14 ms·

Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

277 points by jakey_bakey 3y ago

IncreasePosts 3y ago
Why have we settled upon annotating accessibility options onto a visual-first, generally high-precision/high-touch-density medium? Wouldn't it be better to just have a "low vision" version of the app, a "low touch accuracy" version of the app, etc? Then you could provide the accessibility-minded users with something customized to their needs, instead of trying to shoehorn accessibility onto a layout that might have no commonality between what "normal" users want and what accessibility-required users want.
- threatofrain 3y ago
  I think eventually we're heading to website as data with clients remixing the data in a way you don't expect; i.e., the final output will be a mishmash of sources.
  - blowski 3y ago
    Sounds like "the semantic web", which has been a great idea just about to take for about 20 years now.
    - threatofrain 3y ago
      The problem is that the web isn't semantic enough; I mean, when considering the use case of reading documents, we don't even have a table of contents element.
      - blowski 3y ago
        The vast majority of web content is published on sites that want people to use the content in their extremely curated walled garden. Making it easy to mash up content and integrate it with other sites is the exact opposite of what's happening on Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, et al.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    The opposite of that actually. Nobody is going to bother with websites if it's just data that gets slurped up by AI and fed back to people, it's a lot of work for no payout. People who make websites are going to make them interactive multimedia experiences that pull you away from the chatbot to feel something. The New York Times the information dump has no future, the New York Times the interactive multimedia social game and event hub with emotionally stirring stories, pictures and video can survive.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      I can't speak to GP, but AI is exactly what I had in mind when I read their comment. With AI transforming website content, the sites themselves just become data sources. You could be right though, especially with more and more sites blocking robots. Legitimate companies might just have to shrug and say, "this site prohibits me from reading it. You'll have to go there instead) though that seems like a legal problem to me rather than a technical one.
      - CuriouslyC 3y ago
        Sites that try to use robots.txt to stay relevant are going to fail spectacularly. All their information is going to leak or be provided by other sources, and they're going to get forgotten. The only people who will be able to make a living selling data will be the ones who can produce data so unique that nobody else can claim to have created it, and for which training on it leaves an unmistakable signature that makes litigation easy.
  - jmilloy 3y ago
    Why do you think that? Everything I see suggests the opposite.
- ijwann 3y ago
  Good luck getting your organization to support building two apps. And even if you succeed once, good luck getting your organization to ship features twice every single time they want to build something. What will end up happening is you have your normal app which isn't accessible, and a second app with a fraction of your features that is likely often broken because it's hard to prioritize.
  - threatofrain 3y ago
    You have one backend and two frontends, one of which is simplified and all-about-the-data. I daresay there's the possibility that it's easier to create two websites than it is to make one website do two things.
    - extra88 3y ago
      You might have heard of this thing called "responsive web design," (RWD) it's pretty popular. RWD is all about it not being better to make two websites (in that case, "mobile" vs. "desktop") instead of one.
      - threatofrain 3y ago
        In some ways this is similar. With responsive design we're talking about orthogonal views in the sense that given enough effort, the mobile and desktop experiences can be completely different, but of course in practice we're going to reuse components to save time. So just like we have desktop and mobile views, I'm just proposing one more view where you also get to reuse some of your components, and where you get to pushback on stuff like animations, rich interactions, or novelties.
        extra88 3y ago
        There are already ways to make all those things conditional without creating an entirely new view. Only occasionally does the "accessible way" need to be in addition to what was planned all along, such as up, down, left, right arrow buttons beside a draggable map, you don't need a whole separate map for that.
- kolanos 3y ago
  iOS and Android largely do this for you as long as you use the platform's accessibility features.
- AlienRobot 3y ago
  People said it would take twice as long to make two versions of the same frontend, so they spent a hundred times as long making crossplatform, responsive, accessible GUIs that often feel terrible to use no matter who the user is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- toast0 3y ago
  Separate but equal isn't equal, and in the US, the ADA requires reasonable accommodation. It's not reasonable to require a second, separate app to cater to people with low vision/low dexterity, and chances are it's not going to have equal functionality (how many separate apps have equal functionality). It's better to require platforms to make accommodation a core feature (which they have largely done!) and require developers to use the accommodations. The ADA has a private right of action which means that there's distributed effort to find out what's a reasonable accommodation and also to drag businesses into compliance. There's plusses and minuses with this approach, of course.
  - acdha 3y ago
    > It's not reasonable to require a second, separate app to cater to people with low vision/low dexterity, and chances are it's not going to have equal functionality Your first half of that sentence is debatable in absolute terms but in practice almost always right due to the second half. It can be reasonable to have an alternative version of something — for example, an audio or braille version of a printed document, or a ramp alternative to stairs – but the really hard part is actually keeping them in parity. If something is seen as a compliance obligation, I’d be shocked if that actually happened versus resources being allocated mostly to the extent that they’re cheaper than legal fees.
- PaulStatezny 3y ago
  > Wouldn't it be better to just have a "low vision" version of the app, a "low touch accuracy" version of the app, etc? I find your comment interesting because it speaks to users who can see, just not well. When I think of web accessibility, I (mostly) think of users who are entirely blind. While it turns out: ~80% of screen reader users are blind. The other ~20% may be partially vision impaired, or sometimes not visually impaired at all (but use it due to things like dyslexia). [1] ~2.4% of Americans are visually impaired and use (or could benefit from) a screen reader. [2] A "low vision" / "low touch accuracy" version of an app would likely be serving less than 0.5% (20% of 2.4%, see above) of your userbase. (As opposed to simply supporting screen readers in the "regular" version of the app.) Doesn't seem like a priority to optimize for 0.5% of your userbase when you're just trying to vet an unproven idea. [1] https://www.tempertemper.net/blog/not-all-screen-reader-users-are-blind https://www.tempertemper.net/blog/not-all-screen-reader-user... [2] https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics
  - IncreasePosts 3y ago
    I was just giving examples of different types of accessibility needs, it wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list. You can imagine "no vision" as a type of "low vision", where vision = 0.0 if you'd like
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Do you wear glasses? HoW many people do you know need corrective lenses?
    - pxc 3y ago
      'Low vision' covers a lot of the same ground as phrases like 'legally blind' and 'partially sighted'. It doesn't mean people who rely on corrective lenses whose corrected vision is more or less normal.
  - pxc 3y ago
    Those survey results probably don't mean what you think they mean. Among blind and visually impaired people, the term 'blind' can include basically anyone who is legally blind— it does not refer exclusively to the totally blind. My mom has been legally blind for almost two decades now, IIRC. It's only within the past year or two that her computer and phone usage has begun to switch to primarily screen reader-based rather than primarily magnification-based. From then and continuing on to this day, she chooses between the terms 'low vision' and 'blind' (and various others) mainly according to what she thinks the person she's talking to will most easily understand. (Although over the course of time she has gradually shifted toward favoring the word 'blind', both as she becomes more connected to the local blind community and as her vision continues to degrade). One thing to keep in mind is that going from normal/visual phone usage to a screen reader is like learning to walk all over again (and discovering that some paths are not for you anymore). It's starting over from zero, and it sucks. Going from typical visual usage to jacking up your font sizes is basically free, and using some kind of magnification a fairly natural next step. For people with progressive vision loss, there may be decades where one is 'blind', but it's still not efficient or opportune to drop everything and switch to relying exclusively on a screen reader.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Pie menus support "low touch accuracy" out of the box in a way that benefits everyone, and helps train novice users to become experts by "rehearsal". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39227843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39227843 Fitts' Law intuitively and mathematically explains why pie menus are faster and have lower error rates than linear menus. Fitts's Law says in effect: the bigger and closer a target is, the faster and more reliably you can hit it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law >Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a predictive model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics. The law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was initially developed by Paul Fitts. Pie menus both minimize the target distance, while also maximizing the target size. And the physical directional gesture required to select an item does not demand your continuous visual attention and cognitively taxing hand-eye feedback loop. You don't need to look at the screen to select items from a pie menu, so you can reliably "mouse ahead" or gesture, which is impossible with linear menus. Another advantage is that they support "rehearsal", by seamlessly training novice users to become experts. Unlike keyboard shortcuts, the physical action of the novice and expert is the same, only experts can do it faster without looking at the screen. Unlike traditional "invisible" gesture recognition systems like Palm Graffiti or StrokePlus.net, pie menus are "self revealing" in that the can pop up a menu that shows all the available options and their direction. It's quite difficult to learn which invisible gestures are available and what they all mean, but easy to discover them with pie menus. Pie menus also support "browsing" and "reselection", which gesture recognition doesn't, allowing users to correct errors or even browse around highlighting every item to preview its effects. Since pie menus can provide live continuous preview of the effects of the selected item in the application itself (which is especially nice when you use the distance as a parameter, for example a pie menu that lets you create eight objects, with a pull-out size parameter: the more you pull out, the bigger the object previewed at your cursor, which switches to different objects as you browse around the menu, then turns into a real object when you release the button), so you can see the effect and release the button when it's perfect, or go back to the center to cancel. Often the only feedback you need is the live preview of the pie menu selection, and popping up a menu would be a distraction. Once you learn the directions, you can quickly select items by stroking in the desired direction without even looking at the menu, so pie menus can perform the selection without popping up the menu. There's no need to pop up the "self revealing" menu until you stop dragging the mouse, or you can pop it up instantly by "clicking up" the menu. So a novice can get directions instantly, while an expert can fly ahead without waiting for directions, then pause for directions or confirmation that you have the right selection at any time. There's a smooth escalator moving you up the learning curve every time you use a pie menu, training your muscle memory through rehearsal. That is how pie menus "Lead, follow, or get out of the way". We performed an empirical study in 1988 that measured eight-item pie menus to be 15% faster than linear menus, with less frequent errors. An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus (Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman, Proc. ACM CHI’88): https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie-vs-linear-menus-466c6fdbba4b https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie... >Pie menus gain over traditional linear menus by reducing target seek time, lowering error rates by fixing the distance factor and increasing the target size in Fitts’s Law, minimizing the drift distance after target selection, and are, in general, subjectively equivalent to the linear style. [...] >Pilot study results: A pilot study of 16 subjects showed that users were approximately 15% faster with the pie menus and that errors were less frequent with pie menus. Statistically significant differences were found for item seek time but not task type. Subjects were split on their subjective preference of pie and linear menus. Some commented that they were able to visually isolate an item easier with linear menus and that it was hard to control the selection in pie menus because of the sensitivity of the pie menu selection mechanism. These subjects tended to be the most mouse naive of all whereas those who had heard of or seen a mouse/cursor controlled system but had not used one extensively tended to prefer pie menus. The most mouse naive users, while finding linear menus easier, tended to be better at pie menus and commented that with practice, they would probably be superior and in fact prefer the pie menus because of their speed and minimization of hand movement with the mouse. Not surprisingly, therefore, most of those preferring linear menus did not have a strong preference on the scaled subjective questionnaire. More about Fitts's Law and pie menu in this thread from Sept 27, 2022 on: Cairo: Alternative Windows Desktop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32992673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32992673 More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228342
