10 ms·

I generally agree that shaming people for choosing lazy/convenient options is bad. Quality of life and convenience should be a primary design factor, unless it'

• prezjordan 11y ago
  Yes, I support an X% increase on my taxes to pay for wheelchair lifts on public buses. > Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more complicated than it otherwise would be. If your original design excludes a non-trivial amount of human beings then it's probably not a very good design. Of course context is necessary here, and I can't just throw a snarky one-liner at you. If you're building a puzzle game, then yeah, blind people might not be able to play it and that's okay. If you're making a signup form, then it is inexcusable to leave out folks using assistive technologies because it's "complicated."
  • IanCal 11y ago
    This is why laws around disabled access usually have use the term "reasonable adjustments" or similar. It's worth pointing out that the UK law also covers a businesses website: http://www.out-law.com/page-330 http://www.out-law.com/page-330 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/equality-act-2010-guidance https://www.gov.uk/guidance/equality-act-2010-guidance
  • chrishynes 11y ago
    Right, but there are also shades if grey... What if you're building a signup form _for_ a puzzle game, or a website about it?
    • potatolicious 11y ago
      There are many tools around these shades of grey, not all of which requires onerous effort. For example, I make mobile apps for a living - and both Android and iOS provide many tools that automatically make apps compatible by default with things like braille keyboard and screen readers. But through apathy, carelessness, and bad design/engineering, many apps break this automatic compatibility they got for free. Ditto for the web - if you're building a website for a puzzle game you'll want at least some kind of reasonable fallback, so to a blind person the website would at least make some kind of comprehensible sense rather than merely be a black hole that eats their screen reader. There are definitely cases where product creators need to go out of their way for accessibility's sake, but throughout all of software the tools to ensure a rudimentary level of accessibility already exist and are low-effort.
  • CalRobert 11y ago
    > Yes, I support an X% increase on my taxes to pay for wheelchair lifts on public buses. I agree. Considering we're happy to spend loads on the dangerous roads that often put people in wheelchairs, spending a much smaller amount to help people maimed on those roads seems only fair.
• IanCal 11y ago
  I don't know what the percentage should be, but pretty much yes. I support the disability laws in the UK as I think they make the country a better place. I think it's simply the right thing to do, and probably a financially sound decision for the country (like universal healthcare, the fit pay for hospital care they don't use). Although I think you're being a bit cheeky here in saying "a tax on every able bodied person" when it's really a tax on everyone. Everyone pays the higher price, when it only benefits a few. > it ends up taxing every single person who doesn't use or need those features. Yes, which sounds bad when you think of most regular features, implementing things that only benefit a few people. But the problem is those few people need these features on many products, and without them have massively reduced access to a huge range of things.
  • AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
    That's worse. "Everyone pays this tax, but only a tiny minority are allowed to benefit" is a horrifically unjust way to run a country. Either everyone should benefit equally, or the services should be done away with.
    • IanCal 11y ago
      This is how a huge number of incredibly successful countries work. You tax people on their ability to pay and spend the money on those who need it.
      • thescribe 11y ago
        I don't see how this doesn't create a country where there always exists a person who would be better off defecting?
        • Retra 11y ago
          Defecting how? Voluntarily stepping on a land mine so they can use free wheelchair services? Regardless, "a person" is not a major inefficiency.
        • 11y ago
• tallanvor 11y ago
  We already do that - social security and medicare in the US, for example, go in part to providing help to people with disabilities. I'd rather the author have the option of getting a small amount of help rather than having to spend more money buying pre-cut or pre-made. In his case, it might be enough for someone to come by twice a week and do the cutting and peeling for him. - It would provide him the assistance he needs while not trivializing everything he can do on his own. Obviously that might have to be scaled somewhat based on the number of people who need assistance in a certain area - maybe in large cities it makes more sense for a person to be able to order what they need so that for some people they'd be getting pre-cut fruits and veggies, others might be getting meals ready to be stuck in the oven, and some might need hot meals delivered. The key to me is to provide everyone the ability to be as independent as possible, and not have it be more expensive for them than it is for someone who isn't disabled.
  • Nutmog 11y ago
    Surely the logical conclusion of that line of reasoning is to peel the oranges and chop the veges in a centralized factory somewhere else and distribute them using a supermarket's existing efficient supply chain. Which is exactly what they did. [EDIT. Reading the label, they were were made in the same shop they're sold in.] Hiring someone to come to your house and perform the job of a factory worker makes no economic sense at all if the same job can be done in an actual factory.
    • AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
      It's a matter of numbers. If there were only 10 people in the whole country who had problems chopping/peeling veggies and fruits, obviously it'd be far more wasteful to do it in a centralized fashion. If there were 100 million, obviously it's be far more wasteful to do it via individual helpers. The question is, where is that sweet spot, and how do we weigh the environmental consequences into that equation?
