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But that revenue isn't free. It has a cost in terms of time and effort in engineering the IE support, and then maintaining it. This is time and effort that coul

But that revenue isn't free. It has a cost in terms of time and effort in engineering the IE support, and then maintaining it. This is time and effort that could be better spent enhancing the site in other ways. For example, ~20% of the US population has a disability[1]. Investing effort in improving accessibility would be more sensible, economically speaking, than maintaining IE support, but I still see developers spending hours working around IE CSS bugs, while doing almost nothing to improve accessibility. [1] http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb12-ff16.html http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_f...

notahacker 10y ago
I'd imagine the 20% of the US population that has a disability translates into rather less than 4% of potential users of the average website helped by any particular engineering solution... (apart from basic common-sense design principles like not having tiny buttons or a layout so sensitive it breaks if people bump the text size up)
saurik 10y ago
Most of the people in that 20% likely have a disability that keeps them from working or walking but not from using a computer in a normal fashion. That said, you are responding to my incredulity, and I take disabilities sufficiently at least sufficiently seriously that a blind person presents every year at the conference we have been running for our ecosystem and we get tons of praise for our support of their issues. In some cases, I will even argue that supporting old browsers is related to accessibility: if you are making a product such as a communications tool, one where many if not most users don't directly pay you for their use as you make money from a subset of users, people on older browsers are often people with older computers, who have lower income and less ability to arbitrarily plunk down money to upgrade their technology. Just as we legally mandate people consider the needs of the disabled, I personally think we might be in need of some regulation that demands we also consider the needs of the poor and disconnected: there are tons of users (by which I mean "entire percentage points, by number competitive with blind people as a group of users but with less sympathy from the public") using older versions of browsers because they were stranded by Apple on an older iPod or iPhone with an out-of-date version of MobileSafari, or who would have to pay for a new version of Windows to even be able to use Chrome, or whose only access to a computer is a shared facility where the computers run something they have no control over. When we build websites that don't let them use our service, we essentially are building an implicit class hierarchy.

notahacker 10y ago

I'd imagine the 20% of the US population that has a disability translates into rather less than 4% of potential users of the average website helped by any particular engineering solution... (apart from basic common-sense design principles like not having tiny buttons or a layout so sensitive it breaks if people bump the text size up)

saurik 10y ago

Most of the people in that 20% likely have a disability that keeps them from working or walking but not from using a computer in a normal fashion. That said, you are responding to my incredulity, and I take disabilities sufficiently at least sufficiently seriously that a blind person presents every year at the conference we have been running for our ecosystem and we get tons of praise for our support of their issues. In some cases, I will even argue that supporting old browsers is related to accessibility: if you are making a product such as a communications tool, one where many if not most users don't directly pay you for their use as you make money from a subset of users, people on older browsers are often people with older computers, who have lower income and less ability to arbitrarily plunk down money to upgrade their technology. Just as we legally mandate people consider the needs of the disabled, I personally think we might be in need of some regulation that demands we also consider the needs of the poor and disconnected: there are tons of users (by which I mean "entire percentage points, by number competitive with blind people as a group of users but with less sympathy from the public") using older versions of browsers because they were stranded by Apple on an older iPod or iPhone with an out-of-date version of MobileSafari, or who would have to pay for a new version of Windows to even be able to use Chrome, or whose only access to a computer is a shared facility where the computers run something they have no control over. When we build websites that don't let them use our service, we essentially are building an implicit class hierarchy.