8 ms·

Building accessible websites and apps is a moral obligation

54 points by everdev 8y ago

elpakal 8y ago
Yes. And in some cases you can actually be fined and or sued for ignoring accessibility requirements for handicapped and senior users. So you could argue the government will enforce morality if you do not. Side note, in interviews I always gauge seniority by asking about accessibility. I find it an obvious characteristic of more junior engineers to not have had to consider accessibility APIs. It is a must, and rightfully so.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Current predominant developer culture eschews all responsibility for anything. Modern developers have made it pretty clear that they feel strongly about the moral obligations of other developers, but not so much their own. Everything they do is lazy and selfish. Why make things performant when you can save time by not doing so? Developer time is worth more than pesky user-cattle time. Why make your product smaller and more reliable when you can glue together 100 giant dependencies? You're only going to work at this company for two years anyway, why not use this new unproven stuff so you can put it on your resume?
overshard 8y ago
As a contract developer who provides estimates on my work I always include a section for ADA compliance, WCAG compliance, Accessibility, and a few others. I provide time estimates and explain to my clients that I consider these extremely important things to do. My company has the ability, knowledge, and experience making websites that are accessible. Our clients often don't want to spend the money required for this task. This seems to assume that the developer is at fault for making the choice to not make websites accessible and not management or clients who don't want people to spend time on "useless" things like aria attributes. I preach about accessibility to every manager and client I meet. Most don't care because it "costs them money for such a small percentage of users".
- Grumbledour 8y ago
  Adherence to laws or special guidelines may take time and cost money, but isn't a professional working to spec what a client should be able to expect? Should a baseline of accessibility not always be provided and thus figured into the base price? Does adhering to HTML Spec for example cost a premium price?
  - overshard 8y ago
    Adhering to HTML spec does not by default make a fully accessible website. White text on a white background adheres to the spec but no one can see it. If you mean adhereing to something like WCAG then that is a premium since it requires things like aria attributes, balancing contrasting colors for foreground and background and a whole slew of other things. Isn't it my job as a professional to tell my clients what I am doing and how much it will cost them? Isn't it my job to also explain the importance of these line items? I do this task. Isn't it my client's professional job to then take that information, process it and see how those line items affect their bottom line? If accessibility for the blind on an Aircraft Pilot app website for Pilots who need vision to have that job and use the app is then excluded is this a moral failing on my part or the clients fault? I would say no in both cases, they have literally zero visitors who are blind visiting their website.
    - Grumbledour 8y ago
      Your arguments seems reasonable and I heard it before, but I am not really convinced it strikes to the heart of the matter. Accessibility does include more than the HTML Spec, but adherence to the spec already provides a huge chunk of accessibility for free. And I don't feel every website needs to be 100% accessible, but people complaining about lacking accessibility often do so because developers disregard good practices and common sense. Yes, bad contrast is bad, but most disabled users know ways to fix this minor issue[0], but needing js to dynamically load basic text and image content that a screen reader than struggles with is just inexcusable and gets to the hearth of the issue, that ignoring accessibility also often means ignoring different user Plattforms and usage. A finely crafted website is not only readable by a modern browser and a screen reader, it will also very probably mostly work on older browsers, minor browsers/operating systems and so on. So every developer should have accessibility in mind when creating websites. Of course, being competitive, a shoddy developer who just bangs two wordpress themes together will always be cheaper than good craftsmanship, but in my experience, the problem is more often targeting the wrong clients anyway. [0] And, as sad is this is, the actual design is often not the developers responsibility, unless of course, when it is, in which case he is also to blame. ;-)
coldtea 8y ago
If those websites are life or business supporting or required to use (government, etc). I don't think it's a "moral obligation" to make e.g. a gaming website accessible, any more than it is to "help the poor" or thousands of other ways we can directly do good. In other words, if someone fails to make their hobby SaaS for passive income accessible, they haven't have some "moral failing". They just prioritized shipping basic functionality for the majority of users. It's not really that different that opening a website or business for business in one country (or part of the country) and not another.
- jscholes 8y ago
  > It's not really that different that opening a website or business for business in one country (or part of the country) and not another. It is, because people can choose to move to a part of the country where your business operates. Maybe people don't do this as a rule, but the option is there. People can't just opt to not be disabled.
  - threatofrain 8y ago
