In a word: online. Not too long ago, the medium that packed the biggest outreach punch was television — hands down. But the remote is giving ground to the mouse as more and more people spend their downtime surfing the Web, managing their social network presence, blogging, shopping and generally just contributing to the collective interactive experience.

Need proof? Television’s biggest adherents are baby boomers. Those tweens, teens and millenials, pockets heavy with parental discretionary income, aren’t camped in front of the set. As explained in the latest edition of Variety:

According to a study released by Magna Global’s Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets’ average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That’s the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago — and the first time the nets’ median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo.

If your objective is to influence boomers, the idiot box may still have its merits. If, however, you’re hoping to interact with the next generation, your efforts are bound to fizzle on television. Instead, enhancing your online presence and your ability to create an engaging user community, is proving to be the smart play.

I was once given a piece of advice, when stressing over all the possible outcomes of a given situation. It was that I should not give the largest part of my attention to the smallest possibility. It was sound advice, I admit, and I bet actuaries everywhere would agree. It’s often inefficient or cost-prohibitive to accommodate every possible situation, so best to plan for the most likely, the more typical, the top of the bell curve . . . right?

Tell that to the deaf person trying to watch that must see trailer for America’s Greatest Dog on the CBS website. The video isn’t captioned, so that viewer can’t experience it. Potential viewer lost indeed. Oh, no one was going to watch that anyway? Ok, well then consider being blind and trying to change your shipping address on Amazon or navigate your TV’s menu system. As the video and article on Washington Post.com indicate, it’s no easy feat. You know, I don’t think that video is captioned. Is that irony?

Enter the actuary to argue that perhaps it’s more cost-effective to lose those viewer and users than to accommodate them. According to the rather non-exact stats I dug up, the deaf population is incredibly small, as is the blind population so perhaps the choice is to not plan for the minority. I mean, why else NOT caption your content? Or why not build a site easily navigable for the blind?

Well, let’s acknowledge that there are lots of types of web sites out there. A marketing micro site, reliant on a certain illustrations or type of animation, for example, may never translate well to a screen reader. But that’s not to say the messages shouldn’t somehow be available via other means. If your site is providing information or a service, why wouldn’t you make your site accessible to everyone? As Olivia Norman was quoted in the Washington Post article, “The Internet has revolutionized my life, but there are still basic things that are still completely inaccessible to people like me.”

Thanks to the 1998 congressional amendment to section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, Federal agencies are required to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. In the biz, we say things like, “this site has to be 508” which tells the production team that certain things must be done in order to make the content accessible. It’s not to say we don’t always consider accessibility, but there are some projects when the subject gets more attention than others. It comes down to purpose, audience, and yes, money.

At the 2007 Ideas conference one speaker (forgive my vagueness, it was seven months ago!) made a point that sticks with me and often gets shared with our clients: Section 508 is rather general. It says, in short, “make the content accessible”. It does not specify HOW EASILY accessible or even BY WHAT MEANS accessible. So developers still have many choices while abiding by the regulation.

If you watched the interview with Ms. Norman, you might have noticed she rarely says something can’t be done. She says it’s difficult or time consuming. So the question for developers is are you building a site to simply be accessible or are you building a site to be usable? Usability is about how easy a site is to use, and to me and certainly to those with hearing or vision impairment, a usable site is more valuable than one that checks the “we’re accessible” box.