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Because the only publicly acceptable answer would be to agree to all the poster's current and future demands, regardless of the cost, priorities, risk of breaki

Because the only publicly acceptable answer would be to agree to all the poster's current and future demands, regardless of the cost, priorities, risk of breaking other features, etc. And it never works out because the demands tend to increase over time, and the PR damage of rejecting the very last demand is proportional to the number of ones previously accepted. Make a thought experiment: think what if Cloudflare answered trying to explain the complexity, risks, and maybe cost estimates for supporting something like that, but refusing to add it right away. Nobody would listen to their reasoning. They would be immediately labeled as blind haters or whatnot, supported by endless news articles and retweets. Make another thought experiment: assume they comply with the current demands and add the functionality at some fixed cost. Then in the future, the poster decides that the accessibility support is not sufficient and still makes life hard for blind people. He would come up with another set of demands and Cloudflare would again be forced to comply, because nobody would listen to their reasoning. And because it is physically impossible to make a blind person as productive at certain tasks as a non-blind one, there will be always room for improvement and room for more demands. If you want to truly help the blind, please go ahead and launch a competing product. Or offer an ML-based tool working on top of existing products. Or create Wiki-like system where people would maintain semantic models of commonly used non-accessible sites, letting the accessible tools work over them. But all of that requires hard work, countless hours and numerous trials-and-errors. Trying to strong-arm someone else to put in that effort surely gives a much faster gratification, but it only results in further alienation and ghosting. Sure, Cloudflare will release an official statement saying how they are committed and dedicated and working and planning and hoping, and the whole thing will get forgotten in a few weeks, but ultimately if you want to someone to help you, maybe try to understand their constraints and find a compromise, rather than trying to use the buzzwords to throw the mob at them.

mwcampbell 5y ago
> If you want to truly help the blind, [...] all of that requires hard work, countless hours and numerous trials-and-errors. I do work hard on products to help blind people, and I have been for years, but I can't solve every problem by myself. I even quit my cushy job at Microsoft (on the Windows accessibility team) to develop a product that works around the inaccessibility of screen sharing in online meetings -- imperfectly, but still better than nothing. But neither I nor my tiny company are well-positioned to compete with Cloudflare in the field of security products (such as Browser Isolation) targeted at corporate IT departments. And unfortunately, this particular accessibility problem is not one that we can work around from the outside, at least not yet. So I felt it was worth some of my time to advocate for Cloudflare to make this product accessible. > And because it is physically impossible to make a blind person as productive at certain tasks as a non-blind one, Of course; vision is a higher-bandwidth medium than hearing or touch. But that full bandwidth isn't always needed. And unless you've watched a blind person who's proficient with their screen reader, you may be surprised at how productive they can be at a great many tasks. > there will be always room for improvement and room for more demands. I appreciate that you and others on this thread don't know me, but I've been active in the online blind community for about 20 years, and I don't believe I'm known for making endless demands of mainstream tech companies. And in this case, there's a natural stopping point: when the remote browser is either as accessible as a local browser on the same website, or as accessible as it can be within the constraints of the web platform (where the client for that remote browser runs). And my original advice to Cloudflare on this subject was targeted at getting the product all the way to that logical endpoint. Having said all that, I realize that what you said may reflect what people at Cloudflare think; after all, they don't know me either. I vouched for your comment when it was dead because I felt someone should be allowed to say what others might well be thinking, and I didn't think your comment was too inflamatory. I'd appreciate suggestions on how to better signal that I won't, in fact, put them in a bad PR situation by making ever more demands of them.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > I appreciate that you and others on this thread don't know me mwcampbell has also been active on HN itself for a pretty long time, and reading over his past comments should make it pretty obvious that: A) he knows what he's talking about. B) he is putting in a lot of effort to be reasonable and accommodating to other people and businesses. C) he is personally contributing to and supporting efforts to build products and tools to make things better, not just complaining. mwcambell's response above is very charitable, and I applaud that; it's good to reach out to people diplomatically. But personally, I also feel like it really wouldn't require that much work for skeptics to go over a few of his past posts and to see for themselves whether or not he is the type of person who would "use the buzzwords to throw the mob at [Cloudflare]." None of mwcambell's past or present advocacy efforts are secretive, he is probably one of the most recognizable blind/vision-impared advocates on HN right now. I'll risk being slightly less charitable than he is being, and I'll say that people can put in the 5 minutes of effort it would take to figure out whether or not he's a good faith actor -- especially in the context of suggestions to him that the blind community should go out and build their own Cloudflare competitor.
- throwaway42day 5y ago
  I don't work at Cloudflare. I am merely trying to share my personal pragmatic point of view. In this specific case I would argue that the problem is taken out of scope. The idea of browser isolation is to specifically replace the "smart" stream of data that is prone to attacks with a "dumb" pre-rendered version that is much more rigid. This eliminates the whole class of attacks by design. Sure, it won't work for blind people. So if your organization employs them and you want to achieve comparable level of security, you set them up with a properly isolated VM, install the accessibility software there, and add an exception rule for that VM. Problem solved: the blind person has comparable experience to a regular browser, while the average level of security in the company has raised. If the employer specifically refuses to set up such a VM, it would be reasonable to demand it or sue them. To put it into a perspective, a blind person cannot drive a car in regular traffic due to obvious reasons. So it's reasonable to provide them with alternate means of transportation, but it would be unreasonable to demand that all cars should be banned until they can accommodate blind drivers. It can be technically done if you make every car remote-drivable, but the cost and safety considerations make it completely unviable.
Rapzid 5y ago
> Now, four months later, this problem is still not solved Further I would have never expected something like this to get teed up right before the start of a quarter, and so of course it wouldn't be completed at the end of the quarter.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  OK, that sentence probably should have been something like, "Now, four months later, there has been no visible progress on this problem." Also, remember that Cloudflare first announced the technology 18 months ago, and I advised them of the need to pay special attention to accessibility back then. If I had first raised this 4 months ago, then of course I would understand why they couldn't have solved the problem in that much shorter time.