      • Nutmog 11y ago
        Yeah. The sweet spot moves closer to factory-made if the product can also appeal to regular people, like these oranges. Environmental consequences? What environmental consequences come from using a plastic container? That's a whole other argument, but as long as it's being landfilled not burnt, it's not doing any harm for climate change. Landfills are pretty safe places to store unwanted plastic without it affecting the environment. Making plastic consumes finite oil, but the more we turn into plastic, the less we have to burn, so that's good for climate change.
• thatusertwo 11y ago
  We support a 2-5% tax so people can use credit cards to pay for stuff.
  • CalRobert 11y ago
    This is an astoundingly underrecognized fact. We do so much to boost economic activity by just a percent or two but how much would enabling cashless transactions WITHOUT a universal ~3% tax help things? In some places it's nearly everything we buy (except for the largest expenses, like housing).
• edent 11y ago
  > Would you support a 1% tax on every able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to help disabled people better live their lives? Yes. That was an easy question. Do you know what The Disabled community call the rest of us? The Not Yet Disabled. At some point, you're going to get old. You'll need glasses and all of a sudden that ultra-thin grey font on a stylish grey background will be a pain to read. Or you'll be in an accident and have to spend a week living with your arm in a sling, unable to use a mouse and keyboard simultaneously. Or you'll get drunk, or try to operate your TV while half asleep. Your cognitive impairment will be an impediment to interacting with the world. Even if you're the most selfish person in the world, and don't care about accessibility for people who live with an impairment now - you ought to care about how you'll cope once you become disabled. > And if yes, what do you think is a reasonable limit on X? That's like saying "what's a reasonable limit to spend on security?" You spend what's necessary.
  • 0xcde4c3db 11y ago
    > At some point, you're going to get old. A lot of people seem to believe (roughly speaking) that getting old is a lifestyle disease and will be mostly cosmetic as long as they "stay active" and "don't let age slow them down". They point to the anomaly of the guy running a marathon at 90 and don't think to ask why that's so rare when running is so popular...
  • AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > That's like saying "what's a reasonable limit to spend on security?" You spend what's necessary. That doesn't actually tell you anything. Things would be "more secure" if houses were armored like tanks and everyone was prohibited from leaving their homes without a police escort. The question is not necessity, it's cost/benefit. The whole problem with accessibility is that there are contexts when the required effort is disproportional. When it takes as much or more effort to do the accessibility as to create the product in the first place, or requires a skill set the maker doesn't normally possess. And that's pretty much always when people want to impose it. Because if you can buy a machine for $50 that will peel your oranges, that's what people who need one will do and then nobody else has to do anything. It's when such a machine is too expensive or doesn't work well enough that people want to impose the cost on someone else. That's what we're talking about here. Because there is nothing wrong with a disabled person needing to buy a peeled orange, but there is something wrong with everyone else doing the same thing. The vast majority of customers don't need it, and in that case it's wasteful and environmentally unsound and should be discouraged. The argument seems to be that disabled people shouldn't have to do something different, like asking the produce clerk to peel their oranges. But that argument burns itself to the ground. Then everyone needs to use the more expensive accessible version to avoid special-casing the people who specifically need it. Which moves the cost/benefit analysis away from accessibility, because you have to justify the added cost across the whole population rather than only where it is needed. The result would be fewer accessible products that are more expensive for everyone.
• avehn 11y ago
  Why would you need a tax? When products are originally designed with an awareness of how people with different abilities will use them there is no extra cost involved. A tax would just incentivize inaccessibility. I will concede that it does take extra time/money to bolt on accessibility features after a product has been developed. Which is why it can look like companies are being forced/shamed into fixing their inaccessible products. However, when products are put on the market with faulty or broken parts it is completely reasonable and expected that the company that created the product will pay to fix the issues. Inaccessible products are the same as broken products.
  • PaulHoule 11y ago
    I was one of the organizers of a small conference on accessibility for university and particularly university library web sites. The best slides anybody showed were two different building entrances. One of them had a stairwell plus an ugly looking ramp on the side of the building. On the other one they did some grading in the front so that the ground comes up naturally to the door, which looks great and is better for everybody.
  • RHSeeger 11y ago
    > Why would you need a tax? When products are originally designed with an awareness of how people with different abilities will use them there is no extra cost involved. That is, unfortunately, completely untrue. While there are some decisions that can be made (to improve accessibility) that do not impact the cost of development, there are many that do. While it's true that each small change tends to have only a minor cost, those costs add up when you realize there are thousands of them. They add development time, testing time, and complexity (which impacts maintainability and associated costs). I think it's worth it in most cases, but it's certainly not free.