- mcguire 3y ago
  Or, you could just not have the "low-*" versions and tell anyone who needed or wanted them, "Tough." I wouldn't advise it, though.
- dmazzoni 3y ago
  Assistive technology keeps growing and improving, though. These days most operating systems already come with a voice control feature, designed for people with a motor impairment to use their device entirely by voice. When you add alt text to an image button, you're not just enabling a blind user to hear a description, you're also enabling someone with carpal tunnel to speak the name of that button to activate it. Most other accessibility APIs and preferences have multiple use cases like that, too. That's why accessibility is designed the way it is: you're not modifying your app to work with specific disabilities, you're adding missing semantics and respecting user accessibility preferences, and assistive technology adapts things to work with different users.
AlienRobot 3y ago
I thought this would be a real story, not a hypothetical...
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Many such cases exist; I’ve been the champion before
mikece 3y ago
What is the real liability for a scenario like this? Is there any grace period when a new app or startup becomes far more successful far sooner than expected? I imagine A11Y isn't a massive concern when it's not certain an idea will even work; outside of California I can't imagine being legally skewered if, once you attain unexpected success, you devote A11Y resources to address this issue.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  It’s generally less of a legal liability and more of a reputation thing; as you grow you will get more and more users telling you off. See Wordle for an easy example. Plus, its not that hard to do correctly, so the “we’re a startup on a critical burn rate” stops working as an excuse rather early
  - diggan 3y ago
    > Plus, its not that hard to do correctly, so the “we’re a startup on a critical burn rate” stops working as an excuse rather early It's not a question of it being too hard or easy, but as always, a question of priorities. Say you can either build feature A which is expected to open up the product to be used by 1% more users, as people been asking for that feature. Or you can build feature B, which enables motionsick people to use your app without getting sick from your wasteful animations. This will help 0.001% of your current users, when you have 10,000 users in total lets say. Not saying it's right or wrong, but I understand why people (managers/owners) make the choice to do feature A instead of feature B, especially in a startup-context where it might be the (imaginary or not) choice between surviving or not. I'm personally in the camp of thinking about accessibility as part of all the work done, but it's not exactly the mainstream workflow.
  - linkjuice4all 3y ago
    While it's generally a good idea to make your app/site accessible to all users and user agents - the trouble usually comes when you're big enough to get sued. In my previous life at an ad agency we had a number of clients getting pursued by accessibility lawyers and firms. These were typically nothing more than shakedowns for some insignificant settlement (<$10k) - but it was an open-and-shut case if you wanted to take it to court so it was just easier to settle and spend a couple of sprints on WCAG best practices. IANAL and my agency didn't do the actual implementation so it was typically up to the client to sort out - but having a lawyer on hand should be one of the first things you take care of once you start making or accepting large amounts of money.
huqedato 3y ago
I would never agree with this statement of the author: "You won’t stop until everybody is using your app." Why ? All the apps I ever build (or participate in their development) where targeted to the fit the most, without sacrificing the business requirements or other important/critical aspects of the app. Otherwise will end-up with an unusable product.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That’s fair; I might have been a little gung-ho with this introductory flavour text
  - huqedato 3y ago
    Moreover, the target "audience" of an app is always specified before the design phase, in the Business Requirements Document and such and it's a defining element for the development. I've read/wrote hundreds of such documents in my career, yet I've never seen one that sets its target audience as 'everybody'.
    - bhaney 3y ago
      > the target "audience" of an app is always specified before the design phase, in the Business Requirements Document I could feel my soul leaving my body while reading this
      - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
        TBF, if you don't understand the people that you're writing your app for, you're probably not going to be very successful.
    - lelandfe 3y ago
      You're needlessly rebutting a jokey introduction to an article. I'd also wager few apps have everyone in the world as active users, which is the next sentence in the article.
    - 3y ago
ramshanker 3y ago
>>>>> We’re going to look at a dead simple, cat-themed, companion app I created especially for this article. <<<<< Reading that sent me a chill. So now people are creating new app for each article! Reading further, I understand why it had to be done for this article, but just imagine. Now a days even one-off events have dedicated APP for visitors management. What next, one for each booth of the event.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  I’ve done it before where I have a big sample project for multiple articles, but tbh it’s a lot easier for me as well to keep everything independent
bbertucc 3y ago
everyone should be taking this stuff seriously. EU's accessibility act is set to be implemented in 2025 and the US congress also has a bill in the works that mandates greater accessibility across all governments.
jtriangle 3y ago
>1 in 6 people think your app is broken >16% of people have some kind of accessibility requirement 16% is 4 in 25 people, also no guarantee you'll be able to accommodate their specific accessibility requirement, depending on the app, and depending on the requirement. That's not to say the app shouldn't be accessible, more that, you should think about when you spend the money to implement things like this, and how that money may best be spent to accommodate the highest number of people. Figure out who those people are, then figure out what your revenue growth would be if you captured those people, then compare those numbers to how much you'll have to spend to accommodate their needs. That's no different than any feature upgrade really. Where you'll likely arrive at is the same place many apps have, unfortunately, arrived at, which is to probably just get text scaling quasi working and leave it at that because anything more is throwing cash into a black hole.
- yau8edq12i 3y ago
  [flagged]
- jnovek 3y ago
  As a person who uses accessibility features on his devices, this attitude is why we depend on regulation to ensure that we (disabled people) can do stuff. No company implements accessibility features out of the kindness of their heart.
  - nsxwolf 3y ago
    If I'm putting out a free app as a single developer, I don't have the time or money to do everything. If it becomes popular, I can use metrics to improve the accessibility situation. If government regulations are going to insist I have to put that investment in day 1, I'll just take up badminton or something.
    - edent 3y ago
      [flagged]
zooq_ai 3y ago
Your App is successful because you didn't spend time on useless things like a11y, i18n during the p-m-f stage. If you look at every successful product in history, they didn't focus on a11y or i18n right from the bat. Now, that it is successful, you can think about it and spend resources.
- callalex 3y ago
  Are you really going to use the word “useless” here?
  - zooq_ai 3y ago
    Yes, if you offer something useful, people will jump through hoops to get it. Remember all the original Download/Porn sites. Those had a11y issues even for regular users, yet it was popular. a11y matters only for useless websites because they can't afford for users to leave
- bee_rider 3y ago
  It seems like quite an indictment of the tech sector to say that success happens because accessibility is ignored.
  - breakfastduck 3y ago
    Not really. Solving a new problem / use case is going to help you be successful, accessibility isn't novel. It's a feature.
  - rocqua 3y ago
    Succes requires quickly testing if something works at all. Those tests don't need accessibility to be accurate, so they don't have accessibility. What is important is that, when you found that something works and you start profiting from it, that you make it accessible. incidentally, this is how the EU law works aswell.
  - at_a_remove 3y ago
    I think it is safer to say that accessibility is an one of many edge cases. Not important ... until it suddenly is. I had many tricks to "sell" accessibility to the various clients and one of them was "What percentage of your potential users would you like to immediately piss off?" "How comfortable are you with random lawsuits? [Then you have to talk about the Target lawsuit]"
PaulHoule 3y ago
I was kinda shocked at how bad the UI framework broke down when the text size increased. I always thought iOS widgets seduced developers at the expense of users but here is the proof.
zer00eyz 3y ago
The very community who needs this, is inclined to ask first sue second. The ADA exists and is a powerful law. If you are willing to put in the work, generally you're going to get a pass. I wrote a bunch of accessibility guides (with a lawyer looking over my shoulder) around 2000 for a F500. I have since worked with blind users to add accessibility to apps. If someone is asking, and you can help them do it. You will have a massive advocate for what ever it is your doing!
- aftbit 3y ago
  Yeah for a decent period of time, the accessibility of Dropbox's desktop app was entirely dependent on one passionate blind forum user who called us out (politely!) every time we messed something up. It was a great, productive relationship that led to us continuing to release test builds on the forums for longer than we would otherwise have done so.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Indeed. You can literally spend as little effort as physically possible working on accessibility, and you will still be doing better than way too many businesses, and people with disabilities will still give you props for your literal minimal compliance.
deleted 3y ago
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SamBorick 3y ago
It's amazing how many people in this thread are seriously suggesting that these a11y features are not important. Do HN readers not understand that someday they will grow old, and their eyesight will fail, and they will find themselves increasing the font size on their devices?
- jnovek 3y ago
  This is what gets me -- almost everyone who reaches old age will eventually be disabled. Some folks just get there faster.
  - m463 3y ago
    > Some folks just get there faster. From my observation, most folks get there temporarily or faster in their own specific way. I have friends who lost their hearing early for a variety of reasons. There are lots of ways to have imperfect eyesight, or lose it temporarily. You can lose your glasses or not be able to wear contact lenses for a while. Lots of folks with laser surgery eventually regress. Also the surgery itself has visual side-effects.
- sircastor 3y ago
  Disability accommodations tend to also strongly benefit everyone else. I know this isn't a code thing, but the most useful one I can think of is curb cuts. All of this affects all of us.
  - hawski 3y ago
    There is also a code angle. You can automate around graphical programs easier thanks to accessibility APIs.
  - floxy 3y ago
    Speaking of curb cuts, recently in my town, they ripped up the sidewalks with already existing curb cuts, and added a new yellow pad with raised bumps in addition to new curbs (with the cuts). I was going to ask what this was for, but a quick search indicates that it is likely for blind users to feel the end of the sidewalk with a cane. https://www.simplemost.com/sidewalk-bumps/?utm_partner=gray_kytv https://www.simplemost.com/sidewalk-bumps/?utm_partner=gray_...
