How many users actually disable JS for these (or any other) reasons? Might it be...

robin_reala · on Sept 20, 2016

Last time we checked we get ~180k visits a month from people who specifically disable JS, ~810k further visits a month from people who don’t have JS available.

So no, it’d be more expensive to have a call centre.

asib · on Sept 20, 2016

I don't like this idea because it sacrifices ease of use in order to make small savings during the development phase. You shouldn't subject your users to extra grate where possible, and I think this is especially true for a government site.

richmarr · on Sept 20, 2016

My suspicion is that maintaining a call centre is more expensive than using progressive enhancement... but it's a fair question.

You're also assuming that starting from a simple HTML implementation is more expensive than other methods. I'm not sure that's the case.

As a rule, in terms of accessing public services at least, I'd be inclined to be very careful to make sure it was as accessible as possible.