  • Grishnakh 11y ago
    You're obviously not an engineer. The more requirements you have, the more complex the design process becomes and the more it costs. This isn't to say you shouldn't bother, but it does add extra cost. Now as I said, this doesn't mean you shouldn't ever bother, but you have to weigh the costs and benefits. Making a product more accessible can get you more customers, which means more money. You can also make the product more appealing to more customers, even non-disabled ones: for instance, suppose you make your software product so that the color scheme can be changed, so that color-blind people can tweak it to see it better. Non-color-blind people may find out about this feature and rave about it because they can also use it to tweak it for their tastes (perhaps with a "dark" theme), rather than being stuck with whatever boring color scheme your designers chose to appeal to the masses. This could drive up your sales, even though the original motivation was disabled people.
• ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
  "In all these ways, when going out of your way to make something more accessible-friendly, it ends up taxing every single person who doesn't use or need those features." Actually that's not always the case. In many instances, designing with accessibility in mind increases your customer base and drives more revenue. It's actually a decent size "market" which makes designing for/implementing with accessibility in mind an investment instead of a burden.
  • wyager 11y ago
    If that is true, then businesses can make that decision for themselves. I've always found it funny when people propose some new red tape or requirement and then say "oh, it'll good for business!". Of course, if that were actually the case, the red tape wouldn't be necessary.
    • mcguire 11y ago
      Ever wonder about the red tape and bureaucracy behind those maximum capacity signs in restaurants and bars? I've always found it funny that most people don't realize that anything more than 3 months out is "too long term to worry about" in the business world.
    • ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
      I'm not proposing any new red tape or a requirement though, merely pointing out that there can be a win-win here. And yes, many large scale end-user facing app teams make a business decision to implement their UIs with accessibility in mind. For web apps specifically it's not that big of a deal these days with screen readers getting reasonably sophisticated making the additional dev effort negligible for medium-large projects.
    • npizzolato 11y ago
      That's only true if businesses act with perfect rationality towards long-term thinking and have perfect information, which is obviously not true. The middle manager with numbers to hit for the quarter probably doesn't care to do the research to see if the company would benefit from being more accessible. The project manager who doesn't really know have any disabled people may not even think about accessibility when designing the main initiatives for next year. And on and on.
• RodericDay 11y ago
  Rather than move into the fully abstract and general, I'd actually love to learn more about the specifics of this particular problem. I wonder if regular unpeeled tangerines can be made more accessible with a few smart perforations on their skin, or a tool that does it.
• PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  > Honest question for disability supporters though: Would you support a 1% tax on every able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to help disabled people better live their lives? Yes, absolutely. I realize it's been tainted by association with Marx, but "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is still the best fundamental social principle I can think of. It doesn't even have to be purely altruistic--I want myself and my loved ones to be cared for when we are sick or hurt or disabled; therefore it's only fair and just that I do the same for others. > would you support a X% tax on every single able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to better help all disabled people? And if yes, what do you think is a reasonable limit on X? I haven't studied the problem nearly enough to state a single figure, but broadly the answer is "whatever is necessary and sufficient for the comfort and happiness of both able and disabled." Also "from each according to his ability," of course--in any case I think it's pretty well-established that progressive tax > flat tax. (That said, I respectfully think there must be a better/less wasteful way to make oranges available to people with limited hand strength. Making peeling a free service from the produce department, available on request, seems reasonable; or possibly supplying a device for the purpose, either a cheap take-home item or a countertop dingus at the store.)
  • PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    I seem to be asking this a lot lately, but what's with the downvotes? I was asked an honest, polite question, and I answered it honestly and politely. Is this knee-jerk hate because I mentioned Marx, or what?
    • EdHominem 11y ago
      I think it's not as much mentioning Marx, but seriously mentioning him - as if those words as a solution. If people choose to live in a Kibbutz then that's the sort of attitude they should have, yes. But if they aren't choosing that, then "from each according to his ability" is slavery. It's not magically okay (and, worse in an argument sense, isn't magically workable) simply because it's a social good in question. > Making peeling a free service from the produce department, available on request, seems reasonable For a store to choose, free peeling is fine. The meat department will often do special cuts for you for free if it's not an abusive request. But when you mandate that the store do it you're just stealing from everyone. Labor isn't free and to mandate that someone perform it without compensation means they either won't sell oranges, or will simply jack the prices up. If orange prices go up too much the people who don't need peeled oranges will buy other fruits and the orange demand will dry up. If you're so set on peeled oranges, why not instead pass a law that makes the government pay all labor charges from orange peeling? Rank it against other things, find space in the budget. Make sure nobody in unevenly penalized in the deal. And the answer of course is that nobody is willing to pay for it. When it's not "free" (ie someone else's burden) nobody wants it enough. If we really do want the disabled to live better lives we need to make a principled stand and actually pay more tax to fund higher pensions and give them more cash, which they can spend on orange peeling or hawaiian vacations, as they see fit. Stores could offer free peeling (at a higher base price) to capture this spend, home-care workers would have time (budget) to peel unpeeled oranges, independent orange-peeling services could possibly be economically viable. Perhaps this would spur the invention of an orange-peeling machine, if this really ended up being a pain point. tl;dr You seem fine with making other people work for goals you see as good. If you really cared (enough to spend your own money too) you'd propose fixing the problem at the source and letting the details work themselves out. It's the attitude, not the quote.
