6 ms·

Accessibility costs a lot of money and it's a perfectly valid observation that one can skimp on it for profit. You may call it immoral, I call it mathematics.

by Kenji 9y ago

MBCook 9y ago
Except that makes things easier for everyone else too. For example I often can't watch videos at work. If that's the only way to get information about your product or fix to an issues you might as well be speaking Martian in that video I can't use it.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  The engines behind Alexa and Google Assistant have decent enough accuracy, I'm not sure why there couldn't be a product to run the audio through those to get subtitles. When there's not a single audio source for the main speaker, that becomes a problem, but that's the fault of the people recording it for not getting a clean audio source. However, in practice, this is rarely going to be the case for something like a product video because the studio will have recorded it correctly in isolated sound rooms. We're automatically reverting to "a human should do it" with adding aria tags, video subtitles, and screen readers. That is the problem because developers often have many other things to worry about -- database, security, scalability, maintenance, documentation. Accessibility gets put right beside those and it's no wonder developers don't prioritize it.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    It doesn't work well enough. We're no where NEAR it working well enough. People invent new words (product names, technologies), the text isn't synced to the video, there is background noise, the speech-to-text engine doesn't have the context of the video to guess which homophone is correct. Technology is not the magic bullet to fix everything. We're no where near that place. In the mean time, I still can't use your site. And neither can people with any number of other issues (medical, environmental, simple bandwidth, etc). Don't pawn it off on tech, people need to take responsibility for this kind of stuff.
cbhl 9y ago
More importantly, accessibility is hard and complicated. There aren't good tools for collaboratively captioning videos ala a Google Doc. ARIA is a massively complicated spec that is much harder than <font color="red"> tags. There are simple and easy tools for making inaccessible content (Flash was a big one). It is much, much harder to make accessible content, and it shouldn't be that way.
- tmd83 9y ago
  Financial perspective is an issue but this also. Its complicated and its not directly related to your core work/competency. One uses a lot of frameworks/tools to build on top of what if they are accessible and you can't build the thing completely on your own? Its quite to get started to be sure which one is just some regulatory checklist and which ones actually matter. I have trying to be knowledgeable on this but compared to normal web development informations are both sparse and harder to grok. And its also much harder to test/validate than just checking if my script/css is working/looking right. I have done very little screenreader tests but it somethings they are terribly good at working through and some things break too easily. It might make perfect sense for an accessibility expert but can be very non-intuitive for a regular developer.
- falcolas 9y ago
  Perfect compliance with Sccessibility can be hard and complicated; but have another look at the original article. The things being asked for are not hard or complicated. Making no effort just because a perfect effort would be hard comes across as a cop out. Would we accept this so easily if we were discussing testing?
  - cbhl 9y ago
    If you can push back on $BOSS, certainly. But, frankly, it's way too easy to make inaccessible content. It should be impossible to make inaccessible content. We could have browsers and/or compilers that just break the whole page if it isn't accessible.
  - vacri 9y ago
    I dunno, satisfying both "not low contrast" and "not bright colour schemes" together, along with a good design in general, requires a moderate amount of knowledge. I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be done, but the idea that it's effortless is simply not true.
Spivak 9y ago
If this is truly the case then website accessibility will end up going the way of physical disability accommodations -- legally required.
- tyingq 9y ago
  It has in some cases. In the US, The DOT requires it for airline websites.
panglott 9y ago
Ultimately you're mostly talking about the cost of digital typography.
II2II 9y ago
The cost of accessibility depends upon many factors. If your design starts with accessibility in mind, the costs can be minimal. Keep in mind that the use of small and low contrast elements is a design decision. If the decision is made to use large and high contrast elements from the start, there should be no difference in the development costs. Making it possible to scale pages for pages where things are laid out spatially is far more difficult and incurs much more testing, yet costs can be reduced if the decision is made from the outset. Even the more difficult factors, such as captioning images and videos, can be eased if planning is done ahead. The problem with arguing that it's 'mathematics' is that there are many variables involved in the equation. If the variables use values for poor planning and design decisions, the result is going to be a much higher cost. If the variables use values for solid planning and design decisions, the difference is going to be much lower. Of course it also depends upon the media being used, so it is very difficult to use that equation to make generalizations for all cases.
Arcsech 9y ago
