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You ever think how this might apply to, ianno, startups? Seems like all humans should be on Domino's side, at least all techies. Edit: before the cacophany de
by squirrelicus 7y ago
You ever think how this might apply to, ianno, startups?
Seems like all humans should be on Domino's side, at least all techies.
Edit: before the cacophany decends to tell me how easy accessibility is, let me preemptively highlight that opportunity cost is the fundamental unit of cost to a startup. And this is a ycombinator site. So everyone should already know this.
- mikeash 7y agoAccessibility helps everyone. All humans should be on the side opposite Domino's here.
- praneshp 7y agoTrying to be non-snarky here: How does it help someone who doesn't need any of today's typical accessibility features?
- ken 7y agoHow do you think search engines work? Making pages that a program can easily read is pretty fundamental to how everyone uses the web.
- mikeash 7y agoAccessible design tends to be easier to read in general, helping everyone. Non-blind people may like to use a screen reader so they can do stuff by ear. I suspect a lot of HN readers like to navigate web sites by keyboard, something a lot of sites fail at and something accessibility design ensures. Lots of people who would never describe themselves as "disabled" require corrective lenses and accessibility can help them when their glasses are in the next room. And everyone will reach that point eventually, unless they die young. So my post was not 100% correct. There are some people who do not benefit from accessibility at all: those who are in excellent health and will die a sudden death before they age too much. More discussion about how both digital and physical accessibility helps everyone: https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibility-helps-everyone https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibilit... https://medium.com/@mosaicofminds/the-curb-cut-effect-how-making-public-spaces-accessible-to-people-with-disabilities-helps-everyone-d69f24c58785 https://medium.com/@mosaicofminds/the-curb-cut-effect-how-ma... https://www.npr.org/2015/07/24/423230927/-a-gift-to-the-non-disabled-at-25-the-ada-improves-access-for-all https://www.npr.org/2015/07/24/423230927/-a-gift-to-the-non-...
- praneshp 7y agoThank you, that's exactly the kind of answer I was looking for.
- mikeash 7y agoGlad to be of service. It's not obvious if you don't already know about it, but once you do, you start to see how "accessibility" is so much more than "accommodate a few disabled people."
- Bendingo 7y ago> Accessible design tends to be easier to read in general, helping everyone. This is not necessarily so. I develop mobile apps for a large corp. Our designers are often told by the accessibility team to change their design in ways that make the more accessible, but reduce the usability for normal users. I'm talking about simple controls that most people take for granted, like date/time pickers, carousels etc.
- aaronbrethorst 7y agoCan you give a specific example?
- perardi 7y agoYou may not need any of the features today. What about your older customers? I have it on good authority old people also enjoy pizza. And how do you know you're not going to need that accessibility when you least expect it? You don't wake up expecting a retinal detachment or an accident, but sometimes shit happens. And, though I'm a designer and not a developer, accessibility has had a strong correlation with technical debt. Semantic class names, well structured HTML, not rendering your headline fonts as a bitmap so you can have your on-brand typeface…accessible code tends to go along with resilient code.
- wrs 7y agoIt doesn't, but even that person might need accessibility tomorrow — like literally tomorrow. I suspect that most anyone who breaks their leg quickly becomes a fan of the ADA.
- aitchnyu 7y ago1336X768 laptop and desktop screens which are unreadable in natural light are still sold in India. Our designer made a UI with white on wine-red and and it was a pixelated mess bleeding into the background on our developers' machines.
- elliekelly 7y agoAlternative view: Everyone should have access to the internet no matter their physical limitations but making that a reality sounds like a huge and expensive problem, how can we "techies" on HN use technology to solve that problem?
- mikeash 7y agoIt's already solved on the web. Fancy use of "technology" is what breaks it!
- AnthonyMouse 7y agoKind of. Using fancy frameworks and scripts can certainly break things unnecessarily, but there are some things that require significant labor to make accessible no matter what you do. Suppose I want to put my vacation photos on my personal website. I took a thousand of them. But a blind person can't see photographs; do I have to sit there and caption them all now? That's going to take hours. If that's required I'm just not going to post them. You get the same sort of problem with universities posting course lecture videos. Recording the class costs almost nothing on top of not recording it (just station a camera in the back of the room), but having someone sit there and closed caption all the lectures would add a full time employee who does nothing else. When they're posting the videos for free use of the public, some schools are just going to choose to stop publishing them instead of picking up that level of expense in exchange for no compensation from anyone. And if you want to suggest speech to text software as a solution, isn't that better accomplished by building it into the client rather than the website, so that it works everywhere? But then we shouldn't have laws that mandate it the other way.