seanwilson 3y ago
Nice practical article. Accessibility is really important, but one of my pet peeves is when people call developers lazy for not making apps accessible by default. There really is a lot of concepts to learn, conflicting priorities, and tools to get familiar with, on top of making the business case to do it. Most developers and designers I've worked aren't that familiar with WCAG rules either. By the way, the blue on yellow, and blue on green buttons won't pass color contrast requirements. Black on yellow will work, and white on blue (for darker blues) will work. Finding a set of branded colors that contrast as needed is tricky too.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Thank you for the comment :) Appreciate the feedback, tbh I was a little lazy and probably should have confirmed the 'improved' colour scheme actually worked
- mcguire 3y ago
  Most developers and designers are unfamiliar with a major portion of their jobs. That says quite a bit about professionalism in the software development field.
  - Zanfa 3y ago
    > Most developers and designers are unfamiliar with a major portion of their jobs. Using spans with event listeners instead of anchor tags is my biggest pet peeve of incompetent frontend engineers. It’s like they go out of their way to take something that they get for free and then spend time and effort to break it.
    - acdha 3y ago
      One of the really frustrating parts of that is that they’ll blame accessibility for the extra work rather than admitting that they signed up to duplicate built-in functionality and blew it. I had that recently with some form validation where it went through this “wow that was a lot of work!” cycle and it was like “an HTML 101 form would have taken 15 minutes”.
sircastor 3y ago
For the last 12 years of his life, my father was in an electric wheelchair as a result of a stroke. Prior to that, I was vaguely aware of ADA compliance - basically because there were posted signs everywhere about parking spaces and restroom stalls. It was only after seeing the ease with which he could navigate the world in spite of his chair that I appreciated how important that law was, because I also saw so many things that he wasn't able to do even though there was a law. Our entire world is built around and for people who see, hear, speak, walk, climb, and crawl. As developers, I would say we're second only (maybe) to government in the ability to make the world accessible. I'm as guilty as anybody at this. Please make the effort to make your work as accessible as possible to everyone.
- matsemann 3y ago
  Tangentially related, but it's a bit interesting to see how many men get "radicalized" after being on paternity leave and pushing a stroller around. I'm volunteering on a board for an organization that (among other things) works for more accessible streets (more from an angle of less car dependence though), and we get lots of new members with this revelation. Suddenly they hate getting from point A to B; "It's just a short distance, why is everything making it so hard? Why are there curbs everywhere? Why isn't it wide enough for my stroller to pass? Why are there no big toilets where I can bring the kid with me? Why do I have to go a long way extra for an elevator?".
  - stn8188 3y ago
    Oh man I feel this... My big thing is observing and pointing out how few men's restrooms have diaper changing tables. Some places are awesome with it, or with private family restrooms for this purpose. For the other places... Let's just say that I'm quite used to changing diapers on the seat of the van.
    - sircastor 3y ago
      I 100% believe you, but I don't recall ever having this particular problem as a father (my kid was last in a diaper 2 years ago). The worst situation I recall coming across was the changing table mounted to the wall in the entrance space - which was frankly viewable from the outside of the restroom. I understand why they did it. This was at the Minnesota fairgrounds and there was literally no room in that bathroom any other place. I'm glad I never came across a men's room that wasn't accommodating. If you're not there yet, the next terror is desperately searching for a bathroom for your kid. It's especially hard in city centers where every place has put code locks on their restrooms "for customers only"... It's fine, I'll buy something, but my kid needs a bathroom right now!
ulrischa 3y ago
I have to fight with this sentence since 2010. It is often overseen and startet in the public sector
croes 3y ago
Isn't it quite ironic to use a numeronym like a11y for the word accessibility?
- donatj 3y ago
  I've honestly always wondered if that might be the joke.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  Amusingly: you'd think, but by being a uniquely new "word", it's actually far more discoverable. Searching for "a11y" will find you results for accessibility specifically as it relates to web/app technologies, whereas searching for "accessibility" will find you results relating to everything. Of course that only works if everyone agrees to use it, but thankfully, everyone agreed to use it.
- curtisblaine 3y ago
  Wasn't it chosen because it reads "ally" in leetspeak? Agree it's not incredibly accessible.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    That's probably a factor in its popularity, but it's in the category of "numerical contractions" like i18n [internationalization] or l10n [localization]. Numerical contractions were already very popular in the space of "making things work correctly for more people" [accessibility, localization, internationalization...].
    - Finnucane 3y ago
      Except that they don't really 'work correctly' in screen readers. They get read out rather awkwardly.
    - ttepasse 3y ago
      Sometimes, when I read these contractions too much, I’m starting to think I should short my first name as “T1m”.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I do my best to make all of my apps at least vision-impaired accessible. The last app, I figured a way to make that easier to manage, and reward use by non-disabled folks. I have a long-press help feature. If you long-press on any element in the UI, up pops a popover, with a header, and body text, pointing at the element. The popover explains that element. It's fairly easy to have a long-press gesture recognizer applied to the main view, and dynamically figure out which element was hit. I then look for the accessibility items. If they are there, I do the popover. I use the accessibilityLabel for the header, and the accessibilityHint for the text. It works extremely well, and no one has ever had it pop up when they weren't specifically trying for it.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Say what you want about Apple, they hit the nail on the head when it comes to A11y APIs
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    Absolutely! On macOS, I use KeyCue to show every hotkey* in every app because it's able to inspect accessibility/automation data. Similarly, this is what permits scripting desktop apps from AppleScript. (There's a word or phrase meaning side-benefits from disability compliance, but it escapes me.) * Almost
    - ttepasse 3y ago
      Oh, that’s nice to know, now that the CheatSheet has been discontinued. https://web.archive.org/web/20121114115948/http://mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/ https://web.archive.org/web/20121114115948/http://mediaateli... I thought CheatSheet was the original indie app which Apple copied for its iPad menus, but it seems KeyCue seems far older and such more original. > Similarly, this is what permits scripting desktop apps from AppleScript. AppleScript also has a second interaction in which the App gives access to an API to its “logical” object model. Instead of “Select item in list, then click on the delete button” the programming model is more “Tell the app to delete the e-mail”. On more complicated scripting tasks that makes a huge difference. But that depends on the developer on providing an AppleScript dictionary – which not everyone does. And Electron apps are of course black boxes, in scripting and more often than not in accessibility.
zem 3y ago
this is why i stick to gtk despite some very attractive looking new gui toolkits - gtk has solved its accessibility issues already, and the new toolkits mostly have it on the todo list.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Fun fact: it's far more than 16% because people tend to forget the two super most obvious accessibility requirements: being able to read text, and being able to interact with elements. About half of the planet has a visual disability that's bad enough to require a corrective medical device, and over 10% of the planet is just plain old. Tiny UI elements and small text are easily overlooked, huge problems.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > About half of the planet has a visual disability that's bad enough to require a corrective medical device Can you clarify how many people who merely need corrective lenses need to also rely on software accessibility features? The way you use "about half the planet" in your comment implies that every visual impairment is equal, and that all visual impairments result in increased accessibility needs. My only accessibility need, funnily enough, is a high-DPI display, despite technically having impaired vision, because my vision at close distances (even corrected) is so much better than 20/20 that regular displays look distractingly pixelated to me.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    The idea that "they don't need text controls because most people have glasses, so their vision isn't bad enough" is one of the reasons projects start thinking about a11y too late.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      That may be true, but isn't what I said. I think you're misrepresenting the actual percentage of people who actually need to use text controls in saying that about half the population doesn't have perfect vision. You may notice that those are two different things. It's like using the percentage of people without perfect control of their legs as a proxy for how many people actually need to use a wheelchair. Yes wheelchair accessibility is important, yes many people need to use one, but no not everyone without perfect control of their legs need to be in a wheelchair. Sometimes they only need crutches, etc.
imwillofficial 3y ago
I couldn't get past the over usage of a11y
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That's fair, I couldn't stomach typing the full word out an extra 46 times
  - elpocko 3y ago
    f6x t3s
    - jakey_bakey 3y ago
      You'll need to explain this one to me!
      - elpocko 3y ago
        fortysix times
        jakey_bakey 3y ago
        Thank you
godelski 3y ago
I had some big life events bring a lot of this to my attention this year. I've always cared about accessibility, but never had to deal with it personally before[0]. Luckily I'm not in charge of anything that has real impact here. There are just so many little things that you might think are actually helpful but aren't. This can be something like the slope of a ramp, making it essentially useless for a wheelchair. You can tell that this was made by someone who referenced a manual which was created by some bureaucrat and there was probably no actual handicapped person involved. Or similarly gaps on the subway, she'd have to roll herself, get stuck, and wait for someone to help. OR because she _can_ walk, get out of her wheel chair, push it over the gap, and then sit back down, with everyone looking at her thinking she's a fraud. There's no winning. Sometimes to get to elevators we have to walk/roll past several flights of stairs... Even a lot of phone UXs. The one that really infuriates me is when apps still zoom by sliding your finger up and down on the screen. It sucks as a normal person, it's impossible as a disabled person. But the things we've noticed, is that essentially the things she struggles with are no different than what older people struggle with. Reduced grip, reduced hand mobility, getting tired more easily, difficulties walking, etc. She's still recovering and we're hopeful she'll keep increasing mobility, but it still gave us insight we'd never have seen without it. Here's the thing, the world is just fucking complex and nuanced. We're never upset when we hit a piece of friction where we can tell someone was thinking but that the implementation was just incorrect, or where environments disrupt the implementation, or just when things are difficult to accommodate. I have a very "fit it" mindset (and used to be a traditional engineer, so do try to too).[1] And here's the thing we've also found. Anything that helps us helps the elderly. Anything that helps us ALSO HELPS NORMAL PEOPLE. Most of the issues -- and certainly the most difficult to overcome -- look like they were implemented that way to save a few cents or because they were just rushing. Move fast and break things is a great strategy for getting to learn how something works and get prototypes, but it is not a good strategy for even moderately mature products. So move fast, break things, but make sure you come back and clean up and fix things. It is easy to push off because you're trying to get to the next thing, but I promise you that actually going back and fixing things will make your whole product develop faster. Think about how much of your time is spent rewriting your coworkers' code, or fixing things that should have never been done, or hacking around things (compounding the issue) because you can't directly access the thing you need. A significant amount of this is also reduced. Having a different mentality is needed to think about accessibility but if you focus on thinking deeply and about nuances of issues you'll automatically capture a lot of things that help disabled people too! e.g. the gap in the rail can be motivated for many reasons: things falling in between, people pushing strollers over, rolling bags, etc. If you had thought clearly about any of these issues you would have also helped the person in the wheelchair without having ever thought about them. Making an app more usable for the visually impaired helps normal people see from farther away, when they're sleepy, or hell, even drunk. So you don't need to spend hours thinking about every single possible disability, just think about the nuance of things and think about your tech illiterate family members. If you remember how complex the world is and just keep that in mind (you don't have to address everything!) you will be going above and beyond. The bar is low. [0] Long story short, my partner had some amputations (we're only a tad over 30) because of a freak accident. Lost a thumb and partial movement in that index finger. Also has foot damage and so walking is hard. But other than that, she looks absolutely normal and strangely, this is problematic. She's been shoved by old people when she's trying to sit on the subway because they think she's just being a lazy young person. Or just realizing how many stairs there are... especially outside the US. [1] On the other hand, we also get very excited when we see well implemented things. And the joy we get to see how people thought things through, even if it is something that is more helpful to disabilities we (she) doesn't face. Disabled people are well aware that the world isn't made for them, and most people aren't expecting the world to bend to fit them, but of course every person is frustrated when they experience unique frictions (especially when you're going through the shock of change).