"Accessibility costs money" is a popular thing to say, but I'm not convinced that needs to be true. Okay, fine, captioning/transcribing videos I'll give you, but many of the other issues on this page can be addressed for a web page just by not breaking the defaults. By default, links are underlined. For text content, many major browsers (Firefox and mobile Safari for sure) include a "reader mode" or similar where the user can adjust their own contrast - as long as you don't break your HTML and prevent the reader mode from working. Web pages are black and while by default, so anything with lots of bright colors is something you have to do intentionally. Animations are also something you have to add intentionally. It really seems like just by not breaking the defaults (I.e., no work at all) your web page should do a decent (not perfect) job of being accessible. But we're so obsessed with making things shiny and swooshy that we've lost sight of that.
- SilasX 9y ago
  >"Accessibility costs money" is a popular thing to say, but I'm not convinced that needs to be true. Okay, fine, captioning/transcribing videos I'll give you, Even that one is overstated. Sure, taking some existing video, and treating it as the only representation of the content, and then trying to transcribe it -- that's expensive. But virtually every such video (esp. lectures) intended for conveying information is going to correspond to some text equivalent, and they can just post that in a place that's easy to find. Not only is it cheap, many users who can hear will prefer that version. I think it's just a widespread attitude problem (for lack of a more refined diagnosis). It's not just big institutions, but discussion forums where some users will stubbornly link a video as their only citation, and won't even take the time to summarize the key point they think it's substantiating.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    Can you elaborate why do you assume that such videos are likely to have a text equivalent? You bring up lectures as example - I certainly don't have transcripts of lectures I've given, and neither do most professors/lecturers/whatever that I know; a few of them have most of their talk content in their slides but that's a horrible practice that distracts from effective lecture or presentation; in general all the non-audio material is intended to be a supplement to the talk and either are not meaningful without it (e.g. illustrations) or are not representative of the talk (e.g. a textbook chapter that's mostly about the same topic, but different). The recorded audio (if it'd be recorded) would literally be the only copy of the content of that lecture in existence. The same applies for many other genres of video content. Most videos aren't scripted, and thus no script exists; heck, even videos that are clearly well prepared, staged and filmed with multiple takes (e.g. many of "youtube creators") generally don't have a script beforehand, the textual content is improvised on the spot and doesn't exist in written form unless it gets transcribed. Interviews and podcasts are other good examples - as you say, many users who can hear would prefer to read it, I certainly would, but the obvious reality is that the textual version of those things does not exist unless it gets made, and making it takes much more time than recording the interview or podcast in the first place.
reaperducer 9y ago
There's a word for people like you: Sociopath.
- sctb 9y ago
  No matter what we're replying to, personal attacks like this aren't OK on Hacker News.
jxramos 9y ago
Just thought it would be worth pointing out some other costs we don't typically consider here besides development costs is litigation costs... The most troubling wave of ADA litigation is just beginning to crest. The ADA’s next frontier—and next target of litigation—is the most innovative segment of the domestic economy: e-commerce. The latest trend in ADA litigation is suing commercial websites that aren’t sufficiently accessible to the disabled—because, for instance, they lack assistive technologies for the blind or hearing-impaired. Even though the ADA was enacted before websites became ubiquitous, many courts have interpreted the term “public accommodation” in Title III to encompass the Internet, and will entertain suits applying to it. In 2008, Target paid $6 million to settle a class-action suit brought by the National Federation of the Blind charging that the retailer’s website was allegedly insufficiently accessible to blind customers. Target also paid nearly $4 million in costs and attorneys’ fees to the plaintiffs. Why would Target pay $10 million to settle a case when the law is unsettled and its culpability far from certain? Class-action lawsuits are particularly expensive to defend, and because the potential liability is aggregated to reflect the entire class (all blind consumers, in this example), the financial exposure for a firm if it loses in court presents an unacceptable risk to most corporate defendants. https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-litigation-monster-15128.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-litigation-monster-151...
- zie 9y ago
  This also happened with Netflix over captioning: https://www.nad.org/2011/06/16/nad-files-disability-civil-rights-lawsuit-against-netflix/ https://www.nad.org/2011/06/16/nad-files-disability-civil-ri... Netflix now does the right thing and captions everything.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    Was there a tradeoff involved there? Is there content that is not in the Netflix catalog today because of the costs of closed-captioning the rest of the catalog? If that is the case, are Netflix's customers better or worse off, individually and collectively? Is society better or worse off? (I don't have a clear answer, and I'm not sure there's an objectively clear answer, but I do think that there are tradeoffs in these discussions that are sometimes hidden/ignored.)