    That is an absurd barrier. Move to a foreign country to get access? Also, money is the ultimate accessibility issue that affects everyone, and that's something Facebook and friends understands, which is why they're swallowing the world. Another huge reason people can't access things is because of linguistic or cultural access. I mean, some people say the professional or academic writing of their own culture has access issues...
    - jscholes 8y ago
      > That is an absurd barrier. It may be absurd for someone who has always lived in a location with access to the education, job opportunities and other services which allow them to live the life they want. It's not quite that absurd for the millions of people who have migrated to other countries rather than stagnating in a place they didn't choose to be born in. It's not that absurd to those who live in countries so vast that moving to another city may involve the sorts of distances that people from smaller countries can't cover without crossing a border. And it's not at all absurd for disabled people who do this because their country doesn't allow for independence. Nevertheless, my original comment was more addressing people who move to another city/state, or away from a rural area, to gain access to services which otherwise would remain unavailable to them. That happens all the time.
Mirioron 8y ago
I would have no problem if this were only a moral obligation, but it seems like it's becoming more and more a legal obligation. Legal obligations that require a developer add something frustrate me, because they essentially crush people doing things for fun.
- vanadium 8y ago
  It's also a business obligation, in my opinion, because 1) an increasing percentage of the population has some form of disability, and 2) not accommodating them has a bottom-line business impact. There's a moral, legal, and business obligation to serve your product in an inclusive manner. We're working to get select developers IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals) certified on my team. On the legal front, see also Gomez v. GNC: https://www.levelaccess.com/federal-court-decision-gomez-v-gnc-highlights-importance-choosing-experienced-accessibility-expert/ https://www.levelaccess.com/federal-court-decision-gomez-v-g...
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
  I'd say, when people build stuff for free, or in a way that it just barely covers the costs, it's even morally wrong to expect them to make their stuff more accessible. They're already doing others a favor and asking for even more is just a sign of entitlement.
  - morpheuskafka 8y ago
    I think that the baseline more obligation is not to be exclusive, i.e. whether you are working for free or not, you have an obligation not to design tools that actively further harm to a group, demean or discriminate against a protected group, etc. The duty to be actively inclusive scales with commercial reasonability. For example, it would be reasonable to expect a small business to read aloud a menu to someone with a visual disability, at minimal cost. By contrast, it would be reasonable to expect a transnational company like Walmart to spend significant sums making stores wheelchair accessible. Someone who does something for free, or for incidental income, should only have to do very low time/cost accommodations.
bigcostooge2 8y ago
Sorry. My product owners and designers tell me not to. Is what it is.
malvosenior 8y ago
You should build for your market. Unless you're specifically targeting a market segment that has accessibility requirements, then you should do the least amount of work possible to provide value, then iterate. When creating a product in an early stage market, most development time is better suited to discovering an MVP than adding accessibility features. Think of it as premature optimization.
gnicholas 8y ago
> An HTML file with no CSS and no JavaScript is accessible by default. This is not true. What about color contrast? What about alt text for images? These problems (and many others) can occur in plain html pages.
- vanadium 8y ago
  Color contrast between a default background #FFF and foreground text of #000 is pretty much the gold standard.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    That’s true! But the author didn’t talk about just sticking to the defaults. He made it seem like it was as simple as not using CSS and JS. In reality, it’s more complicated, like you pointed out.
- falcolas 8y ago
  If you don't apply styling, the browser defaults for color contrast are often sufficient.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    But it isn’t as though the problem is “using CSS” — it’s doing the stuff that people currently use CSS to do. Using html to do that same stuff is no better from an accessibility perspective, which is what the quote seems to imply. Note: I’m all for web accessibility and I work in this space. I think it’s important for advocates to not overstate the case for the simplicity of compliance, which is what I think happened here.
- queercode 8y ago
  The default blue link color is also accessible by default, w/ a contrast to white of 9.3: https://color.review/check/0000EE-FFFFFF https://color.review/check/0000EE-FFFFFF
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