austin-cheney 3y ago
The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone. Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect vision. There are no blind soldiers in the army yet all Army digital communications are required to conform to federal regulations that accounts for accessibility. The result is higher quality products with greater availability. Usually the best argument opposing accessibility is that the authors/developers don’t know what they are doing. When they say accessibility is too expensive that’s what they really mean, and it’s not a good argument.
- dylan604 3y ago
  > Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect vision. I saw another IRL example of this in yet another football match over the weekend where one team was in a blue jersey with the other team in a black jersey. I'm not even color blind, yet it was hard for me to immediately distinguish players. I really miss the old days of home team in their club's color, with the away team in a predominately white jersey. So not even remotely UI/front-end related to a tech forum, but color contrast is a basic way humans separate things. It is not nice to mess with that for normal things.
- cogman10 3y ago
  > When they say accessibility is too expensive that’s what they really mean, and it’s not a good argument. Disabilities can be conflicting which makes catering to all difficult. Consider, for example, that someone who is deaf will usually use a flashing light to wake them up. However, if you are someone that's prone to seizures, that flashing light is now something that can trigger a medical emergency. Now consider how fire alarms typically work, big flashing lights and loud sirens. With accessibility you kind of can't please everyone. Not saying you shouldn't try, but there needs to be some level of "best effort" applied.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
rifty 3y ago
I run into this issue a fair bit because I enable 'larger text' for the display zoom option on my iPhone. I do this because I find it is just more comfortable to do things on the screen with one hand when there are larger hit boxes. I think 'accessibility' can be reframed as being more generally about flexible configuration and control for everyone to benefit from. For such personal devices it's not just about about disability, it's about the freedom I want as a user to mold an interface to actually fit me and my usage style moment to moment. Sometimes I want a screen read to me or just a section of it. I'm not visually impaired, I just might not want to look at the screen.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Ethical devs and legally-compliant organizations develop for a11y. Resources: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/tools/list https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/tools/list https://developer.apple.com/accessibility/ https://developer.apple.com/accessibility/ https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/accessibility/apps https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/accessibility/... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/accessibility https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/acces... https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility
lamontcg 3y ago
I like that this article was about solving the problem and not lecturing the person that they should have done it all up front before it was ever successful.
neomantra 3y ago
Just today, I was making a product landing page and wanted it to be accessible. Since we have Instagram, YouTube, and GitHub, I wanted to get the icons from those sources. I looked at how to ensure that with SVG and found this SO [1]. While YouTube does not supply SVGs, the SVGs from Instagram [2] and GitHub [3] did not include any a11y metadata. I was really surprised by this, given the massive user bases thereof, both consumer and developer. Maybe that's because it's not universal what should be there? So I had to insert it myself. I was scared to make a repo sharing these changes, but I will drop the GitHub one here: In `<svg>` element I added: role="img" aria-label="[title + description]" Nested inside I put: <title>GitHub Octocat Logo</title> <desc>An Octocat shadow in front of a white circle</desc> [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4697100/accessibility-recommended-alt-text-convention-for-svg-and-mathml https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4697100/accessibility-re... [2] https://about.meta.com/brand/resources/instagram/instagram-brand/ https://about.meta.com/brand/resources/instagram/instagram-b... [3] https://github.com/logos https://github.com/logos
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  You don't really need to do that. The point of putting alt text on images is to users who use screen readers can still understand your website. Tabbing through in a screen reader hearing detailed descriptions of each social logo is probably a poor user experience. Probably just "Github logo" or even "Github" would do just as well. If the image/logo is purely presentational (that is - if you remove the image do you remove information from the site?), just blank it out with an empty string.
  - neomantra 3y ago
    Thanks for that feedback, I appreciate it. The road to bad UX is paved with good intentions. Is the issue specifically the aria-label being too verbose? Like it's OK for the other metadata or even that's overkill?
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      It's probably overkill. The other way of looking at it is that if you put all that content in the visible text, does the page still read correctly? If the image is only used to convey the word "Github", then that's probably all your alt tag needs to be. The best way to figure it out is to use the screen reader in your operating system. It's hard to judge usability without actually using it. Aria-label, and the rest of the HTML (like just the text content, or label attributes, etc) all build up the accessibility tree which is what screen readers read out. All browser dev tools should have a way to view this. If putting a <title> inside an SVG doesn't result in that showing up in the accessibility tree, it's next to useless.
cogn1zance 3y ago
I think A11Y has been approached incorrectly. A11Y should be an additional standardized data feed that A11Y devices have to consume. Right now the requirements while helpful to everyone, also restrict the full potential of CSS/JS/the browser. With highly complex UIs it becomes almost impossible to be compliant. Right now any A11Y device has unique control over applications. In theory it seems like one could introduce a new product to market, claim a website does not support it, and then file a suit.
darajava 3y ago
I built my app in Flutter without thinking about a11y at all, and had a blind user complain about a feature I updated. She had been using the app for about 6 months and she said it’s one of the most accessible apps she’s used. Flutter pretty much takes care of it all for you and the highly custom feature I built didn’t need much tweaking at all to make it work for her again.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I've heard this previously as well. Pretty compelling argument for using Flutter. If only I didn't dislike Dart so much...
  - fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
    What issues have you had with dart last you tried it? What was the last version you tried? Dart has improved greatly in the last few years. It's one of the better OOP GCed languages these days in my opinion.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      My issues with Dart are pretty shallow honestly, mainly coming down to look and feel[1] and personal preference. I have no remaining technical qualms with Dart, just that I don't like it's flavor of ice cream (metaphorically speaking of course). It reminds me a lot of Java and feels like it was created to be more like what Javascript "should" have been had it been designed to be a scripting version of Java from the start. Of course this makes a ton of sense given it was designed at Google from a lot of Java devs. [1]: In the past I did have some criticisms around performance and non-native widgets, but those have been worked out
      - fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
        Interesting view. What makes it feel like java in your opinion? I think I see your point about dart being what JS should have been but I would add that it is also like what Java should have been. And really the only reason to compare it to Java is because it is the language that spawned most other comparable languages (C#, Swift, Dart, Kotlin, JS (kind of)). But syntactically Dart is nothing like java: - no `new` - no single class files only restriction - named parameters - no java.util.arraylist nonsense. semantically it is also very different (unlike eg. Kotlin) - first class support for passing functions as parameters (this is the worst issue with Java by far and can't be understated) - sound type system (String cannot be null) - async/await - no bytecode lots of other QOL features as well. If you're really thinking of trying out Flutter don't let Dart stop you from doing so. You may even find you like it!
bmitc 3y ago
For software accessibility, I get the importance, but I personally have no idea where to start. Cross-platform windowing, graphics, fonts, and audio are already insanely difficult. How does one do cross-platform accessibility?
- dmazzoni 3y ago
  Every cross-platform GUI toolkit I've ever seen has accessibility support. You just need to learn how to use it.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    But that required those platforms, such as Qt and Flutter, to figure it out in a bespoke manner. I am not aware of any existing cross-platform accessibility frameworks.
m3kw9 3y ago
Is why you go native UI methods as much as possible(iOS) it comes with a lot of accessibility by default. Also fonts and colours if possible as they provide dynamic sizing and contrast.
m3kw9 3y ago
Supporting speak text is especially difficult because you have to sequence the texts depending on your layouts.
friedtofu 3y ago
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2BX4yw8Z4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2BX4yw8Z4Y This post reminded me of a video I found really cool from a couple years back where Masahiro Sakurai(creator of Kirby, Super Smash Bros) talked about the importance of accessibility options and how Japanese developers - at the time, were lagging behind their western counterparts. He shows examples from and references Sony/Naughty Dog's 'The Last of Us'. I'm not sure if this is something that Sakurai influenced or not, though I have noticed larger Japanese AAA game studios adding more and more features in terms of accessibility in the last couple years from studios such as Ryu Go Gotoko(Yakuza series), Capcom(Resident Evil, Street Fighter), and FromSoft(Dark Souls, Elden Ring)
kenneth 3y ago
Is it really that hard to type the word "accessibility" that we need to come up with a silly shorthand version of it?
- mablopoule 3y ago
  It's in line with internationalization, shortened as 'I18n', while doing a cute play on world 'ally', not sure what the fuss is about.
atoav 3y ago
I think accessibility is probably one of the first things you should think about. Not because it is that important to you, but because when you decide to use this or that technology, this or that framework, accessability should be somewhere on the list of pros and cons for each choice. Unless of course you're just experimenting and it seamlessly turns into a serious thing by accident, that is.
RileyJames 3y ago
Does anyone know a similarly good guide for testing / retro fitting a11y to a web app? Asking for a friend…

