[VWWHFSfQ]

We all hate to see people losing their jobs, but it's been known for a very long time that Twitter had an extremely bloated headcount. I'm not at all surprised that something called the "Accessibility Experience Team" was one of the first groups to get cut.

[culi]

Uhhh I don't consider making an app accessible to be contributing to the problem of a "bloated headcount". Maybe the team itself had too many people on it, but to axe the entire team is pretty disgusting and shows a complete disregard for an entire class of people's needs

[lopkeny12ko]

Accessibility is not a critical business function the same way running Twitter's datacenters is a critical business function.

I work at $LARGE_CORPORATION and our product a11y team's most recent major ship was a new palette of colors with improved contrast ratios. A UI change that makes the site easier to read for < 1% of users does not contribute meaningfully to incremental revenue. If I were Musk I would have cut this team too.

[onion2k]

When I added a similar feature to an app a few years ago I found about 5% of users selected the high contrast theme. Our UX person talked to users and found loads of people using crappy old corporate LCD monitors that should have gone in the bin years ago found it really useful.

The moral of the story is that users who don't need a feature will still use it.

[miki123211]

This is how accommodations work, and have always worked.

From what I've heard from people in the industry, apparently a significant portion of users consuming audio described movies and TV shows, originally aimed at blind people, are truck drivers who have to look at the road, not the screen.

Audiobooks and OCR technology, also originally developed with the blind in mind, are now used by many fully-abled people in their lives.

Closed captions, originally intended for the hearing-impaired, are now a staple of many bars, where the chatter is so loud that nobody can hear the TV.

There are many more examples.

[TheNewsIsHere]

A few months back I enabled some high contrast and white point settings on my iPhone.

I’m not visually impaired, but the UI is just so much better now. It’s made me stop and fiddle with the accessibility settings in other things too.

[kaba0]

Preventing all the lawsuits that might result from bad accessibility seems like quite a business critical feature to me.

[CodeAndCuffs]

Circa 2017 when IE8 compatibility was still a thing, I saw a metric that said more people use screen readers and/or have poor enough vision to need some sort of UI accomodation than there were IE8 users

Some very brief googling suggests about 3% of Americans are visually disabled. Having a team ensure your product is available to an extra 3% of people seems like a potentially reasonable investment.

[slenk]

If accessibility isn't a critical function I would say your business needs to think over some priorities.

It's ok to just make the platform inaccessible for a large number of people?

[pjbeam]

Ask your business counsel if accessibility is important.

[MisterBastahrd]

And when a high profile app isn't accessible by legal standards, it'll be the easiest money for a competent lawyer to make.

[VWWHFSfQ]

I don't think Twitter is worrying about that right now.

[pasttense01]

But even if we were getting rid of that Team what most of here would have done would be to move the best software engineers in that Team to other groups rather than fire them.

[izacus]

Uh... Why?

[VWWHFSfQ]

Because Twitter as-is is a finished product. There's no immediate need to review accessibility issues since there are no new product features/updates for the foreseeable future. Musk froze everything. So what were those people supposed to do? Nothing? Might as well let them move on to new jobs.

[fzeroracer]

> There's no immediate need to review accessibility issues since there are no new product features/updates for the foreseeable future

Really? You were on the team then? I assume you found out that they had an entirely empty Jira backlog and no more accessibility updates to do on main, so they were let go?

I appreciate your insight, former Twitter employee. What else can you tell us about how your job went?

[spoils19]

You don't need to be a Twitter employee to know this. Merely posting on this forum gives you enlightenment and insight that others would only dream to have. I stand proudly with VWWHFSfQ.

[kaba0]

Yeah we all know big applications work like that and will get finished sometime. Like google search which definitely didn’t change since its first iteration, it does the same doesn’t it?

[Avshalom]

A new feature launched today, and it's not finished so will definitely be updated. Musk said long form text attachments are coming like next week...

he didn't freeze shit.

[whoIsYou]

yes, anyone halfway intelligent on that team knew MONTHS AGO that their job was already gone