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by mwcampbell 1571 days ago
The article strikes me as being dismissive about accessibility, merely describing it as a legal requirement and source of bloat. For a lot of software, I'd say it's a moral imperative, and that's why it's a legal requirement. I'm afraid that the treatment in this article will encourage developers to ignore accessibility in useful applications that could in principle be accessible, and these applications will then become required for jobs, education, etc., thus erecting new barriers for disabled people. But now that someone has directly linked accessibility to bloat, I guess I should make sure that my own in-development solution for cross-platform GUI accessibility [1] can never be described as bloated.

Edit to add: The article did also mention that accessibility is a must-have feature, though I can't remember now if that bit was there in the original. Sorry if it was.

[1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit
2 comments
PeterisP 1571 days ago
A big difference is that most of enterprise software is designed for a limited set of internal users, not the general public. If you have a 1000 employees and one of them is blind, then the software used by the department where that person works needs to be accessible to blind people as a reasonable accommodation, but you don't need to make e.g. a random accounting tool used by five specific users accommodate something that none of those five people have. The same applies for physical work such as in a manufacturing environment - you may have to accommodate a particular workbench/tools so that they are usable from a wheelchair (e.g. lowering certain things) but you don't have to redesign all your workplaces for that, that would be bad as it would make them less usable for their current users.

Also, "accessibility" is not a single feature; different aspects of accessibility - for different needs - are quite different, unrelated, separate features.

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mwcampbell 1571 days ago
> you don't need to make e.g. a random accounting tool used by five specific users accommodate something that none of those five people have

What if that team then wants to hire a sixth person, and one of the qualified candidates is blind (or has some other disability that's relevant for software)? If accessibility isn't the default, it's too easy to pass on qualified candidates in a category where many struggle to find work.

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nullspace 1571 days ago
Yeah, I agree. I don't think a11y should go away even for open-source software, unless it's lightly used or just a toy project.
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