277 points by jakey_bakey 3y ago

Why have we settled upon annotating accessibility options onto a visual-first, generally high-precision/high-touch-density medium? Wouldn't it be better to just have a "low vision" version of the app, a "low touch accuracy" version of the app, etc? Then you could provide the accessibility-minded users with something customized to their needs, instead of trying to shoehorn accessibility onto a layout that might have no commonality between what "normal" users want and what accessibility-required users want.

threatofrain 3y ago
I think eventually we're heading to website as data with clients remixing the data in a way you don't expect; i.e., the final output will be a mishmash of sources.
- blowski 3y ago
  Sounds like "the semantic web", which has been a great idea just about to take for about 20 years now.
  - threatofrain 3y ago
    The problem is that the web isn't semantic enough; I mean, when considering the use case of reading documents, we don't even have a table of contents element.
    - blowski 3y ago
      The vast majority of web content is published on sites that want people to use the content in their extremely curated walled garden. Making it easy to mash up content and integrate it with other sites is the exact opposite of what's happening on Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, et al.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  The opposite of that actually. Nobody is going to bother with websites if it's just data that gets slurped up by AI and fed back to people, it's a lot of work for no payout. People who make websites are going to make them interactive multimedia experiences that pull you away from the chatbot to feel something. The New York Times the information dump has no future, the New York Times the interactive multimedia social game and event hub with emotionally stirring stories, pictures and video can survive.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    I can't speak to GP, but AI is exactly what I had in mind when I read their comment. With AI transforming website content, the sites themselves just become data sources. You could be right though, especially with more and more sites blocking robots. Legitimate companies might just have to shrug and say, "this site prohibits me from reading it. You'll have to go there instead) though that seems like a legal problem to me rather than a technical one.
    - CuriouslyC 3y ago
      Sites that try to use robots.txt to stay relevant are going to fail spectacularly. All their information is going to leak or be provided by other sources, and they're going to get forgotten. The only people who will be able to make a living selling data will be the ones who can produce data so unique that nobody else can claim to have created it, and for which training on it leaves an unmistakable signature that makes litigation easy.
- jmilloy 3y ago
  Why do you think that? Everything I see suggests the opposite.
ijwann 3y ago
Good luck getting your organization to support building two apps. And even if you succeed once, good luck getting your organization to ship features twice every single time they want to build something. What will end up happening is you have your normal app which isn't accessible, and a second app with a fraction of your features that is likely often broken because it's hard to prioritize.
- threatofrain 3y ago
  You have one backend and two frontends, one of which is simplified and all-about-the-data. I daresay there's the possibility that it's easier to create two websites than it is to make one website do two things.
  - extra88 3y ago
    You might have heard of this thing called "responsive web design," (RWD) it's pretty popular. RWD is all about it not being better to make two websites (in that case, "mobile" vs. "desktop") instead of one.
    - threatofrain 3y ago
      In some ways this is similar. With responsive design we're talking about orthogonal views in the sense that given enough effort, the mobile and desktop experiences can be completely different, but of course in practice we're going to reuse components to save time. So just like we have desktop and mobile views, I'm just proposing one more view where you also get to reuse some of your components, and where you get to pushback on stuff like animations, rich interactions, or novelties.
      - extra88 3y ago
        There are already ways to make all those things conditional without creating an entirely new view. Only occasionally does the "accessible way" need to be in addition to what was planned all along, such as up, down, left, right arrow buttons beside a draggable map, you don't need a whole separate map for that.
kolanos 3y ago
iOS and Android largely do this for you as long as you use the platform's accessibility features.
AlienRobot 3y ago
People said it would take twice as long to make two versions of the same frontend, so they spent a hundred times as long making crossplatform, responsive, accessible GUIs that often feel terrible to use no matter who the user is.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
toast0 3y ago
Separate but equal isn't equal, and in the US, the ADA requires reasonable accommodation. It's not reasonable to require a second, separate app to cater to people with low vision/low dexterity, and chances are it's not going to have equal functionality (how many separate apps have equal functionality). It's better to require platforms to make accommodation a core feature (which they have largely done!) and require developers to use the accommodations. The ADA has a private right of action which means that there's distributed effort to find out what's a reasonable accommodation and also to drag businesses into compliance. There's plusses and minuses with this approach, of course.
- acdha 3y ago
  > It's not reasonable to require a second, separate app to cater to people with low vision/low dexterity, and chances are it's not going to have equal functionality Your first half of that sentence is debatable in absolute terms but in practice almost always right due to the second half. It can be reasonable to have an alternative version of something — for example, an audio or braille version of a printed document, or a ramp alternative to stairs – but the really hard part is actually keeping them in parity. If something is seen as a compliance obligation, I’d be shocked if that actually happened versus resources being allocated mostly to the extent that they’re cheaper than legal fees.
PaulStatezny 3y ago
> Wouldn't it be better to just have a "low vision" version of the app, a "low touch accuracy" version of the app, etc? I find your comment interesting because it speaks to users who can see, just not well. When I think of web accessibility, I (mostly) think of users who are entirely blind. While it turns out: ~80% of screen reader users are blind. The other ~20% may be partially vision impaired, or sometimes not visually impaired at all (but use it due to things like dyslexia). [1] ~2.4% of Americans are visually impaired and use (or could benefit from) a screen reader. [2] A "low vision" / "low touch accuracy" version of an app would likely be serving less than 0.5% (20% of 2.4%, see above) of your userbase. (As opposed to simply supporting screen readers in the "regular" version of the app.) Doesn't seem like a priority to optimize for 0.5% of your userbase when you're just trying to vet an unproven idea. [1] https://www.tempertemper.net/blog/not-all-screen-reader-users-are-blind https://www.tempertemper.net/blog/not-all-screen-reader-user... [2] https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics
- IncreasePosts 3y ago
  I was just giving examples of different types of accessibility needs, it wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list. You can imagine "no vision" as a type of "low vision", where vision = 0.0 if you'd like
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Do you wear glasses? HoW many people do you know need corrective lenses?
  - pxc 3y ago
    'Low vision' covers a lot of the same ground as phrases like 'legally blind' and 'partially sighted'. It doesn't mean people who rely on corrective lenses whose corrected vision is more or less normal.
- pxc 3y ago
  Those survey results probably don't mean what you think they mean. Among blind and visually impaired people, the term 'blind' can include basically anyone who is legally blind— it does not refer exclusively to the totally blind. My mom has been legally blind for almost two decades now, IIRC. It's only within the past year or two that her computer and phone usage has begun to switch to primarily screen reader-based rather than primarily magnification-based. From then and continuing on to this day, she chooses between the terms 'low vision' and 'blind' (and various others) mainly according to what she thinks the person she's talking to will most easily understand. (Although over the course of time she has gradually shifted toward favoring the word 'blind', both as she becomes more connected to the local blind community and as her vision continues to degrade). One thing to keep in mind is that going from normal/visual phone usage to a screen reader is like learning to walk all over again (and discovering that some paths are not for you anymore). It's starting over from zero, and it sucks. Going from typical visual usage to jacking up your font sizes is basically free, and using some kind of magnification a fairly natural next step. For people with progressive vision loss, there may be decades where one is 'blind', but it's still not efficient or opportune to drop everything and switch to relying exclusively on a screen reader.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Pie menus support "low touch accuracy" out of the box in a way that benefits everyone, and helps train novice users to become experts by "rehearsal". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39227843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39227843 Fitts' Law intuitively and mathematically explains why pie menus are faster and have lower error rates than linear menus. Fitts's Law says in effect: the bigger and closer a target is, the faster and more reliably you can hit it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law >Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a predictive model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics. The law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was initially developed by Paul Fitts. Pie menus both minimize the target distance, while also maximizing the target size. And the physical directional gesture required to select an item does not demand your continuous visual attention and cognitively taxing hand-eye feedback loop. You don't need to look at the screen to select items from a pie menu, so you can reliably "mouse ahead" or gesture, which is impossible with linear menus. Another advantage is that they support "rehearsal", by seamlessly training novice users to become experts. Unlike keyboard shortcuts, the physical action of the novice and expert is the same, only experts can do it faster without looking at the screen. Unlike traditional "invisible" gesture recognition systems like Palm Graffiti or StrokePlus.net, pie menus are "self revealing" in that the can pop up a menu that shows all the available options and their direction. It's quite difficult to learn which invisible gestures are available and what they all mean, but easy to discover them with pie menus. Pie menus also support "browsing" and "reselection", which gesture recognition doesn't, allowing users to correct errors or even browse around highlighting every item to preview its effects. Since pie menus can provide live continuous preview of the effects of the selected item in the application itself (which is especially nice when you use the distance as a parameter, for example a pie menu that lets you create eight objects, with a pull-out size parameter: the more you pull out, the bigger the object previewed at your cursor, which switches to different objects as you browse around the menu, then turns into a real object when you release the button), so you can see the effect and release the button when it's perfect, or go back to the center to cancel. Often the only feedback you need is the live preview of the pie menu selection, and popping up a menu would be a distraction. Once you learn the directions, you can quickly select items by stroking in the desired direction without even looking at the menu, so pie menus can perform the selection without popping up the menu. There's no need to pop up the "self revealing" menu until you stop dragging the mouse, or you can pop it up instantly by "clicking up" the menu. So a novice can get directions instantly, while an expert can fly ahead without waiting for directions, then pause for directions or confirmation that you have the right selection at any time. There's a smooth escalator moving you up the learning curve every time you use a pie menu, training your muscle memory through rehearsal. That is how pie menus "Lead, follow, or get out of the way". We performed an empirical study in 1988 that measured eight-item pie menus to be 15% faster than linear menus, with less frequent errors. An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus (Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman, Proc. ACM CHI’88): https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie-vs-linear-menus-466c6fdbba4b https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie... >Pie menus gain over traditional linear menus by reducing target seek time, lowering error rates by fixing the distance factor and increasing the target size in Fitts’s Law, minimizing the drift distance after target selection, and are, in general, subjectively equivalent to the linear style. [...] >Pilot study results: A pilot study of 16 subjects showed that users were approximately 15% faster with the pie menus and that errors were less frequent with pie menus. Statistically significant differences were found for item seek time but not task type. Subjects were split on their subjective preference of pie and linear menus. Some commented that they were able to visually isolate an item easier with linear menus and that it was hard to control the selection in pie menus because of the sensitivity of the pie menu selection mechanism. These subjects tended to be the most mouse naive of all whereas those who had heard of or seen a mouse/cursor controlled system but had not used one extensively tended to prefer pie menus. The most mouse naive users, while finding linear menus easier, tended to be better at pie menus and commented that with practice, they would probably be superior and in fact prefer the pie menus because of their speed and minimization of hand movement with the mouse. Not surprisingly, therefore, most of those preferring linear menus did not have a strong preference on the scaled subjective questionnaire. More about Fitts's Law and pie menu in this thread from Sept 27, 2022 on: Cairo: Alternative Windows Desktop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32992673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32992673 More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228342
mcguire 3y ago
Or, you could just not have the "low-*" versions and tell anyone who needed or wanted them, "Tough." I wouldn't advise it, though.
dmazzoni 3y ago
Assistive technology keeps growing and improving, though. These days most operating systems already come with a voice control feature, designed for people with a motor impairment to use their device entirely by voice. When you add alt text to an image button, you're not just enabling a blind user to hear a description, you're also enabling someone with carpal tunnel to speak the name of that button to activate it. Most other accessibility APIs and preferences have multiple use cases like that, too. That's why accessibility is designed the way it is: you're not modifying your app to work with specific disabilities, you're adding missing semantics and respecting user accessibility preferences, and assistive technology adapts things to work with different users.