Accessibility costs a lot of money and it's a perfectly valid observation that one can skimp on it for profit. You may call it immoral, I call it mathematics.

by Kenji 9y ago

Accessibility costs a lot of money and it's a perfectly valid observation that one can skimp on it for profit. You may call it immoral, I call it mathematics.

MBCook 9y ago

Except that makes things easier for everyone else too. For example I often can't watch videos at work. If that's the only way to get information about your product or fix to an issues you might as well be speaking Martian in that video I can't use it.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
The engines behind Alexa and Google Assistant have decent enough accuracy, I'm not sure why there couldn't be a product to run the audio through those to get subtitles. When there's not a single audio source for the main speaker, that becomes a problem, but that's the fault of the people recording it for not getting a clean audio source. However, in practice, this is rarely going to be the case for something like a product video because the studio will have recorded it correctly in isolated sound rooms. We're automatically reverting to "a human should do it" with adding aria tags, video subtitles, and screen readers. That is the problem because developers often have many other things to worry about -- database, security, scalability, maintenance, documentation. Accessibility gets put right beside those and it's no wonder developers don't prioritize it.
- MBCook 9y ago
  It doesn't work well enough. We're no where NEAR it working well enough. People invent new words (product names, technologies), the text isn't synced to the video, there is background noise, the speech-to-text engine doesn't have the context of the video to guess which homophone is correct. Technology is not the magic bullet to fix everything. We're no where near that place. In the mean time, I still can't use your site. And neither can people with any number of other issues (medical, environmental, simple bandwidth, etc). Don't pawn it off on tech, people need to take responsibility for this kind of stuff.

cbhl 9y ago

More importantly, accessibility is hard and complicated. There aren't good tools for collaboratively captioning videos ala a Google Doc. ARIA is a massively complicated spec that is much harder than <font color="red"> tags. There are simple and easy tools for making inaccessible content (Flash was a big one). It is much, much harder to make accessible content, and it shouldn't be that way.

tmd83 9y ago
Financial perspective is an issue but this also. Its complicated and its not directly related to your core work/competency. One uses a lot of frameworks/tools to build on top of what if they are accessible and you can't build the thing completely on your own? Its quite to get started to be sure which one is just some regulatory checklist and which ones actually matter. I have trying to be knowledgeable on this but compared to normal web development informations are both sparse and harder to grok. And its also much harder to test/validate than just checking if my script/css is working/looking right. I have done very little screenreader tests but it somethings they are terribly good at working through and some things break too easily. It might make perfect sense for an accessibility expert but can be very non-intuitive for a regular developer.
falcolas 9y ago
Perfect compliance with Sccessibility can be hard and complicated; but have another look at the original article. The things being asked for are not hard or complicated. Making no effort just because a perfect effort would be hard comes across as a cop out. Would we accept this so easily if we were discussing testing?
- cbhl 9y ago
  If you can push back on $BOSS, certainly. But, frankly, it's way too easy to make inaccessible content. It should be impossible to make inaccessible content. We could have browsers and/or compilers that just break the whole page if it isn't accessible.
- vacri 9y ago
  I dunno, satisfying both "not low contrast" and "not bright colour schemes" together, along with a good design in general, requires a moderate amount of knowledge. I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be done, but the idea that it's effortless is simply not true.

Spivak 9y ago

If this is truly the case then website accessibility will end up going the way of physical disability accommodations -- legally required.

tyingq 9y ago
It has in some cases. In the US, The DOT requires it for airline websites.

panglott 9y ago

Ultimately you're mostly talking about the cost of digital typography.

II2II 9y ago

The cost of accessibility depends upon many factors. If your design starts with accessibility in mind, the costs can be minimal. Keep in mind that the use of small and low contrast elements is a design decision. If the decision is made to use large and high contrast elements from the start, there should be no difference in the development costs. Making it possible to scale pages for pages where things are laid out spatially is far more difficult and incurs much more testing, yet costs can be reduced if the decision is made from the outset. Even the more difficult factors, such as captioning images and videos, can be eased if planning is done ahead. The problem with arguing that it's 'mathematics' is that there are many variables involved in the equation. If the variables use values for poor planning and design decisions, the result is going to be a much higher cost. If the variables use values for solid planning and design decisions, the difference is going to be much lower. Of course it also depends upon the media being used, so it is very difficult to use that equation to make generalizations for all cases.