So let's say some random person, Bob, builds an awesome website in his free time. Bob spends hundreds of hours just so others can use his awesome idea. Now you're telling him what to do. That's not morality, that's just entitlement. Even if Bob was to put some ads on his webpage, because he wasn't so selfless after all, then what? > It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up If you have a problem, you complain. If you don't complain, then you'll have to wait until someone else does or just live with it. That goes for everybody; it's how life works. > If you build for the web, you have a moral obligation to make sure it works right for everyone. No. No I don't. It wasn't my moral obligation to build that website to begin with. It wasn't my moral obligation to make it available to anyone in the first place. It's not my obligation to translate the web page to make it available to people who don't speak my language. And it isn't my obligation to make it available or accessible to any other group of people.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  It's one thing to discuss how to best support people with disabilities. It's another thing to sit on your own high horse, and preach from on high about how other developers should do "their fucking job". I'm so sick of this gluttonous moral posturing.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  It goes deeper than that. At my enterprise company, our accessibility department explicitly does not gather any data on our users with accessibility needs. We don't know who they are, what problems they are facing, or if our solutions work for them or not. The reason? It would infringe on their "rights" (What rights are these? I didn't press further). What they do is hire a few people with visible disabilities (wheelchair or missing limbs) and then parade them around to development teams to shame us into accessibility "compliance". It is a gross process involving lots of trial-and-error.
  - extra88 8y ago
    Privacy rights, including personal medical information. Additionally, counting how many people are affected by a particular accessibility barrier too often leads to ignoring them because the numbers tend to be small. > gross process involving lots of trial-and-error. That can be reduced through developer education and changes in processes but doesn't that also describe browser and device testing; it's part of the job.
matz1 8y ago
>Would you say the builder has a moral obligation to not build a house that’s going to collapse on people? This is nothing to do with moral obligation. At least for me, much more to with the cost vs return on building a house that’s going to collapse on people. Unless I'm forced to build website that is accessible, I won't do it.
janpot 8y ago
It's as much my moral obligation to build an accessible website as it is a mason's moral obligation to build a wheelchair accessible house.
soheil 8y ago
You could turn anything into a moral obligation, eg. I have a moral obligation not to eat pasta because there is less environmentally damaging food available and it's also probably doing some non-zero amount of harm to my body compared to something healthier so since I may feel a tiny bit worse therefore I'll have less potential energy to help someone in need or have a lower probability of assisting a disabled person when I next encounter one. So let's not play that game.
Glyptodon 8y ago
I agree to a point, but I think it goes too far at times, mostly when it comes to making _all_ images/video accessible. I can't imagine YouTube would exist if it had to have captioning for every single video to begin with, for example. (Now they auto-generate, but I don't think even today your average independent web dev could make their own videos do that, pretty sure YouTube needed a huge corpus of content to start with to develop it. And even with auto generated subs, any video that's mostly things happening without words is "dark" to a blind person.)
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  > I can't imagine YouTube would exist if it had to have captioning for every single video to begin with In many instances, the rise of YouTube has been deleterious to the web. So much content that would have once been presented in text is now video, with the result that what might have been a fast skim now forces readers to move at the slower pace of the video, and it is much more difficult to parse for those with disabilities or to find in a search engine. (Too much content today has moved to images, too – it is remarkable how people who would have once written a blog consisting of longform text, are now trying to shoehorn their content into the more limited space that Instagram provides for them.)
  - Grumbledour 8y ago
    I can never get over the fact people share images with one or two sentence "wisdoms" or "jokes" as their only content on social networks instead of just copying text.
- connor4312 8y ago
  Yea. But for the work most developers do, making their content accessible is largely just learning how to do it. UI toolkits will generally do the right thing out box. Using the semantically correct elements for your content, once you learn how to do so, is no extra development cost. For me, I belive it is the morally correct thing thing to do, for the 1 of me to spend a few hours learning in order to make N people's lives that little bit easier in the future. The main accessibility cost is when it comes to building new UI patterns. But that's a relatively rare case, most sites will be served fine by piecing together elements from existing toolkits and modules.
csande17 8y ago
People with visual disabilities make up about 2.5% of the US adult population. (Source: https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics# https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics#) People who do not speak English natively make up about 20% of the US population, and around 8% of the US cannot speak English fluently. (Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_Stat... , http://blog.languageline.com/limited-english-proficient-census# http://blog.languageline.com/limited-english-proficient-cens...) So if you're aiming for maximum inclusivity, you should consider translating your app into Spanish a higher priority than adding ARIA tags.
- zeveb 8y ago
  Unlike learning a language, blindness is not something which can be overcome with education.
  - everdev 8y ago
    I've tried learning multiple languages and have lived abroad and learning another language for me was not easy or fast despite years of studying and practicing the language.
    - samuraiseoul 8y ago
      No one said it was fast or easy. Given a long enough timeline and some daily effort, you can most likely learn another language. You can't study yourself to un-blindness.
    - astrea 8y ago
      So? You still learned it. You can't learn to see if you're blind.
      - DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
        Just because something is possible you shouldn't go around expecting it from anybody. Learning a language just for a website is dumb and nobody is going to do it, so the website is essentially just as unaccessible to someone who doesn't speak the language as someone who's blind.
polote 8y ago
We have vision algorithms that are able to tell that a picture is a picture of a horse, why do we still need the alt attribute ? We have the level of knowledge to build a tool that make website accessible, so my opinion is you need that tool. It is easier to build one accessible tool than to ask all developers of the world to put an alt attribute and respect the h1, h2 naming
MentallyRetired 8y ago
Chalk it up to SEO if you need to make a business case for it.
luiscleto 8y ago
Yes, it's a good thing for sites and apps to be accessible. No, it's not an obligation of any kind (nor should it be). For companies that have grown enough to be providing services to (and profiting off of) a large enough part of the population, it would make sense to expect them to put resources into this. For someone working for free, trying to get an idea off the ground, or servicing a very niche subset of the population (i.e. a very restricted market) this blanket statement makes no sense and the costs it would add to make it an obligation would likely only cause a decrease in quantity of what is available (which, if deemed valuable, can be made more accessible later on) rather than an increase in quality of what's available.
selfsimilar 8y ago
TFA gets a few things wrong - the analogy to house building is off, and I don't think the moral argument is even necessary - but ultimately if, as I infer, he's talking about web professionals, not hobbyists, those people should care and be educated about how to do this. The house analogy bothers me because a house is not a public space the way a shop or museum is. And a lot of accessibility concerns like contrast ratios are simple and can be minor CSS changes - analogous to curb cuts in sidewalks. But if you're acting as architect for a public-facing website for a business then it absolutely makes sense without invoking any moral obligation to engineer at least a minimum amount of accessibility.
jimmaswell 8y ago
I thought screen readers by now would be able to adapt to the large volume of malformed web content out there instead of breaking on misused tags etc.
SCdF 8y ago
Perhaps a more general state is that it's a moral obligation to think and care about inclusivity relevant to your platform, instead of just "works for me"ing it. The application I work on is not specifically inclusive of blind people. However, it is inclusive of people who have very basic levels of general and technical education (e.g. not understanding what a percentage is), because those are the people we know use it. I think it's understandable if your videogame doesn't work with blind people, but lots of people have simple visual imparements you could work around (colour blind modes, scalable UI for old people etc). Similarly, giving a shit about having good contrast on your website doesn't seem like a big ask, as well as not breaking everything when someone wants to scale fonts. I don't think you have to support every possible use case under the sun, but at least thinking about and considering some of them is a big positive step.
glvn 8y ago
I look at this very simply. If you are a business that is marketing the app to external consumers, adding internationalization and accessibility protects you from possible legal and regulatory trouble, while also increasing the size of your potential user base. But for side projects? No, when it comes to my side project, I'm the master, in the dictator, what I say goes. Users don't like it? Tough, go build your own app.
- aklemm 8y ago
  Sure, but you have to accept that means you are not committed to the dignity of disabled viewers.
morpheuskafka 8y ago
Here's my breakdown: > Morality is not always relative (house example) Building an unsafe house exposes people to active harm. When you invite someone into a house you make the implied warranty that the roof will not collapse and kill them do to your negligence. > You’re a web professional If you're making a new product for Google or Microsoft, I completely agree with this article. However, developing web apps is not the same as building bridges. If you are a bridge builder, you're a licensed civil engineer with a sizeable government budget. If you build web apps, you might be a 30-year senior dev, or you might be a student trying to launch a startup with a hundred dollars and no employees. Or, you might just be making a personal web page for yourself or family. > The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it. As with any term, "the web" can have multiple meanings. This statement is true of the original web implementation, "[an] HTML file with no CSS and no JavaScript." That's not the web anyone knows today. Modern definitions of the web might include PWAs, > It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up If you're Google and you "forget" to alt-tag images, again I agree by all means. But this is only true if we're talking about common knowledge stuff (which is relative to size and resources of the developer) or things that are deliberately ignored. > It should be easier Why is it the job of a side-project, non-profit, startup, or personal developer to conform to obscure, complex standards--why isn't it the job of the for-profit screen reader companies to make decent standards in the first place? > you have a moral obligation to make sure it works right for everyone. Building anything is a game of tradeoffs. If you can afford and have the expertise to do so, you absolutely should invest in a11y. Your moral obligation is to not intentionally harm users, not to spend endless amounts of time complying with every standard and best practice.

