2 ms·

It makes me very happy that I am never going to convince people like you that accessibility is optional. I can't convince myself of it either when it comes to p

by jot 13y ago

It makes me very happy that I am never going to convince people like you that accessibility is optional. I can't convince myself of it either when it comes to profitable products. We need more people like you running profitable businesses and ensuring that it is never optional in the (misguided) name of lower costs and more profits. Unfortunately when you build an MVP for the 100% you build it for no one. If accessibility is the most important thing for you then make your product and therefore your MVP for with people with disabilities as your primary audience. I would suggest a much narrower focus than that as its sadly far too big a market to start with.

mwcampbell 13y ago
EDIT: improve phrasing in a couple of places; link to a better blog post to make my point I'll try to be less confrontational in this reply. It seems to me that you're setting up this false dichotomy: either developers working on MVPs can ignore accessibility because 90% of people have no significant disability, or they can try in vain to make an MVP for 100% of people. Of course it makes sense that one can't do the latter; when developing software in general, but an MVP in particular, one has to pick and choose which categories of users to target. One has to choose which features to implement and which to leave out or save for later. But it still seems wrong to suggest that one can ignore a set of potential users who might be a good fit for the application in every way, but happen to have a disability through no choice of their own. To get an idea of the consequences when accessibility is ignored, check out this blog post: http://blindaccessjournal.com/2005/02/opportunity-lost-to-technology-inaccessibility/ http://blindaccessjournal.com/2005/02/opportunity-lost-to-te... Maybe I'm just too close to this particular issue. after all, I'm visually impaired myself, and my boss and most of my coworkers are totally blind. Nonetheless, I believe that accessibility shouldn't be a nice-to-have feature, but something one just expects to be there, like security. A commenter on another sub-thread pointed out the absurdity of suggesting that a developer can ignore security even for a prototype. I think the same holds for accessibility. Browsers, toolkits, and frameworks can do a lot to make it more likely that an application will be accessible by default, but I think that as with security, some level of consideration from the application developer will always be necessary. Agreed about "people with disabilities" being too broad a market to focus on. Too many different disabilities. Where I work, we focus on making our software maximally usable for blind people.
- jot 13y ago
  No worries. I was confrontational in my post. Let me clarify: I'm not saying MVP (or pre-profit product) developers should ignore accessibility. I'm saying they shouldn't spend too high a portion of their time worrying about it. If a product fails some measure of accessibility it has a bug which will need to be fixed at some point. Just because it's a bug that you are aware of and it's easier to detect than other bugs doesn't mean that it should stop you from trying to sell the product. A buggy product with some income is more likely to succeed than an apparently bug-free product and no income. I've worked with blind coworkers in the past and have tried using screen readers myself so I have some appreciation of the challenges. Thank you for the link, it's always good to have a reminder. It sounds like the employer in question and Siebel should have had legal action taken against them. They're both clearly of a size where they can and should be doing better. This is another example of why we need brilliant web developers building businesses that can destroy backwards companies like those. How do you get on with Hacker News? I just put it through a checker and it appears to be pretty appalling. Would it be better if pg shut down Hacker News completely until the issues it found are resolved?

by jot 13y ago

mwcampbell 13y ago

EDIT: improve phrasing in a couple of places; link to a better blog post to make my point I'll try to be less confrontational in this reply. It seems to me that you're setting up this false dichotomy: either developers working on MVPs can ignore accessibility because 90% of people have no significant disability, or they can try in vain to make an MVP for 100% of people. Of course it makes sense that one can't do the latter; when developing software in general, but an MVP in particular, one has to pick and choose which categories of users to target. One has to choose which features to implement and which to leave out or save for later. But it still seems wrong to suggest that one can ignore a set of potential users who might be a good fit for the application in every way, but happen to have a disability through no choice of their own. To get an idea of the consequences when accessibility is ignored, check out this blog post: http://blindaccessjournal.com/2005/02/opportunity-lost-to-technology-inaccessibility/ http://blindaccessjournal.com/2005/02/opportunity-lost-to-te... Maybe I'm just too close to this particular issue. after all, I'm visually impaired myself, and my boss and most of my coworkers are totally blind. Nonetheless, I believe that accessibility shouldn't be a nice-to-have feature, but something one just expects to be there, like security. A commenter on another sub-thread pointed out the absurdity of suggesting that a developer can ignore security even for a prototype. I think the same holds for accessibility. Browsers, toolkits, and frameworks can do a lot to make it more likely that an application will be accessible by default, but I think that as with security, some level of consideration from the application developer will always be necessary. Agreed about "people with disabilities" being too broad a market to focus on. Too many different disabilities. Where I work, we focus on making our software maximally usable for blind people.

jot 13y ago
No worries. I was confrontational in my post. Let me clarify: I'm not saying MVP (or pre-profit product) developers should ignore accessibility. I'm saying they shouldn't spend too high a portion of their time worrying about it. If a product fails some measure of accessibility it has a bug which will need to be fixed at some point. Just because it's a bug that you are aware of and it's easier to detect than other bugs doesn't mean that it should stop you from trying to sell the product. A buggy product with some income is more likely to succeed than an apparently bug-free product and no income. I've worked with blind coworkers in the past and have tried using screen readers myself so I have some appreciation of the challenges. Thank you for the link, it's always good to have a reminder. It sounds like the employer in question and Siebel should have had legal action taken against them. They're both clearly of a size where they can and should be doing better. This is another example of why we need brilliant web developers building businesses that can destroy backwards companies like those. How do you get on with Hacker News? I just put it through a checker and it appears to be pretty appalling. Would it be better if pg shut down Hacker News completely until the issues it found are resolved?