Arcsech 9y ago

"Accessibility costs money" is a popular thing to say, but I'm not convinced that needs to be true. Okay, fine, captioning/transcribing videos I'll give you, but many of the other issues on this page can be addressed for a web page just by not breaking the defaults. By default, links are underlined. For text content, many major browsers (Firefox and mobile Safari for sure) include a "reader mode" or similar where the user can adjust their own contrast - as long as you don't break your HTML and prevent the reader mode from working. Web pages are black and while by default, so anything with lots of bright colors is something you have to do intentionally. Animations are also something you have to add intentionally. It really seems like just by not breaking the defaults (I.e., no work at all) your web page should do a decent (not perfect) job of being accessible. But we're so obsessed with making things shiny and swooshy that we've lost sight of that.

SilasX 9y ago
>"Accessibility costs money" is a popular thing to say, but I'm not convinced that needs to be true. Okay, fine, captioning/transcribing videos I'll give you, Even that one is overstated. Sure, taking some existing video, and treating it as the only representation of the content, and then trying to transcribe it -- that's expensive. But virtually every such video (esp. lectures) intended for conveying information is going to correspond to some text equivalent, and they can just post that in a place that's easy to find. Not only is it cheap, many users who can hear will prefer that version. I think it's just a widespread attitude problem (for lack of a more refined diagnosis). It's not just big institutions, but discussion forums where some users will stubbornly link a video as their only citation, and won't even take the time to summarize the key point they think it's substantiating.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  Can you elaborate why do you assume that such videos are likely to have a text equivalent? You bring up lectures as example - I certainly don't have transcripts of lectures I've given, and neither do most professors/lecturers/whatever that I know; a few of them have most of their talk content in their slides but that's a horrible practice that distracts from effective lecture or presentation; in general all the non-audio material is intended to be a supplement to the talk and either are not meaningful without it (e.g. illustrations) or are not representative of the talk (e.g. a textbook chapter that's mostly about the same topic, but different). The recorded audio (if it'd be recorded) would literally be the only copy of the content of that lecture in existence. The same applies for many other genres of video content. Most videos aren't scripted, and thus no script exists; heck, even videos that are clearly well prepared, staged and filmed with multiple takes (e.g. many of "youtube creators") generally don't have a script beforehand, the textual content is improvised on the spot and doesn't exist in written form unless it gets transcribed. Interviews and podcasts are other good examples - as you say, many users who can hear would prefer to read it, I certainly would, but the obvious reality is that the textual version of those things does not exist unless it gets made, and making it takes much more time than recording the interview or podcast in the first place.

reaperducer 9y ago

There's a word for people like you: Sociopath.

sctb 9y ago
No matter what we're replying to, personal attacks like this aren't OK on Hacker News.

jxramos 9y ago

Just thought it would be worth pointing out some other costs we don't typically consider here besides development costs is litigation costs... The most troubling wave of ADA litigation is just beginning to crest. The ADA’s next frontier—and next target of litigation—is the most innovative segment of the domestic economy: e-commerce. The latest trend in ADA litigation is suing commercial websites that aren’t sufficiently accessible to the disabled—because, for instance, they lack assistive technologies for the blind or hearing-impaired. Even though the ADA was enacted before websites became ubiquitous, many courts have interpreted the term “public accommodation” in Title III to encompass the Internet, and will entertain suits applying to it. In 2008, Target paid $6 million to settle a class-action suit brought by the National Federation of the Blind charging that the retailer’s website was allegedly insufficiently accessible to blind customers. Target also paid nearly $4 million in costs and attorneys’ fees to the plaintiffs. Why would Target pay $10 million to settle a case when the law is unsettled and its culpability far from certain? Class-action lawsuits are particularly expensive to defend, and because the potential liability is aggregated to reflect the entire class (all blind consumers, in this example), the financial exposure for a firm if it loses in court presents an unacceptable risk to most corporate defendants. https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-litigation-monster-15128.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-litigation-monster-151...

zie 9y ago
This also happened with Netflix over captioning: https://www.nad.org/2011/06/16/nad-files-disability-civil-rights-lawsuit-against-netflix/ https://www.nad.org/2011/06/16/nad-files-disability-civil-ri... Netflix now does the right thing and captions everything.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  Was there a tradeoff involved there? Is there content that is not in the Netflix catalog today because of the costs of closed-captioning the rest of the catalog? If that is the case, are Netflix's customers better or worse off, individually and collectively? Is society better or worse off? (I don't have a clear answer, and I'm not sure there's an objectively clear answer, but I do think that there are tradeoffs in these discussions that are sometimes hidden/ignored.)