54 points by everdev 8y ago

Yes. And in some cases you can actually be fined and or sued for ignoring accessibility requirements for handicapped and senior users. So you could argue the government will enforce morality if you do not. Side note, in interviews I always gauge seniority by asking about accessibility. I find it an obvious characteristic of more junior engineers to not have had to consider accessibility APIs. It is a must, and rightfully so.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

Current predominant developer culture eschews all responsibility for anything. Modern developers have made it pretty clear that they feel strongly about the moral obligations of other developers, but not so much their own. Everything they do is lazy and selfish. Why make things performant when you can save time by not doing so? Developer time is worth more than pesky user-cattle time. Why make your product smaller and more reliable when you can glue together 100 giant dependencies? You're only going to work at this company for two years anyway, why not use this new unproven stuff so you can put it on your resume?

overshard 8y ago

As a contract developer who provides estimates on my work I always include a section for ADA compliance, WCAG compliance, Accessibility, and a few others. I provide time estimates and explain to my clients that I consider these extremely important things to do. My company has the ability, knowledge, and experience making websites that are accessible. Our clients often don't want to spend the money required for this task. This seems to assume that the developer is at fault for making the choice to not make websites accessible and not management or clients who don't want people to spend time on "useless" things like aria attributes. I preach about accessibility to every manager and client I meet. Most don't care because it "costs them money for such a small percentage of users".

Grumbledour 8y ago
Adherence to laws or special guidelines may take time and cost money, but isn't a professional working to spec what a client should be able to expect? Should a baseline of accessibility not always be provided and thus figured into the base price? Does adhering to HTML Spec for example cost a premium price?
- overshard 8y ago
  Adhering to HTML spec does not by default make a fully accessible website. White text on a white background adheres to the spec but no one can see it. If you mean adhereing to something like WCAG then that is a premium since it requires things like aria attributes, balancing contrasting colors for foreground and background and a whole slew of other things. Isn't it my job as a professional to tell my clients what I am doing and how much it will cost them? Isn't it my job to also explain the importance of these line items? I do this task. Isn't it my client's professional job to then take that information, process it and see how those line items affect their bottom line? If accessibility for the blind on an Aircraft Pilot app website for Pilots who need vision to have that job and use the app is then excluded is this a moral failing on my part or the clients fault? I would say no in both cases, they have literally zero visitors who are blind visiting their website.
  - Grumbledour 8y ago
    Your arguments seems reasonable and I heard it before, but I am not really convinced it strikes to the heart of the matter. Accessibility does include more than the HTML Spec, but adherence to the spec already provides a huge chunk of accessibility for free. And I don't feel every website needs to be 100% accessible, but people complaining about lacking accessibility often do so because developers disregard good practices and common sense. Yes, bad contrast is bad, but most disabled users know ways to fix this minor issue[0], but needing js to dynamically load basic text and image content that a screen reader than struggles with is just inexcusable and gets to the hearth of the issue, that ignoring accessibility also often means ignoring different user Plattforms and usage. A finely crafted website is not only readable by a modern browser and a screen reader, it will also very probably mostly work on older browsers, minor browsers/operating systems and so on. So every developer should have accessibility in mind when creating websites. Of course, being competitive, a shoddy developer who just bangs two wordpress themes together will always be cheaper than good craftsmanship, but in my experience, the problem is more often targeting the wrong clients anyway. [0] And, as sad is this is, the actual design is often not the developers responsibility, unless of course, when it is, in which case he is also to blame. ;-)

coldtea 8y ago

If those websites are life or business supporting or required to use (government, etc). I don't think it's a "moral obligation" to make e.g. a gaming website accessible, any more than it is to "help the poor" or thousands of other ways we can directly do good. In other words, if someone fails to make their hobby SaaS for passive income accessible, they haven't have some "moral failing". They just prioritized shipping basic functionality for the majority of users. It's not really that different that opening a website or business for business in one country (or part of the country) and not another.