mwcampbell 5y ago

> If you want to truly help the blind, [...] all of that requires hard work, countless hours and numerous trials-and-errors. I do work hard on products to help blind people, and I have been for years, but I can't solve every problem by myself. I even quit my cushy job at Microsoft (on the Windows accessibility team) to develop a product that works around the inaccessibility of screen sharing in online meetings -- imperfectly, but still better than nothing. But neither I nor my tiny company are well-positioned to compete with Cloudflare in the field of security products (such as Browser Isolation) targeted at corporate IT departments. And unfortunately, this particular accessibility problem is not one that we can work around from the outside, at least not yet. So I felt it was worth some of my time to advocate for Cloudflare to make this product accessible. > And because it is physically impossible to make a blind person as productive at certain tasks as a non-blind one, Of course; vision is a higher-bandwidth medium than hearing or touch. But that full bandwidth isn't always needed. And unless you've watched a blind person who's proficient with their screen reader, you may be surprised at how productive they can be at a great many tasks. > there will be always room for improvement and room for more demands. I appreciate that you and others on this thread don't know me, but I've been active in the online blind community for about 20 years, and I don't believe I'm known for making endless demands of mainstream tech companies. And in this case, there's a natural stopping point: when the remote browser is either as accessible as a local browser on the same website, or as accessible as it can be within the constraints of the web platform (where the client for that remote browser runs). And my original advice to Cloudflare on this subject was targeted at getting the product all the way to that logical endpoint. Having said all that, I realize that what you said may reflect what people at Cloudflare think; after all, they don't know me either. I vouched for your comment when it was dead because I felt someone should be allowed to say what others might well be thinking, and I didn't think your comment was too inflamatory. I'd appreciate suggestions on how to better signal that I won't, in fact, put them in a bad PR situation by making ever more demands of them.

danShumway 5y ago
> I appreciate that you and others on this thread don't know me mwcampbell has also been active on HN itself for a pretty long time, and reading over his past comments should make it pretty obvious that: A) he knows what he's talking about. B) he is putting in a lot of effort to be reasonable and accommodating to other people and businesses. C) he is personally contributing to and supporting efforts to build products and tools to make things better, not just complaining. mwcambell's response above is very charitable, and I applaud that; it's good to reach out to people diplomatically. But personally, I also feel like it really wouldn't require that much work for skeptics to go over a few of his past posts and to see for themselves whether or not he is the type of person who would "use the buzzwords to throw the mob at [Cloudflare]." None of mwcambell's past or present advocacy efforts are secretive, he is probably one of the most recognizable blind/vision-impared advocates on HN right now. I'll risk being slightly less charitable than he is being, and I'll say that people can put in the 5 minutes of effort it would take to figure out whether or not he's a good faith actor -- especially in the context of suggestions to him that the blind community should go out and build their own Cloudflare competitor.
throwaway42day 5y ago
I don't work at Cloudflare. I am merely trying to share my personal pragmatic point of view. In this specific case I would argue that the problem is taken out of scope. The idea of browser isolation is to specifically replace the "smart" stream of data that is prone to attacks with a "dumb" pre-rendered version that is much more rigid. This eliminates the whole class of attacks by design. Sure, it won't work for blind people. So if your organization employs them and you want to achieve comparable level of security, you set them up with a properly isolated VM, install the accessibility software there, and add an exception rule for that VM. Problem solved: the blind person has comparable experience to a regular browser, while the average level of security in the company has raised. If the employer specifically refuses to set up such a VM, it would be reasonable to demand it or sue them. To put it into a perspective, a blind person cannot drive a car in regular traffic due to obvious reasons. So it's reasonable to provide them with alternate means of transportation, but it would be unreasonable to demand that all cars should be banned until they can accommodate blind drivers. It can be technically done if you make every car remote-drivable, but the cost and safety considerations make it completely unviable.

Rapzid 5y ago

> Now, four months later, this problem is still not solved Further I would have never expected something like this to get teed up right before the start of a quarter, and so of course it wouldn't be completed at the end of the quarter.

mwcampbell 5y ago
OK, that sentence probably should have been something like, "Now, four months later, there has been no visible progress on this problem." Also, remember that Cloudflare first announced the technology 18 months ago, and I advised them of the need to pay special attention to accessibility back then. If I had first raised this 4 months ago, then of course I would understand why they couldn't have solved the problem in that much shorter time.