and the sites of major online resellers, software vendors, banks or supermarkets in addition to working to educate web designers and software houses?

Thoughts?

Replies

1. #1 On February 26, 2006 01:15 AM luxuryluke said:

   Let’s do it!

2. #2 On February 26, 2006 02:42 AM Andy Hume said:

   I think this can certainly be a good approach.

   If top level stakeholders really do understand the benefits of standards and accessibility for themselves, then that will surely filter down to the grass roots. Who’s paying the bills, right?

   Andy, do you feel that we have perhaps reached a critical mass in terms of reaching out to developers themselves, or that the adoption of standards has slowed down a little?

3. #3 On February 26, 2006 03:14 AM Hyeonseok Shin said:

   Good strategy, I think.

   Educations and promotions have its limitations that developers and clients may not adopt the standatds message without strong market demand. With change of major company, the standards demand will spread widely.

4. #4 On February 26, 2006 05:14 PM Gareth Rushgrove said:

   Good analogy - hopefully. Who does everyone see as the people to ’get to’ and how to get to them? A concerted, organised effort or more of an ad hoc individual effort.

5. #5 On February 26, 2006 08:22 PM stuart said:

   You got your end abbr tag in the wrong place in para 3, cheers

   (Ed says: Thanks Stuart, those code monkeys are being whipped as we speak.)

6. #6 On February 27, 2006 01:35 AM Nathan said:

   I think this approach will work. I am attempting to infiltrate everyone I work near with the idea of accessibility, not just for the web. But, since I do mainly work on web stuff, I really try to promote standards and things to the other companies I come in contact with.

   Sadly, I am not in contact with any leader of any industry (well maybe one, but cutting hair won’t do it).

   How do we infiltrate the top minds of our industry?

7. #7 On February 27, 2006 01:54 AM Scott said:

   First up, I have to say I must agree totally with your opening statement. When I got back from my 4 week holiday I noticed a drop in good xhtml and css practices throughout our source code.

   We also got a new guy recently and it’s taken him ages to understand why you’d separate content and style… and why not use tables for layout. His main argument is consistency across varying browsers.. anyway.

   This does sound like a good idea. It’d be good to see Microsoft have a decent stab at it!

8. #8 On February 27, 2006 02:05 AM Alex McKee said:

   Absolutely. *IF* the board of directors of companies can be convinced of a real boon in utilising web standards and more accessible techniques then there will not only be pressure from the designer who may fold for financial reasons, but from above, effectively leading to the middle management reluctantly falling in line.

   The trick lies in convincing the big companies. Perhaps the WASP and other such organisations can run a business conference on standards and invite leading corporate directors to it, and leading designers to speak and present a clear no-geeky-talk set of reasons to switch then we will achieve this.

   Is such a thing possible? Andy, Molly et al?

9. #9 On February 27, 2006 04:32 PM Scott said:

   Your link to (Creo)Scitex is broken. To continue the string of acquisitions, Scitex was purchased by Creo Products Inc. and renamed CreoScitex. Creo Products Inc. later decided to consolidate both companies under one name: Creo Inc. Approximately a year after that they got bought out by Kodak. The Creo name lives on in the Creo Print On-Demand Systems Group, a subgroup of Kodak Graphics Communications Group.

   https://www.creo.com/

10. #10 On February 28, 2006 12:51 AM Ben Buchanan said:

    I think the strategy is good, just depends what the "top" is for the web industry to go "top down" :)

    eg. we can work on clients, but it would also really help if a few high-profile sites and a few key web application vendors came to the party.

    I’m thinking sites like Google and Amazon; and companies like Oracle (PeopleSoft), IBM (Lotus Notes), Blackboard (higher ed LCMS).

    I’ve seen quite a few people say ’why go to standards if site x and application y work just fine without them’. They generally don’t believe that actually they don’t ’work just fine’, they ’just work’ ;)

11. #11 On February 28, 2006 01:13 AM Malarkey said:

    @ Scott: Oooo, a history of Scitex. I worked for them too once :)

    @ Ben: "but it would also really help if a few high-profile sites and a few key web application vendors came to the party."

    This is exactly the approach that we took with digital photography, picking top targets in different sectors and approaching their top-brass directly and always at Director rather than Management or operational levels.

    @ Alex: "Perhaps the WASP and other such organisations can run a business conference on standards and invite leading corporate directors to it, and leading designers to speak and present a clear no-geeky-talk set of reasons to switch then we will acheive this. Is such a thing possible? Andy, Molly et al?"

    Molly, what do you think?

12. #12 On February 28, 2006 02:04 AM Tom said:

    Yea, sounds like a plan.