3 ms·

Worth noting that disability accommodations often benefit everyone, not just disabled people. A classic example is wheelchair accessibility. Those ramps and ele

Worth noting that disability accommodations often benefit everyone, not just disabled people. A classic example is wheelchair accessibility. Those ramps and elevators are also useful to parents pushing a stroller, to someone walking a bicycle, or to someone towing a heavy load on wheels. In the Web context, accessible websites also work better for search indexing, and for semantic processing, and for manipulating with Javascript (ie: addons). Text annotations for images are a huge help to all sorts of people and software, not just folks who can't see the image. The main reason to support accessibility work is that it is the right thing to do for disabled people. But if that doesn't motivate you, there are selfish reasons for people without disabilities too.

roughly 5y ago
The baby stroller's a classic - the number of people I know who've suddenly gained an appreciation for the ADA after having kids...
jameshart 5y ago
One of the weird parts I find about accessibility is that it tends to be considered as ‘something the developers do’. That we can solve accessibility just through technical means, and generally just by playing around with the user interface. In organization after organization I see accessibility as something the tech org has to champion to get time to deliver on, so it gets seen as an ‘extra cost’ of developing a feature. But the fact is that some features, as requested, are really hard to deliver in an accessible way - but if you thought about what you wanted to deliver from an accessible angle in the first place you might find there’s a way to solve the problem that is intrinsically more accessible. In general not enough attention is paid to just flat out whether an entire business process is accessible. Or perhaps more - how you can adjust your business, your offering, or your process in order to make it possible for more people to access it, or to be employed by you in delivering it. If you treat accessibility as a box checking exercise done by web and app devs you can end up worrying about making the driver portal of your ride sharing app work for a blind user, rather than thinking about what features are needed to make it possible for a person in a wheelchair to hire a rideshare that can accommodate them. Accessibility doesn’t begin and end at screenreader support and text contrast levels. But if you leave it up to developers to do then that may be all you’re going to be able to get.
- roughly 5y ago
  Agree with this. As much shade as I tend to throw at engineers for not considering the consequences of our actions, finance, sales, and marketing are absolutely different beasts here, and you're right that it often does wind up being engineering that's trying to push for these viewpoints.

roughly 5y ago

The baby stroller's a classic - the number of people I know who've suddenly gained an appreciation for the ADA after having kids...

jameshart 5y ago

One of the weird parts I find about accessibility is that it tends to be considered as ‘something the developers do’. That we can solve accessibility just through technical means, and generally just by playing around with the user interface. In organization after organization I see accessibility as something the tech org has to champion to get time to deliver on, so it gets seen as an ‘extra cost’ of developing a feature. But the fact is that some features, as requested, are really hard to deliver in an accessible way - but if you thought about what you wanted to deliver from an accessible angle in the first place you might find there’s a way to solve the problem that is intrinsically more accessible. In general not enough attention is paid to just flat out whether an entire business process is accessible. Or perhaps more - how you can adjust your business, your offering, or your process in order to make it possible for more people to access it, or to be employed by you in delivering it. If you treat accessibility as a box checking exercise done by web and app devs you can end up worrying about making the driver portal of your ride sharing app work for a blind user, rather than thinking about what features are needed to make it possible for a person in a wheelchair to hire a rideshare that can accommodate them. Accessibility doesn’t begin and end at screenreader support and text contrast levels. But if you leave it up to developers to do then that may be all you’re going to be able to get.

roughly 5y ago
Agree with this. As much shade as I tend to throw at engineers for not considering the consequences of our actions, finance, sales, and marketing are absolutely different beasts here, and you're right that it often does wind up being engineering that's trying to push for these viewpoints.