3 ms·
I think you're partially right. The development of good accessibility features require what any other feature would require- time. Since there aren't enough ski
by batch12 1y ago
I think you're partially right. The development of good accessibility features require what any other feature would require- time. Since there aren't enough skilled people willing to give their time to make a good dent in the issue, the only solution left is to pay people for their efforts, sadly.
- esafak 1y agoWhat kind of people are needed, accessibility experts? I think such people are usually PMs or designers, not engineers.
- pseudo0 1y agoAccessibility experts typically end up creating a bunch of requirements that need engineering man-hours to fulfil. That tends to be boring dev work that most people don't want to do for free. It's hard enough to find people to work on the shiny, fun stuff in open-source.
- esafak 1y agoSounds like a task for an LLM.
- whatevaa 1y agoSounds like a good task for LLM to fuck up the codebase to a point it's unmaintainable.
- zihotki 1y agoLLMs are terrible at accessibility since it requires a lot of implicit context. I'm currently implenemting accessibility for a web app. LLMs (sonnet 3-4, gemini 2.5) make a huge mess and they need a lot of supervision and planning
- ohdeargodno 1y agoYou don't need to be an expert to verify basic checklists. Adding accessibility labels to your buttons, making keyboard navigation work are supposed to be part of your work as an "engineer". Can you imagine building a bridge and saying "yeah no I haven't checked the sidewalks are safe that's an accessibility feature" ? A basic understanding of accessibility principles is a requirement if you intend to call yourself an engineer (and work on UI facing elements, of course.)
- mook 1y agoI don't know if this applies here, but my previous experience with doing amateur open source stuff against a code base work corporate backing was that they'll out-code you if they don't care about it. As in be very slow at doing reviews (because they are busy doing features their manager wants them to do, but it's their area that's being changed so the review is still needed), and things can bitrot in that time because they're actively working on it. In one case the lead then said too bad the project is a meritocracy and people who do the work daily has the say.