jscholes 8y ago
> It's not really that different that opening a website or business for business in one country (or part of the country) and not another. It is, because people can choose to move to a part of the country where your business operates. Maybe people don't do this as a rule, but the option is there. People can't just opt to not be disabled.
- threatofrain 8y ago
  That is an absurd barrier. Move to a foreign country to get access? Also, money is the ultimate accessibility issue that affects everyone, and that's something Facebook and friends understands, which is why they're swallowing the world. Another huge reason people can't access things is because of linguistic or cultural access. I mean, some people say the professional or academic writing of their own culture has access issues...
  - jscholes 8y ago
    > That is an absurd barrier. It may be absurd for someone who has always lived in a location with access to the education, job opportunities and other services which allow them to live the life they want. It's not quite that absurd for the millions of people who have migrated to other countries rather than stagnating in a place they didn't choose to be born in. It's not that absurd to those who live in countries so vast that moving to another city may involve the sorts of distances that people from smaller countries can't cover without crossing a border. And it's not at all absurd for disabled people who do this because their country doesn't allow for independence. Nevertheless, my original comment was more addressing people who move to another city/state, or away from a rural area, to gain access to services which otherwise would remain unavailable to them. That happens all the time.

Mirioron 8y ago

I would have no problem if this were only a moral obligation, but it seems like it's becoming more and more a legal obligation. Legal obligations that require a developer add something frustrate me, because they essentially crush people doing things for fun.

vanadium 8y ago
It's also a business obligation, in my opinion, because 1) an increasing percentage of the population has some form of disability, and 2) not accommodating them has a bottom-line business impact. There's a moral, legal, and business obligation to serve your product in an inclusive manner. We're working to get select developers IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals) certified on my team. On the legal front, see also Gomez v. GNC: https://www.levelaccess.com/federal-court-decision-gomez-v-gnc-highlights-importance-choosing-experienced-accessibility-expert/ https://www.levelaccess.com/federal-court-decision-gomez-v-g...
DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
I'd say, when people build stuff for free, or in a way that it just barely covers the costs, it's even morally wrong to expect them to make their stuff more accessible. They're already doing others a favor and asking for even more is just a sign of entitlement.
- morpheuskafka 8y ago
  I think that the baseline more obligation is not to be exclusive, i.e. whether you are working for free or not, you have an obligation not to design tools that actively further harm to a group, demean or discriminate against a protected group, etc. The duty to be actively inclusive scales with commercial reasonability. For example, it would be reasonable to expect a small business to read aloud a menu to someone with a visual disability, at minimal cost. By contrast, it would be reasonable to expect a transnational company like Walmart to spend significant sums making stores wheelchair accessible. Someone who does something for free, or for incidental income, should only have to do very low time/cost accommodations.

bigcostooge2 8y ago

Sorry. My product owners and designers tell me not to. Is what it is.

malvosenior 8y ago

You should build for your market. Unless you're specifically targeting a market segment that has accessibility requirements, then you should do the least amount of work possible to provide value, then iterate. When creating a product in an early stage market, most development time is better suited to discovering an MVP than adding accessibility features. Think of it as premature optimization.

gnicholas 8y ago

> An HTML file with no CSS and no JavaScript is accessible by default. This is not true. What about color contrast? What about alt text for images? These problems (and many others) can occur in plain html pages.

vanadium 8y ago
Color contrast between a default background #FFF and foreground text of #000 is pretty much the gold standard.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  That’s true! But the author didn’t talk about just sticking to the defaults. He made it seem like it was as simple as not using CSS and JS. In reality, it’s more complicated, like you pointed out.
falcolas 8y ago
If you don't apply styling, the browser defaults for color contrast are often sufficient.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  But it isn’t as though the problem is “using CSS” — it’s doing the stuff that people currently use CSS to do. Using html to do that same stuff is no better from an accessibility perspective, which is what the quote seems to imply. Note: I’m all for web accessibility and I work in this space. I think it’s important for advocates to not overstate the case for the simplicity of compliance, which is what I think happened here.
queercode 8y ago
The default blue link color is also accessible by default, w/ a contrast to white of 9.3: https://color.review/check/0000EE-FFFFFF https://color.review/check/0000EE-FFFFFF
Mediterraneo10 8y ago

DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago

So let's say some random person, Bob, builds an awesome website in his free time. Bob spends hundreds of hours just so others can use his awesome idea. Now you're telling him what to do. That's not morality, that's just entitlement. Even if Bob was to put some ads on his webpage, because he wasn't so selfless after all, then what? > It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up If you have a problem, you complain. If you don't complain, then you'll have to wait until someone else does or just live with it. That goes for everybody; it's how life works. > If you build for the web, you have a moral obligation to make sure it works right for everyone. No. No I don't. It wasn't my moral obligation to build that website to begin with. It wasn't my moral obligation to make it available to anyone in the first place. It's not my obligation to translate the web page to make it available to people who don't speak my language. And it isn't my obligation to make it available or accessible to any other group of people.

tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
It's one thing to discuss how to best support people with disabilities. It's another thing to sit on your own high horse, and preach from on high about how other developers should do "their fucking job". I'm so sick of this gluttonous moral posturing.
jbob2000 8y ago
It goes deeper than that. At my enterprise company, our accessibility department explicitly does not gather any data on our users with accessibility needs. We don't know who they are, what problems they are facing, or if our solutions work for them or not. The reason? It would infringe on their "rights" (What rights are these? I didn't press further). What they do is hire a few people with visible disabilities (wheelchair or missing limbs) and then parade them around to development teams to shame us into accessibility "compliance". It is a gross process involving lots of trial-and-error.
- extra88 8y ago
  Privacy rights, including personal medical information. Additionally, counting how many people are affected by a particular accessibility barrier too often leads to ignoring them because the numbers tend to be small. > gross process involving lots of trial-and-error. That can be reduced through developer education and changes in processes but doesn't that also describe browser and device testing; it's part of the job.

matz1 8y ago

>Would you say the builder has a moral obligation to not build a house that’s going to collapse on people? This is nothing to do with moral obligation. At least for me, much more to with the cost vs return on building a house that’s going to collapse on people. Unless I'm forced to build website that is accessible, I won't do it.

janpot 8y ago

It's as much my moral obligation to build an accessible website as it is a mason's moral obligation to build a wheelchair accessible house.

soheil 8y ago

You could turn anything into a moral obligation, eg. I have a moral obligation not to eat pasta because there is less environmentally damaging food available and it's also probably doing some non-zero amount of harm to my body compared to something healthier so since I may feel a tiny bit worse therefore I'll have less potential energy to help someone in need or have a lower probability of assisting a disabled person when I next encounter one. So let's not play that game.

Glyptodon 8y ago

I agree to a point, but I think it goes too far at times, mostly when it comes to making _all_ images/video accessible. I can't imagine YouTube would exist if it had to have captioning for every single video to begin with, for example. (Now they auto-generate, but I don't think even today your average independent web dev could make their own videos do that, pretty sure YouTube needed a huge corpus of content to start with to develop it. And even with auto generated subs, any video that's mostly things happening without words is "dark" to a blind person.)

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> I can't imagine YouTube would exist if it had to have captioning for every single video to begin with In many instances, the rise of YouTube has been deleterious to the web. So much content that would have once been presented in text is now video, with the result that what might have been a fast skim now forces readers to move at the slower pace of the video, and it is much more difficult to parse for those with disabilities or to find in a search engine. (Too much content today has moved to images, too – it is remarkable how people who would have once written a blog consisting of longform text, are now trying to shoehorn their content into the more limited space that Instagram provides for them.)
- Grumbledour 8y ago
  I can never get over the fact people share images with one or two sentence "wisdoms" or "jokes" as their only content on social networks instead of just copying text.
connor4312 8y ago
Yea. But for the work most developers do, making their content accessible is largely just learning how to do it. UI toolkits will generally do the right thing out box. Using the semantically correct elements for your content, once you learn how to do so, is no extra development cost. For me, I belive it is the morally correct thing thing to do, for the 1 of me to spend a few hours learning in order to make N people's lives that little bit easier in the future. The main accessibility cost is when it comes to building new UI patterns. But that's a relatively rare case, most sites will be served fine by piecing together elements from existing toolkits and modules.

csande17 8y ago

People with visual disabilities make up about 2.5% of the US adult population. (Source: https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics# https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics#) People who do not speak English natively make up about 20% of the US population, and around 8% of the US cannot speak English fluently. (Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_Stat... , http://blog.languageline.com/limited-english-proficient-census# http://blog.languageline.com/limited-english-proficient-cens...) So if you're aiming for maximum inclusivity, you should consider translating your app into Spanish a higher priority than adding ARIA tags.

zeveb 8y ago
Unlike learning a language, blindness is not something which can be overcome with education.
- everdev 8y ago
  I've tried learning multiple languages and have lived abroad and learning another language for me was not easy or fast despite years of studying and practicing the language.
  - samuraiseoul 8y ago
    No one said it was fast or easy. Given a long enough timeline and some daily effort, you can most likely learn another language. You can't study yourself to un-blindness.
  - astrea 8y ago
    So? You still learned it. You can't learn to see if you're blind.
    - DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
      Just because something is possible you shouldn't go around expecting it from anybody. Learning a language just for a website is dumb and nobody is going to do it, so the website is essentially just as unaccessible to someone who doesn't speak the language as someone who's blind.

