3 ms·

You pulled the text straight out of my mind... Eventually I had to turn to self-directed unpaid development in order to do work I wasn't ashamed of.

• at_a_remove 5y ago
  I have done various accessibility spiels on HN before. I think most people who are ... (and heaven help me, what do we even call this now? "Webmaster" is out, "web designers" seem to focus on almost anything else in the real world, "programmer" is too broad ...) people who are responsible what actual HTML tags and CSS attributes are assigned in the final output either care about this to some degree or simply haven't been introduced to the concept. Overall, we'd rather close our tags and put in the alt attributes and so on. There's nothing malign about it. However, the people who decide what our time will be spent on dismiss even the barest accessibility as soon as it hits their radars. Even when I could get "through" to them, well, it's all about what the client wants. And accessibility is a concern that ranges deeply enough through our efforts that we cannot simply squeeze it in as five percent, or a skunkworks project. I help out a little old lady (eighty-eight this year) and my mother with computer "stuff," and that's a whole dimension of accessibility which just gets ignored. Not every user of an application is some sharp-eyed twenty-something with fine motor control and an ingrained habit of scanning the UI for changes, and yet these people are effectively ignored. I am out of the webdev biz, and happily so, but this remains a point of lingering bitterness.