31 ms·

You can build a wheelchair ramp and perhaps it needs some new lumber occasionally but it's relatively easy to spot and fix problems. For a website, it could ea

You can build a wheelchair ramp and perhaps it needs some new lumber occasionally but it's relatively easy to spot and fix problems. For a website, it could easily fall out of accessibility with an update to some library you rely on, and you wouldn't even know. To me, the difference is that software is never finished and behaves differently depending on who's using it on what OS and what web browser, and is thus that much harder to keep compliant.

Tomte 6y ago
That's only because there are no incentives to make libraries work (and keep working) wrt to accessibility. So the courts provide the incentives.
Forge36 6y ago
What if a business is in a city and the building is old? The number of stores downtown with a single step is surprisingly high. What are the rules on building the ramp on a public sidewalk? The roadblock isn't always maintenance, it's doing the work up front to avoid that step being a problem later.
- macintux 6y ago
  There are definitely edge cases where a ramp can be harder to build than an accessible website is to maintain over the long run. I'm unconvinced that's more than a tiny fraction of the overall problem space.
derekp7 6y ago
If you are using automated testing then you need to make the site accessible to the test script. Which kind of makes it accessible to screen readers automatically.
runarberg 6y ago
I feel like this attitude undermines the fact that web development is an industry with skilled workers. A well crafted web site is accessible by default. A skilled web developer knows which parts can be problematic and deals with it. This is really no different then a skilled carpenter know how to build a robust wheel chair ramp. A bad contractor will have unskilled carpenters build unsound ADA compliance that requires expensive maintenance later. The same applies for web dev shops.
- macintux 6y ago
  A grocery store is going to find it far easier to recognize shoddy workmanship in the physical world. And, again, the only software that ever "finishes" is the software that falls into buggy disuse. The same attributes that make the digital world much faster to create a solution than the analog world make it much more challenging to maintain over the long run, and more difficult to for most people to be able to tell the difference between good work and poor work. I'm not saying we shouldn't expect the business world to be accessible online, just that I'm not convinced it's practical for smaller businesses. I think the end of that road is just forcing them all into Facebook's arms, which is the last place I want them to be.
- extra88 6y ago
  > web development is an industry with skilled workers It's an industry with some skilled workers but a lot that aren't. It's amazing to me, who watched the web develop as a non-professional, how many workers don't know basic things about HTML, CSS specificity, etc. That ignorance leads to the web being worse in many ways, not just less accessible. I used to think that if you call yourself a "web professional" that part of that was understanding how to make things accessible, basically "it's your job, do your job;" if the so-called professionals did that then the problems of inaccessible sites would go away. I do still think there are some fundamentals that every web professional should know and handling those takes care the large majority of barriers. I underestimated how vast the web profession is and the scope of possible accessibility problems and now think that even if web professionals become better educated, there will always be a need for specialists in accessibility (which is self-serving since I have become one).

Tomte 6y ago

That's only because there are no incentives to make libraries work (and keep working) wrt to accessibility. So the courts provide the incentives.

Forge36 6y ago

What if a business is in a city and the building is old? The number of stores downtown with a single step is surprisingly high. What are the rules on building the ramp on a public sidewalk? The roadblock isn't always maintenance, it's doing the work up front to avoid that step being a problem later.

macintux 6y ago
There are definitely edge cases where a ramp can be harder to build than an accessible website is to maintain over the long run. I'm unconvinced that's more than a tiny fraction of the overall problem space.

derekp7 6y ago

If you are using automated testing then you need to make the site accessible to the test script. Which kind of makes it accessible to screen readers automatically.

runarberg 6y ago

I feel like this attitude undermines the fact that web development is an industry with skilled workers. A well crafted web site is accessible by default. A skilled web developer knows which parts can be problematic and deals with it. This is really no different then a skilled carpenter know how to build a robust wheel chair ramp. A bad contractor will have unskilled carpenters build unsound ADA compliance that requires expensive maintenance later. The same applies for web dev shops.

macintux 6y ago
A grocery store is going to find it far easier to recognize shoddy workmanship in the physical world. And, again, the only software that ever "finishes" is the software that falls into buggy disuse. The same attributes that make the digital world much faster to create a solution than the analog world make it much more challenging to maintain over the long run, and more difficult to for most people to be able to tell the difference between good work and poor work. I'm not saying we shouldn't expect the business world to be accessible online, just that I'm not convinced it's practical for smaller businesses. I think the end of that road is just forcing them all into Facebook's arms, which is the last place I want them to be.
extra88 6y ago
> web development is an industry with skilled workers It's an industry with some skilled workers but a lot that aren't. It's amazing to me, who watched the web develop as a non-professional, how many workers don't know basic things about HTML, CSS specificity, etc. That ignorance leads to the web being worse in many ways, not just less accessible. I used to think that if you call yourself a "web professional" that part of that was understanding how to make things accessible, basically "it's your job, do your job;" if the so-called professionals did that then the problems of inaccessible sites would go away. I do still think there are some fundamentals that every web professional should know and handling those takes care the large majority of barriers. I underestimated how vast the web profession is and the scope of possible accessibility problems and now think that even if web professionals become better educated, there will always be a need for specialists in accessibility (which is self-serving since I have become one).