AlienRobot 3y ago

I thought this would be a real story, not a hypothetical...

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Many such cases exist; I’ve been the champion before

mikece 3y ago

What is the real liability for a scenario like this? Is there any grace period when a new app or startup becomes far more successful far sooner than expected? I imagine A11Y isn't a massive concern when it's not certain an idea will even work; outside of California I can't imagine being legally skewered if, once you attain unexpected success, you devote A11Y resources to address this issue.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
It’s generally less of a legal liability and more of a reputation thing; as you grow you will get more and more users telling you off. See Wordle for an easy example. Plus, its not that hard to do correctly, so the “we’re a startup on a critical burn rate” stops working as an excuse rather early
- diggan 3y ago
  > Plus, its not that hard to do correctly, so the “we’re a startup on a critical burn rate” stops working as an excuse rather early It's not a question of it being too hard or easy, but as always, a question of priorities. Say you can either build feature A which is expected to open up the product to be used by 1% more users, as people been asking for that feature. Or you can build feature B, which enables motionsick people to use your app without getting sick from your wasteful animations. This will help 0.001% of your current users, when you have 10,000 users in total lets say. Not saying it's right or wrong, but I understand why people (managers/owners) make the choice to do feature A instead of feature B, especially in a startup-context where it might be the (imaginary or not) choice between surviving or not. I'm personally in the camp of thinking about accessibility as part of all the work done, but it's not exactly the mainstream workflow.
- linkjuice4all 3y ago
  While it's generally a good idea to make your app/site accessible to all users and user agents - the trouble usually comes when you're big enough to get sued. In my previous life at an ad agency we had a number of clients getting pursued by accessibility lawyers and firms. These were typically nothing more than shakedowns for some insignificant settlement (<$10k) - but it was an open-and-shut case if you wanted to take it to court so it was just easier to settle and spend a couple of sprints on WCAG best practices. IANAL and my agency didn't do the actual implementation so it was typically up to the client to sort out - but having a lawyer on hand should be one of the first things you take care of once you start making or accepting large amounts of money.

huqedato 3y ago

I would never agree with this statement of the author: "You won’t stop until everybody is using your app." Why ? All the apps I ever build (or participate in their development) where targeted to the fit the most, without sacrificing the business requirements or other important/critical aspects of the app. Otherwise will end-up with an unusable product.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
That’s fair; I might have been a little gung-ho with this introductory flavour text
- huqedato 3y ago
  Moreover, the target "audience" of an app is always specified before the design phase, in the Business Requirements Document and such and it's a defining element for the development. I've read/wrote hundreds of such documents in my career, yet I've never seen one that sets its target audience as 'everybody'.
  - bhaney 3y ago
    > the target "audience" of an app is always specified before the design phase, in the Business Requirements Document I could feel my soul leaving my body while reading this
    - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      TBF, if you don't understand the people that you're writing your app for, you're probably not going to be very successful.
  - lelandfe 3y ago
    You're needlessly rebutting a jokey introduction to an article. I'd also wager few apps have everyone in the world as active users, which is the next sentence in the article.
  - 3y ago

ramshanker 3y ago

>>>>> We’re going to look at a dead simple, cat-themed, companion app I created especially for this article. <<<<< Reading that sent me a chill. So now people are creating new app for each article! Reading further, I understand why it had to be done for this article, but just imagine. Now a days even one-off events have dedicated APP for visitors management. What next, one for each booth of the event.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
I’ve done it before where I have a big sample project for multiple articles, but tbh it’s a lot easier for me as well to keep everything independent

bbertucc 3y ago

everyone should be taking this stuff seriously. EU's accessibility act is set to be implemented in 2025 and the US congress also has a bill in the works that mandates greater accessibility across all governments.

jtriangle 3y ago

>1 in 6 people think your app is broken >16% of people have some kind of accessibility requirement 16% is 4 in 25 people, also no guarantee you'll be able to accommodate their specific accessibility requirement, depending on the app, and depending on the requirement. That's not to say the app shouldn't be accessible, more that, you should think about when you spend the money to implement things like this, and how that money may best be spent to accommodate the highest number of people. Figure out who those people are, then figure out what your revenue growth would be if you captured those people, then compare those numbers to how much you'll have to spend to accommodate their needs. That's no different than any feature upgrade really. Where you'll likely arrive at is the same place many apps have, unfortunately, arrived at, which is to probably just get text scaling quasi working and leave it at that because anything more is throwing cash into a black hole.

yau8edq12i 3y ago
[flagged]
jnovek 3y ago
As a person who uses accessibility features on his devices, this attitude is why we depend on regulation to ensure that we (disabled people) can do stuff. No company implements accessibility features out of the kindness of their heart.
- nsxwolf 3y ago
  If I'm putting out a free app as a single developer, I don't have the time or money to do everything. If it becomes popular, I can use metrics to improve the accessibility situation. If government regulations are going to insist I have to put that investment in day 1, I'll just take up badminton or something.
  - edent 3y ago
    [flagged]

zooq_ai 3y ago

Your App is successful because you didn't spend time on useless things like a11y, i18n during the p-m-f stage. If you look at every successful product in history, they didn't focus on a11y or i18n right from the bat. Now, that it is successful, you can think about it and spend resources.

callalex 3y ago
Are you really going to use the word “useless” here?
- zooq_ai 3y ago
  Yes, if you offer something useful, people will jump through hoops to get it. Remember all the original Download/Porn sites. Those had a11y issues even for regular users, yet it was popular. a11y matters only for useless websites because they can't afford for users to leave
bee_rider 3y ago
It seems like quite an indictment of the tech sector to say that success happens because accessibility is ignored.
- breakfastduck 3y ago
  Not really. Solving a new problem / use case is going to help you be successful, accessibility isn't novel. It's a feature.
- rocqua 3y ago
  Succes requires quickly testing if something works at all. Those tests don't need accessibility to be accurate, so they don't have accessibility. What is important is that, when you found that something works and you start profiting from it, that you make it accessible. incidentally, this is how the EU law works aswell.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  I think it is safer to say that accessibility is an one of many edge cases. Not important ... until it suddenly is. I had many tricks to "sell" accessibility to the various clients and one of them was "What percentage of your potential users would you like to immediately piss off?" "How comfortable are you with random lawsuits? [Then you have to talk about the Target lawsuit]"

PaulHoule 3y ago

I was kinda shocked at how bad the UI framework broke down when the text size increased. I always thought iOS widgets seduced developers at the expense of users but here is the proof.

zer00eyz 3y ago

The very community who needs this, is inclined to ask first sue second. The ADA exists and is a powerful law. If you are willing to put in the work, generally you're going to get a pass. I wrote a bunch of accessibility guides (with a lawyer looking over my shoulder) around 2000 for a F500. I have since worked with blind users to add accessibility to apps. If someone is asking, and you can help them do it. You will have a massive advocate for what ever it is your doing!

aftbit 3y ago
Yeah for a decent period of time, the accessibility of Dropbox's desktop app was entirely dependent on one passionate blind forum user who called us out (politely!) every time we messed something up. It was a great, productive relationship that led to us continuing to release test builds on the forums for longer than we would otherwise have done so.
mrguyorama 3y ago
Indeed. You can literally spend as little effort as physically possible working on accessibility, and you will still be doing better than way too many businesses, and people with disabilities will still give you props for your literal minimal compliance.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

SamBorick 3y ago

It's amazing how many people in this thread are seriously suggesting that these a11y features are not important. Do HN readers not understand that someday they will grow old, and their eyesight will fail, and they will find themselves increasing the font size on their devices?

jnovek 3y ago
This is what gets me -- almost everyone who reaches old age will eventually be disabled. Some folks just get there faster.
- m463 3y ago
  > Some folks just get there faster. From my observation, most folks get there temporarily or faster in their own specific way. I have friends who lost their hearing early for a variety of reasons. There are lots of ways to have imperfect eyesight, or lose it temporarily. You can lose your glasses or not be able to wear contact lenses for a while. Lots of folks with laser surgery eventually regress. Also the surgery itself has visual side-effects.
sircastor 3y ago
Disability accommodations tend to also strongly benefit everyone else. I know this isn't a code thing, but the most useful one I can think of is curb cuts. All of this affects all of us.
- hawski 3y ago
  There is also a code angle. You can automate around graphical programs easier thanks to accessibility APIs.
- floxy 3y ago
  Speaking of curb cuts, recently in my town, they ripped up the sidewalks with already existing curb cuts, and added a new yellow pad with raised bumps in addition to new curbs (with the cuts). I was going to ask what this was for, but a quick search indicates that it is likely for blind users to feel the end of the sidewalk with a cane. https://www.simplemost.com/sidewalk-bumps/?utm_partner=gray_kytv https://www.simplemost.com/sidewalk-bumps/?utm_partner=gray_...

