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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 i

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.

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.