polote 8y ago

We have vision algorithms that are able to tell that a picture is a picture of a horse, why do we still need the alt attribute ? We have the level of knowledge to build a tool that make website accessible, so my opinion is you need that tool. It is easier to build one accessible tool than to ask all developers of the world to put an alt attribute and respect the h1, h2 naming

MentallyRetired 8y ago

Chalk it up to SEO if you need to make a business case for it.

luiscleto 8y ago

Yes, it's a good thing for sites and apps to be accessible. No, it's not an obligation of any kind (nor should it be). For companies that have grown enough to be providing services to (and profiting off of) a large enough part of the population, it would make sense to expect them to put resources into this. For someone working for free, trying to get an idea off the ground, or servicing a very niche subset of the population (i.e. a very restricted market) this blanket statement makes no sense and the costs it would add to make it an obligation would likely only cause a decrease in quantity of what is available (which, if deemed valuable, can be made more accessible later on) rather than an increase in quality of what's available.

selfsimilar 8y ago

TFA gets a few things wrong - the analogy to house building is off, and I don't think the moral argument is even necessary - but ultimately if, as I infer, he's talking about web professionals, not hobbyists, those people should care and be educated about how to do this. The house analogy bothers me because a house is not a public space the way a shop or museum is. And a lot of accessibility concerns like contrast ratios are simple and can be minor CSS changes - analogous to curb cuts in sidewalks. But if you're acting as architect for a public-facing website for a business then it absolutely makes sense without invoking any moral obligation to engineer at least a minimum amount of accessibility.

jimmaswell 8y ago

I thought screen readers by now would be able to adapt to the large volume of malformed web content out there instead of breaking on misused tags etc.

SCdF 8y ago

Perhaps a more general state is that it's a moral obligation to think and care about inclusivity relevant to your platform, instead of just "works for me"ing it. The application I work on is not specifically inclusive of blind people. However, it is inclusive of people who have very basic levels of general and technical education (e.g. not understanding what a percentage is), because those are the people we know use it. I think it's understandable if your videogame doesn't work with blind people, but lots of people have simple visual imparements you could work around (colour blind modes, scalable UI for old people etc). Similarly, giving a shit about having good contrast on your website doesn't seem like a big ask, as well as not breaking everything when someone wants to scale fonts. I don't think you have to support every possible use case under the sun, but at least thinking about and considering some of them is a big positive step.

glvn 8y ago

I look at this very simply. If you are a business that is marketing the app to external consumers, adding internationalization and accessibility protects you from possible legal and regulatory trouble, while also increasing the size of your potential user base. But for side projects? No, when it comes to my side project, I'm the master, in the dictator, what I say goes. Users don't like it? Tough, go build your own app.

aklemm 8y ago
Sure, but you have to accept that means you are not committed to the dignity of disabled viewers.

morpheuskafka 8y ago

Here's my breakdown: > Morality is not always relative (house example) Building an unsafe house exposes people to active harm. When you invite someone into a house you make the implied warranty that the roof will not collapse and kill them do to your negligence. > You’re a web professional If you're making a new product for Google or Microsoft, I completely agree with this article. However, developing web apps is not the same as building bridges. If you are a bridge builder, you're a licensed civil engineer with a sizeable government budget. If you build web apps, you might be a 30-year senior dev, or you might be a student trying to launch a startup with a hundred dollars and no employees. Or, you might just be making a personal web page for yourself or family. > The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it. As with any term, "the web" can have multiple meanings. This statement is true of the original web implementation, "[an] HTML file with no CSS and no JavaScript." That's not the web anyone knows today. Modern definitions of the web might include PWAs, > It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up If you're Google and you "forget" to alt-tag images, again I agree by all means. But this is only true if we're talking about common knowledge stuff (which is relative to size and resources of the developer) or things that are deliberately ignored. > It should be easier Why is it the job of a side-project, non-profit, startup, or personal developer to conform to obscure, complex standards--why isn't it the job of the for-profit screen reader companies to make decent standards in the first place? > you have a moral obligation to make sure it works right for everyone. Building anything is a game of tradeoffs. If you can afford and have the expertise to do so, you absolutely should invest in a11y. Your moral obligation is to not intentionally harm users, not to spend endless amounts of time complying with every standard and best practice.