seanwilson 3y ago

Nice practical article. Accessibility is really important, but one of my pet peeves is when people call developers lazy for not making apps accessible by default. There really is a lot of concepts to learn, conflicting priorities, and tools to get familiar with, on top of making the business case to do it. Most developers and designers I've worked aren't that familiar with WCAG rules either. By the way, the blue on yellow, and blue on green buttons won't pass color contrast requirements. Black on yellow will work, and white on blue (for darker blues) will work. Finding a set of branded colors that contrast as needed is tricky too.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Thank you for the comment :) Appreciate the feedback, tbh I was a little lazy and probably should have confirmed the 'improved' colour scheme actually worked
mcguire 3y ago
Most developers and designers are unfamiliar with a major portion of their jobs. That says quite a bit about professionalism in the software development field.
- Zanfa 3y ago
  > Most developers and designers are unfamiliar with a major portion of their jobs. Using spans with event listeners instead of anchor tags is my biggest pet peeve of incompetent frontend engineers. It’s like they go out of their way to take something that they get for free and then spend time and effort to break it.
  - acdha 3y ago
    One of the really frustrating parts of that is that they’ll blame accessibility for the extra work rather than admitting that they signed up to duplicate built-in functionality and blew it. I had that recently with some form validation where it went through this “wow that was a lot of work!” cycle and it was like “an HTML 101 form would have taken 15 minutes”.

sircastor 3y ago

For the last 12 years of his life, my father was in an electric wheelchair as a result of a stroke. Prior to that, I was vaguely aware of ADA compliance - basically because there were posted signs everywhere about parking spaces and restroom stalls. It was only after seeing the ease with which he could navigate the world in spite of his chair that I appreciated how important that law was, because I also saw so many things that he wasn't able to do even though there was a law. Our entire world is built around and for people who see, hear, speak, walk, climb, and crawl. As developers, I would say we're second only (maybe) to government in the ability to make the world accessible. I'm as guilty as anybody at this. Please make the effort to make your work as accessible as possible to everyone.

matsemann 3y ago
Tangentially related, but it's a bit interesting to see how many men get "radicalized" after being on paternity leave and pushing a stroller around. I'm volunteering on a board for an organization that (among other things) works for more accessible streets (more from an angle of less car dependence though), and we get lots of new members with this revelation. Suddenly they hate getting from point A to B; "It's just a short distance, why is everything making it so hard? Why are there curbs everywhere? Why isn't it wide enough for my stroller to pass? Why are there no big toilets where I can bring the kid with me? Why do I have to go a long way extra for an elevator?".
- stn8188 3y ago
  Oh man I feel this... My big thing is observing and pointing out how few men's restrooms have diaper changing tables. Some places are awesome with it, or with private family restrooms for this purpose. For the other places... Let's just say that I'm quite used to changing diapers on the seat of the van.
  - sircastor 3y ago
    I 100% believe you, but I don't recall ever having this particular problem as a father (my kid was last in a diaper 2 years ago). The worst situation I recall coming across was the changing table mounted to the wall in the entrance space - which was frankly viewable from the outside of the restroom. I understand why they did it. This was at the Minnesota fairgrounds and there was literally no room in that bathroom any other place. I'm glad I never came across a men's room that wasn't accommodating. If you're not there yet, the next terror is desperately searching for a bathroom for your kid. It's especially hard in city centers where every place has put code locks on their restrooms "for customers only"... It's fine, I'll buy something, but my kid needs a bathroom right now!

ulrischa 3y ago

I have to fight with this sentence since 2010. It is often overseen and startet in the public sector

croes 3y ago

Isn't it quite ironic to use a numeronym like a11y for the word accessibility?

donatj 3y ago
I've honestly always wondered if that might be the joke.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Amusingly: you'd think, but by being a uniquely new "word", it's actually far more discoverable. Searching for "a11y" will find you results for accessibility specifically as it relates to web/app technologies, whereas searching for "accessibility" will find you results relating to everything. Of course that only works if everyone agrees to use it, but thankfully, everyone agreed to use it.
curtisblaine 3y ago
Wasn't it chosen because it reads "ally" in leetspeak? Agree it's not incredibly accessible.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  That's probably a factor in its popularity, but it's in the category of "numerical contractions" like i18n [internationalization] or l10n [localization]. Numerical contractions were already very popular in the space of "making things work correctly for more people" [accessibility, localization, internationalization...].
  - Finnucane 3y ago
    Except that they don't really 'work correctly' in screen readers. They get read out rather awkwardly.
  - ttepasse 3y ago
    Sometimes, when I read these contractions too much, I’m starting to think I should short my first name as “T1m”.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I do my best to make all of my apps at least vision-impaired accessible. The last app, I figured a way to make that easier to manage, and reward use by non-disabled folks. I have a long-press help feature. If you long-press on any element in the UI, up pops a popover, with a header, and body text, pointing at the element. The popover explains that element. It's fairly easy to have a long-press gesture recognizer applied to the main view, and dynamically figure out which element was hit. I then look for the accessibility items. If they are there, I do the popover. I use the accessibilityLabel for the header, and the accessibilityHint for the text. It works extremely well, and no one has ever had it pop up when they weren't specifically trying for it.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Say what you want about Apple, they hit the nail on the head when it comes to A11y APIs
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Absolutely! On macOS, I use KeyCue to show every hotkey* in every app because it's able to inspect accessibility/automation data. Similarly, this is what permits scripting desktop apps from AppleScript. (There's a word or phrase meaning side-benefits from disability compliance, but it escapes me.) * Almost
  - ttepasse 3y ago
    Oh, that’s nice to know, now that the CheatSheet has been discontinued. https://web.archive.org/web/20121114115948/http://mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/ https://web.archive.org/web/20121114115948/http://mediaateli... I thought CheatSheet was the original indie app which Apple copied for its iPad menus, but it seems KeyCue seems far older and such more original. > Similarly, this is what permits scripting desktop apps from AppleScript. AppleScript also has a second interaction in which the App gives access to an API to its “logical” object model. Instead of “Select item in list, then click on the delete button” the programming model is more “Tell the app to delete the e-mail”. On more complicated scripting tasks that makes a huge difference. But that depends on the developer on providing an AppleScript dictionary – which not everyone does. And Electron apps are of course black boxes, in scripting and more often than not in accessibility.

zem 3y ago

this is why i stick to gtk despite some very attractive looking new gui toolkits - gtk has solved its accessibility issues already, and the new toolkits mostly have it on the todo list.

TheRealPomax 3y ago

Fun fact: it's far more than 16% because people tend to forget the two super most obvious accessibility requirements: being able to read text, and being able to interact with elements. About half of the planet has a visual disability that's bad enough to require a corrective medical device, and over 10% of the planet is just plain old. Tiny UI elements and small text are easily overlooked, huge problems.

LoganDark 3y ago
> About half of the planet has a visual disability that's bad enough to require a corrective medical device Can you clarify how many people who merely need corrective lenses need to also rely on software accessibility features? The way you use "about half the planet" in your comment implies that every visual impairment is equal, and that all visual impairments result in increased accessibility needs. My only accessibility need, funnily enough, is a high-DPI display, despite technically having impaired vision, because my vision at close distances (even corrected) is so much better than 20/20 that regular displays look distractingly pixelated to me.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  The idea that "they don't need text controls because most people have glasses, so their vision isn't bad enough" is one of the reasons projects start thinking about a11y too late.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    That may be true, but isn't what I said. I think you're misrepresenting the actual percentage of people who actually need to use text controls in saying that about half the population doesn't have perfect vision. You may notice that those are two different things. It's like using the percentage of people without perfect control of their legs as a proxy for how many people actually need to use a wheelchair. Yes wheelchair accessibility is important, yes many people need to use one, but no not everyone without perfect control of their legs need to be in a wheelchair. Sometimes they only need crutches, etc.

imwillofficial 3y ago

I couldn't get past the over usage of a11y

jakey_bakey 3y ago
That's fair, I couldn't stomach typing the full word out an extra 46 times
- elpocko 3y ago
  f6x t3s
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    You'll need to explain this one to me!
    - elpocko 3y ago
      fortysix times
      - jakey_bakey 3y ago
        Thank you

godelski 3y ago

I had some big life events bring a lot of this to my attention this year. I've always cared about accessibility, but never had to deal with it personally before[0]. Luckily I'm not in charge of anything that has real impact here. There are just so many little things that you might think are actually helpful but aren't. This can be something like the slope of a ramp, making it essentially useless for a wheelchair. You can tell that this was made by someone who referenced a manual which was created by some bureaucrat and there was probably no actual handicapped person involved. Or similarly gaps on the subway, she'd have to roll herself, get stuck, and wait for someone to help. OR because she _can_ walk, get out of her wheel chair, push it over the gap, and then sit back down, with everyone looking at her thinking she's a fraud. There's no winning. Sometimes to get to elevators we have to walk/roll past several flights of stairs... Even a lot of phone UXs. The one that really infuriates me is when apps still zoom by sliding your finger up and down on the screen. It sucks as a normal person, it's impossible as a disabled person. But the things we've noticed, is that essentially the things she struggles with are no different than what older people struggle with. Reduced grip, reduced hand mobility, getting tired more easily, difficulties walking, etc. She's still recovering and we're hopeful she'll keep increasing mobility, but it still gave us insight we'd never have seen without it. Here's the thing, the world is just fucking complex and nuanced. We're never upset when we hit a piece of friction where we can tell someone was thinking but that the implementation was just incorrect, or where environments disrupt the implementation, or just when things are difficult to accommodate. I have a very "fit it" mindset (and used to be a traditional engineer, so do try to too).[1] And here's the thing we've also found. Anything that helps us helps the elderly. Anything that helps us ALSO HELPS NORMAL PEOPLE. Most of the issues -- and certainly the most difficult to overcome -- look like they were implemented that way to save a few cents or because they were just rushing. Move fast and break things is a great strategy for getting to learn how something works and get prototypes, but it is not a good strategy for even moderately mature products. So move fast, break things, but make sure you come back and clean up and fix things. It is easy to push off because you're trying to get to the next thing, but I promise you that actually going back and fixing things will make your whole product develop faster. Think about how much of your time is spent rewriting your coworkers' code, or fixing things that should have never been done, or hacking around things (compounding the issue) because you can't directly access the thing you need. A significant amount of this is also reduced. Having a different mentality is needed to think about accessibility but if you focus on thinking deeply and about nuances of issues you'll automatically capture a lot of things that help disabled people too! e.g. the gap in the rail can be motivated for many reasons: things falling in between, people pushing strollers over, rolling bags, etc. If you had thought clearly about any of these issues you would have also helped the person in the wheelchair without having ever thought about them. Making an app more usable for the visually impaired helps normal people see from farther away, when they're sleepy, or hell, even drunk. So you don't need to spend hours thinking about every single possible disability, just think about the nuance of things and think about your tech illiterate family members. If you remember how complex the world is and just keep that in mind (you don't have to address everything!) you will be going above and beyond. The bar is low. [0] Long story short, my partner had some amputations (we're only a tad over 30) because of a freak accident. Lost a thumb and partial movement in that index finger. Also has foot damage and so walking is hard. But other than that, she looks absolutely normal and strangely, this is problematic. She's been shoved by old people when she's trying to sit on the subway because they think she's just being a lazy young person. Or just realizing how many stairs there are... especially outside the US. [1] On the other hand, we also get very excited when we see well implemented things. And the joy we get to see how people thought things through, even if it is something that is more helpful to disabilities we (she) doesn't face. Disabled people are well aware that the world isn't made for them, and most people aren't expecting the world to bend to fit them, but of course every person is frustrated when they experience unique frictions (especially when you're going through the shock of change).

