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This is particularly visible with the sorry state of accessibility options for disabled individuals. I deal with a moderate vision impairment and everything I

by jnovek 4y ago

This is particularly visible with the sorry state of accessibility options for disabled individuals. I deal with a moderate vision impairment and everything I do to make computers more usable is bespoke hacks and workarounds I’ve put together myself. In MacOS, for example, I can’t even replace the system fonts with more readable options, or increase the font size of system tools. Most software ships with fixed font sizes (electron is exceptionally bad here — why is it that I can easily resize fonts in web browsers and not electron?) and increasingly new software doesn’t render correctly with an effective resolution below 1080p. Games don’t care at all about the vision impaired. E.g. RDR2 cost half a billion dollars to make yet there is no way to size fonts up large enough for me to read. I welcome regulation if it means fixing these sorts of problems.

concordDance 4y ago
You don't need regulation, you need technologies that can be freely modified by their users and the changes distributed.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Regulations and user modifiably aren't mutually exclusive. In fact the former is one way to ensure the latter.
- jnovek 4y ago
  This is what I do. I primarily use Linux because it has the most flexibility with typeface and scaling, but it’s still not perfect (e.g. all electron apps) and it’s definitely bespoke and hard to reproduce. I routinely open tickets with software vendors and open source projects asking for things that ought to be low-hanging fruit and I’m either blown off or directed to tools that don’t make sense for me (usually magnifier or text-to-speech). The appetite for fixing issues that limit my access to software is essentially null. I’ve dealt with these problems for two decades and I really believe that there is very little economic incentive to make software accessible. Unless substantially more people become vision impaired in the future, that’s how it will stay. I am pretty certain that only way software companies will really take the vision impaired into account is if they are forced to.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    If they're low hanging fruit why not implement them yourself or put up a bug bounty? If even a fraction of those with limited vision did this the problem would be solved. And if its not, then it's probably not worth making it accessible (e.g. if it would cost £10k to make some obscure game accessible that would probably only have a half dozen vision impaired users that's just not worth it, the time of the developers is worth more than the hypothetical users enjoyment of the game).
    - DontTrustOver25 4y ago

by jnovek 4y ago

concordDance 4y ago

You don't need regulation, you need technologies that can be freely modified by their users and the changes distributed.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Regulations and user modifiably aren't mutually exclusive. In fact the former is one way to ensure the latter.
jnovek 4y ago
This is what I do. I primarily use Linux because it has the most flexibility with typeface and scaling, but it’s still not perfect (e.g. all electron apps) and it’s definitely bespoke and hard to reproduce. I routinely open tickets with software vendors and open source projects asking for things that ought to be low-hanging fruit and I’m either blown off or directed to tools that don’t make sense for me (usually magnifier or text-to-speech). The appetite for fixing issues that limit my access to software is essentially null. I’ve dealt with these problems for two decades and I really believe that there is very little economic incentive to make software accessible. Unless substantially more people become vision impaired in the future, that’s how it will stay. I am pretty certain that only way software companies will really take the vision impaired into account is if they are forced to.
- concordDance 4y ago
  If they're low hanging fruit why not implement them yourself or put up a bug bounty? If even a fraction of those with limited vision did this the problem would be solved. And if its not, then it's probably not worth making it accessible (e.g. if it would cost £10k to make some obscure game accessible that would probably only have a half dozen vision impaired users that's just not worth it, the time of the developers is worth more than the hypothetical users enjoyment of the game).
  - DontTrustOver25 4y ago