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> So they've thought about it, but they haven't actually done it yet. In my experience, a11y shouldn't be an afterthought but baked-in from the beginning. Doin

> So they've thought about it, but they haven't actually done it yet. In my experience, a11y shouldn't be an afterthought but baked-in from the beginning. Doing the latter results in hacky, harder-to-maintain code.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
100% this. If you think about it, doing accessibility right -- in particular screen reader work -- requires thinking very carefully about the data model behind the presentation. What you need to declare and when. And doing that thinking actually could force engineers into building UI frameworks that not only are accessible for the visually or auditory impaired, but for broader systems as a whole. It's hard work that has to get done, but it's not particularly sexy.
- logicprog 3y ago
  I think it could be sexy! I honestly think a graphical user interface designed from first principles to be accessible would also be kind of incredible for everyone else to use too, much in the way many accessibility improvements (in the US at least) like curb ramps and subtitles make things better for everyone as a side effect. Honestly, I think an ideally a11y interface might end up working like a modern easier on the eyes version of Symbolics Genera — think about it: every UI element on the screen actually retrievably connected to its underlying data representation, and imbued with a ton of semantic metadata that's designed to be used to actively facilitate further interactions with the UI (maybe for instance a generalized way to attach metadata about related UI elements to each UI element, so the UI itself essentially forms a sort of semantic hypertext web you can navigate behind the scenes), as well as composability, rearrangeability, and scriptability! That would probably be a massive boon for disabled people and also amazing for us nerds. Perhaps it would even have a focus on representing the interface in terms of that metadata, with the visual elements being sort of abbreviations/overlays on top of that metadata, sort of like how Emacs does graphics and GUI elements?
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Yes I think you and I are on the same wavelength.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

100% this. If you think about it, doing accessibility right -- in particular screen reader work -- requires thinking very carefully about the data model behind the presentation. What you need to declare and when. And doing that thinking actually could force engineers into building UI frameworks that not only are accessible for the visually or auditory impaired, but for broader systems as a whole. It's hard work that has to get done, but it's not particularly sexy.

logicprog 3y ago
I think it could be sexy! I honestly think a graphical user interface designed from first principles to be accessible would also be kind of incredible for everyone else to use too, much in the way many accessibility improvements (in the US at least) like curb ramps and subtitles make things better for everyone as a side effect. Honestly, I think an ideally a11y interface might end up working like a modern easier on the eyes version of Symbolics Genera — think about it: every UI element on the screen actually retrievably connected to its underlying data representation, and imbued with a ton of semantic metadata that's designed to be used to actively facilitate further interactions with the UI (maybe for instance a generalized way to attach metadata about related UI elements to each UI element, so the UI itself essentially forms a sort of semantic hypertext web you can navigate behind the scenes), as well as composability, rearrangeability, and scriptability! That would probably be a massive boon for disabled people and also amazing for us nerds. Perhaps it would even have a focus on representing the interface in terms of that metadata, with the visual elements being sort of abbreviations/overlays on top of that metadata, sort of like how Emacs does graphics and GUI elements?
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Yes I think you and I are on the same wavelength.