austin-cheney 3y ago

The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone. Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect vision. There are no blind soldiers in the army yet all Army digital communications are required to conform to federal regulations that accounts for accessibility. The result is higher quality products with greater availability. Usually the best argument opposing accessibility is that the authors/developers don’t know what they are doing. When they say accessibility is too expensive that’s what they really mean, and it’s not a good argument.

dylan604 3y ago
> Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect vision. I saw another IRL example of this in yet another football match over the weekend where one team was in a blue jersey with the other team in a black jersey. I'm not even color blind, yet it was hard for me to immediately distinguish players. I really miss the old days of home team in their club's color, with the away team in a predominately white jersey. So not even remotely UI/front-end related to a tech forum, but color contrast is a basic way humans separate things. It is not nice to mess with that for normal things.
cogman10 3y ago
> When they say accessibility is too expensive that’s what they really mean, and it’s not a good argument. Disabilities can be conflicting which makes catering to all difficult. Consider, for example, that someone who is deaf will usually use a flashing light to wake them up. However, if you are someone that's prone to seizures, that flashing light is now something that can trigger a medical emergency. Now consider how fire alarms typically work, big flashing lights and loud sirens. With accessibility you kind of can't please everyone. Not saying you shouldn't try, but there needs to be some level of "best effort" applied.
- mrguyorama 3y ago

rifty 3y ago

I run into this issue a fair bit because I enable 'larger text' for the display zoom option on my iPhone. I do this because I find it is just more comfortable to do things on the screen with one hand when there are larger hit boxes. I think 'accessibility' can be reframed as being more generally about flexible configuration and control for everyone to benefit from. For such personal devices it's not just about about disability, it's about the freedom I want as a user to mold an interface to actually fit me and my usage style moment to moment. Sometimes I want a screen read to me or just a section of it. I'm not visually impaired, I just might not want to look at the screen.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Ethical devs and legally-compliant organizations develop for a11y. Resources: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/tools/list https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/tools/list https://developer.apple.com/accessibility/ https://developer.apple.com/accessibility/ https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/accessibility/apps https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/accessibility/... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/accessibility https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/acces... https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility

lamontcg 3y ago

I like that this article was about solving the problem and not lecturing the person that they should have done it all up front before it was ever successful.

neomantra 3y ago

Just today, I was making a product landing page and wanted it to be accessible. Since we have Instagram, YouTube, and GitHub, I wanted to get the icons from those sources. I looked at how to ensure that with SVG and found this SO [1]. While YouTube does not supply SVGs, the SVGs from Instagram [2] and GitHub [3] did not include any a11y metadata. I was really surprised by this, given the massive user bases thereof, both consumer and developer. Maybe that's because it's not universal what should be there? So I had to insert it myself. I was scared to make a repo sharing these changes, but I will drop the GitHub one here: In `<svg>` element I added: role="img" aria-label="[title + description]" Nested inside I put: <title>GitHub Octocat Logo</title> <desc>An Octocat shadow in front of a white circle</desc> [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4697100/accessibility-recommended-alt-text-convention-for-svg-and-mathml https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4697100/accessibility-re... [2] https://about.meta.com/brand/resources/instagram/instagram-brand/ https://about.meta.com/brand/resources/instagram/instagram-b... [3] https://github.com/logos https://github.com/logos

madeofpalk 3y ago
You don't really need to do that. The point of putting alt text on images is to users who use screen readers can still understand your website. Tabbing through in a screen reader hearing detailed descriptions of each social logo is probably a poor user experience. Probably just "Github logo" or even "Github" would do just as well. If the image/logo is purely presentational (that is - if you remove the image do you remove information from the site?), just blank it out with an empty string.
- neomantra 3y ago
  Thanks for that feedback, I appreciate it. The road to bad UX is paved with good intentions. Is the issue specifically the aria-label being too verbose? Like it's OK for the other metadata or even that's overkill?
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    It's probably overkill. The other way of looking at it is that if you put all that content in the visible text, does the page still read correctly? If the image is only used to convey the word "Github", then that's probably all your alt tag needs to be. The best way to figure it out is to use the screen reader in your operating system. It's hard to judge usability without actually using it. Aria-label, and the rest of the HTML (like just the text content, or label attributes, etc) all build up the accessibility tree which is what screen readers read out. All browser dev tools should have a way to view this. If putting a <title> inside an SVG doesn't result in that showing up in the accessibility tree, it's next to useless.

cogn1zance 3y ago

I think A11Y has been approached incorrectly. A11Y should be an additional standardized data feed that A11Y devices have to consume. Right now the requirements while helpful to everyone, also restrict the full potential of CSS/JS/the browser. With highly complex UIs it becomes almost impossible to be compliant. Right now any A11Y device has unique control over applications. In theory it seems like one could introduce a new product to market, claim a website does not support it, and then file a suit.

darajava 3y ago

I built my app in Flutter without thinking about a11y at all, and had a blind user complain about a feature I updated. She had been using the app for about 6 months and she said it’s one of the most accessible apps she’s used. Flutter pretty much takes care of it all for you and the highly custom feature I built didn’t need much tweaking at all to make it work for her again.

freedomben 3y ago
I've heard this previously as well. Pretty compelling argument for using Flutter. If only I didn't dislike Dart so much...
- fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
  What issues have you had with dart last you tried it? What was the last version you tried? Dart has improved greatly in the last few years. It's one of the better OOP GCed languages these days in my opinion.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    My issues with Dart are pretty shallow honestly, mainly coming down to look and feel[1] and personal preference. I have no remaining technical qualms with Dart, just that I don't like it's flavor of ice cream (metaphorically speaking of course). It reminds me a lot of Java and feels like it was created to be more like what Javascript "should" have been had it been designed to be a scripting version of Java from the start. Of course this makes a ton of sense given it was designed at Google from a lot of Java devs. [1]: In the past I did have some criticisms around performance and non-native widgets, but those have been worked out
    - fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
      Interesting view. What makes it feel like java in your opinion? I think I see your point about dart being what JS should have been but I would add that it is also like what Java should have been. And really the only reason to compare it to Java is because it is the language that spawned most other comparable languages (C#, Swift, Dart, Kotlin, JS (kind of)). But syntactically Dart is nothing like java: - no `new` - no single class files only restriction - named parameters - no java.util.arraylist nonsense. semantically it is also very different (unlike eg. Kotlin) - first class support for passing functions as parameters (this is the worst issue with Java by far and can't be understated) - sound type system (String cannot be null) - async/await - no bytecode lots of other QOL features as well. If you're really thinking of trying out Flutter don't let Dart stop you from doing so. You may even find you like it!

bmitc 3y ago

For software accessibility, I get the importance, but I personally have no idea where to start. Cross-platform windowing, graphics, fonts, and audio are already insanely difficult. How does one do cross-platform accessibility?

dmazzoni 3y ago
Every cross-platform GUI toolkit I've ever seen has accessibility support. You just need to learn how to use it.
- bmitc 3y ago
  But that required those platforms, such as Qt and Flutter, to figure it out in a bespoke manner. I am not aware of any existing cross-platform accessibility frameworks.

m3kw9 3y ago

Is why you go native UI methods as much as possible(iOS) it comes with a lot of accessibility by default. Also fonts and colours if possible as they provide dynamic sizing and contrast.

m3kw9 3y ago

Supporting speak text is especially difficult because you have to sequence the texts depending on your layouts.

friedtofu 3y ago

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2BX4yw8Z4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2BX4yw8Z4Y This post reminded me of a video I found really cool from a couple years back where Masahiro Sakurai(creator of Kirby, Super Smash Bros) talked about the importance of accessibility options and how Japanese developers - at the time, were lagging behind their western counterparts. He shows examples from and references Sony/Naughty Dog's 'The Last of Us'. I'm not sure if this is something that Sakurai influenced or not, though I have noticed larger Japanese AAA game studios adding more and more features in terms of accessibility in the last couple years from studios such as Ryu Go Gotoko(Yakuza series), Capcom(Resident Evil, Street Fighter), and FromSoft(Dark Souls, Elden Ring)

kenneth 3y ago

Is it really that hard to type the word "accessibility" that we need to come up with a silly shorthand version of it?

mablopoule 3y ago
It's in line with internationalization, shortened as 'I18n', while doing a cute play on world 'ally', not sure what the fuss is about.

atoav 3y ago

I think accessibility is probably one of the first things you should think about. Not because it is that important to you, but because when you decide to use this or that technology, this or that framework, accessability should be somewhere on the list of pros and cons for each choice. Unless of course you're just experimenting and it seamlessly turns into a serious thing by accident, that is.

RileyJames 3y ago

Does anyone know a similarly good guide for testing / retro fitting a11y to a web app? Asking for a friend…