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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

If that is true, then businesses can make that decision for themselves.

I've always found it funny when people propose some new red tape or requirement and then say "oh, it'll good for business!". Of course, if that were actually the case, the red tape wouldn't be necessary.

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Ever wonder about the red tape and bureaucracy behind those maximum capacity signs in restaurants and bars?

I've always found it funny that most people don't realize that anything more than 3 months out is "too long term to worry about" in the business world.

That's only true if businesses act with perfect rationality towards long-term thinking and have perfect information, which is obviously not true. The middle manager with numbers to hit for the quarter probably doesn't care to do the research to see if the company would benefit from being more accessible. The project manager who doesn't really know have any disabled people may not even think about accessibility when designing the main initiatives for next year. And on and on.

Businesses are irrational, but they're certainly more rational than government.

I'm not proposing any new red tape or a requirement though, merely pointing out that there can be a win-win here.

And yes, many large scale end-user facing app teams make a business decision to implement their UIs with accessibility in mind. For web apps specifically it's not that big of a deal these days with screen readers getting reasonably sophisticated making the additional dev effort negligible for medium-large projects.

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