• nkrisc 11y ago
  I'd say a reasonable limit is "whatever it takes to help our fellow humans to live dignified and satisfying lives." It's a choice. There's nothing that says we, as a society, have to do this at all. We could leave disabled people to the wolves if we wanted. But we don't. And I choose not to. It's not about some greater or absolute morality, it's simply the morals I choose. Don't forget, you're just one car wreck away from not being able to peel an orange. Could be tomorrow, could be never. You'll never know until it happens.
  • EdHominem 11y ago
    That's the thing, it's really easy to say something that sounds good, like "helping our fellows" and "dignified and satisfying lives", but "whatever it takes" is a license for tyranny. It'll end up being selectively enforced. We obviously don't care much as a society because we let junkies die on the street, but the rule will be used to make some webdev firm spend millions making a puzzle-game accessible because of a flash outrage-mob and a some politician cashing in. If something like this was to really work it'd have to be done economically, from the bottom-up. Rather than dropping an obligation on the world, fund the disabled (higher pensions) to pay to make things accessible. If there aren't enough accessible puzzle game there'll be a large pool of money seeking them, and if nobody cares, nobody is burdened. As we're discovering with foreign aid - the wrong aid hurts, and the right aid looks like cash handouts. But that won't work because nobody is actually willing to pay anything to help, they're just willing to legally oblige others to work for free.
• lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
  One of the things your comparison glosses over is the instances in which decisions made in the name of "accessibility" end up being more widely applicable. The classic example I see a lot is the idea of the wheel chair access ramp. Able people on bikes, anyone dragging a wheeled cart or bag, etc; they all get some tangible benefit from having ramp access. There's a certain danger in design spec to the "average" since any individual user is likely to have some diverse collection of needs and targeting what appears to be niche, can end up being much more representative than the "average" might suggest.
• mcguire 11y ago
  "Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more complicated than it otherwise would be. It bloats the product spec. Makes the implementation more complex, which in turn makes it harder to understand and maintain in the future. It makes the manufacturing more onerous." It also makes it easier to use for just about everyone. It's the same tradeoff you have to think about whenever you are building something for other people to use instead of just for yourself.
  • paulryanrogers 11y ago
    Very true, yet the costs are often significant for what most would consider minor. For example speech recognition makes a lot of things easier but can significantly impact the computer's performance.
    • mcguire 11y ago
      No doubt, and I am certain many developers are using speech recognition because it's cool, rather than for any specific benefit. But still, many users seem to think it is a valuable feature, too.
• SilasX 11y ago
  Virtually every commenter responding is missing the point of your question (how high an X, and why? What are the tradeoffs?) and is instead moralizing about the rather obvious point that helping the disabled is good (and X for them is higher than 1%), or changing the topic to cases where accessibility improvements help everyone. Very frustrating.
• adiabatty 11y ago
  > would you support a X% tax on every single able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to better help all disabled people? No. First, you'd have to figure out whether someone is able-bodied or not. Do you think the IRS is equipped to handle disability claims? There are all sorts of disabilities that aren't bad enough to qualify someone for permanent disability because they're not _that_ bad, not permanent, or both. Then, once collected, where would the money go? Assuming the fund isn't raided to cover for shortfalls elsewhere — something that happens regularly here in California — the money would get handed out to whomever has the most convincing/numerous lobbyists. This seems like a strictly worse solution than what we have already: people go on partial or permanent disability, get a check cut to them, and then they go out and buy whatever'll make their lives better, not what some person in the capital thinks that people "who have a disability" would want. Nevermind that there's _thousands_ of _different_ ways one can be disabled, all requiring different modifications… There's also a lot of overlap between "good for people with some particular disabilities" and "good for lazy people". Would you be in favor of Procter & Gamble lobbying for and getting federal funds to make Swiffers? I wouldn't, even though I think pre-moistened mopping sheets are great — that's naked corporate welfare! Most of us have seen poorly-designed enterprise software and have figured out that they're poorly designed, in part, because the end users are not the buyers and have little input into the buying process. I'd expect a "have A tax B and give the money to C ostensibly for D's benefit" to suffer from the same sorts of principal-agent* problem. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]