- iamtheworstdev 7y agoBummer that you're being down voted as it is a legitimate concern. Someone will eventually have to decide at what point a website has to be accessible, ie minimum views, minimum ad revenue or goods sold, etc. And the lower that bar is then the higher the barrier to entry for a web presence for anyone.
- ken 7y agoOr it means people should use better tools. Making HTML easy for screen readers isn’t exactly difficult. It works by default! Developers add complexity which breaks it only by choice.
- Spivak 7y ago"You are required by law to make you site usable by an entire class of almost entirely proprietary 3rd party software with widely varying quality and features and who will definitely not take advantage of the fact that every major site has to legally be compatible with them." There is the accessibility standard but is Domino's on the hook when it's not enough to actually use the site with some applications?
- ken 7y agoI think making all startup web applications more accessible would be a great improvement for everyone, especially techies. A webpage that’s accessible is also easier to script or remix. Why would anyone oppose this? Is the only way to get your startup off the ground to walk over visually impaired people? Restaurants have razor thin margins too but I’ve never heard of any restaurant looking to save a buck by limiting wheelchair access.
- qtplatypus 7y agoUnfortunately looking to save a buck by limiting wheelchair access is frightfully common. That's why people have to get sued under the ADA. The point of the ADA is to make violating it more expensive then complying with it.
- beatgammit 7y agoI agree, all websites should be accessible. The question, however, isn't about what websites should do, but about what websites must do, and I don't think it's morally justifiable to force a website to make their content accessible. Are we going to force Domino's to offer Braille menus? What about menus in Russian? Or large print menus and menus? No. I believe a company shouldn't be forced to accommodate everyone who may want their products, though I certainly think they should do it voluntarily. In fact, I'd support boycotts and critical press about it, but not a law.
- sergiotapia 7y agoshould vs must my dude. It should be accessible, I disagree that it _must_ be accessible.
- squirrelicus 7y agoHang on... Three points 1) Obviously accessible is better. Everyone agrees. When all cost is opportunity cost, do things that don't scale. Target your market aggressively. Cut your market to reduce your opportunity costs of getting to a revenue stream, then expand your market. 2) the more burdens you place in the market, the more you favor established players and make it more difficult and costly for startups to happen and succeed. 3) since when did not spending the time to build something for blind people equal walking over them? They're a valuable part of the market, to be sure, but come on. I can't sell a product to seeing people until i build in functionality for blind people? This is why the federal register is so large. Pointless crusades from short sighted busybodies.
- qtplatypus 7y agoAccessibility is a cost of doing business. One of the requirements of operating a business in the US is that you can not discriminate against people within a protected class. If a startup can't follow reasonable accessibility requirements then I'm of the view then it has already failed.
- beatgammit 7y agoI think there's a difference between discrimination and not going out of your way to accommodate. I don't think you can discriminate accidentally, it must be intentional. That being said, I don't know the legal precedent on this, I'm just talking from what I consider moral. You shouldn't have to lower all of the shelves (or provide ladders) just because really short people exist, but if your employees refuse to assist when asked, then you have a problem. Likewise, Dominos will help blind people at their stores or over the phone, so there's still a way for them to reasonably order food from them. I don't think Dominos should be forced to make their website accessible, though they certainly receive the negative press.
- qtplatypus 7y agoI can understand why considering this to be a difference makes sense when you are considering it from the perspective of personal morality. However I'm coming to it more from the perspective of wanting to remove impediments to disabled people having equivalent access to able people. Now from that perspective it doesn't matter to the person with disabilities if the company is acting deliberately in a discriminatory fashion or they are doing it out of ignorance it still creates an impediment. The thing is that most sources of impediments to disabled people come from people creating procedures, designs or structures and not considering that not everyone has the same abilities. There are few people who have malice against people with disabilities so having deliberate acts of discrimination be the threshold would not be effective in solving the problem. I don't think we should even consider this from the perspective of morality or punishment. Corporations are amoral profit maximisers by their nature. When corporations don't create accessible sites what they save by not creating an accessible site is paid by the people with disabilities. The ability to sue over ADA violations is a way to capture this negative externality.
- vkou 7y ago> Seems like all humans should be on Domino's side, at least all techies. I am unable to, without resorting to profanity, and a personal attack, express how self-serving, and anti-human this opinion is. Why exactly do you have against people with disabilities?
- Matheus28 7y agoThe interesting thing is: you'd expect pizza companies to be in the bottom of the list of companies to be sued for accessibility, since you can just call and order very quickly
- tree123 7y agohey Zeach, I made another agar.io clone. This time with websockets http://g69io.herokuapp.com/ http://g69io.herokuapp.com/