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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Amazon and Google (with Android) and other tech newcomers are not going to think about accessibility unless there is a stronger force than "the market" pushing them to.

You are overly cynical. There is a group of developers sitting just a few feet from me whose whole job is making Google's products more accessible.

That said there are a lot of people at Google doing a lot of different things, and most don't think about accessibility until they have to. But, as a company, Google seems to take it seriously. And there is enough idealism built in to the culture that I don't think we need external people telling us we need to do it.

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"and most don't think about accessibility until they have to"

If the ADA didn't exist, when would they "have to"?

If you want to claim "disband the ADA", then ok, that's consistent, but if they don't exist, it is just plain not profitable to include facilities for the disabled, most of the time. Too small a group for too big an expense.

If the ADA didn't exist, when would they "have to"?

Right after the accessibility group comes through and points out how they are inaccessible, and how many potential users are impacted by that. Accessibility has a lot of internal support, and not mainly for legal reasons.

Who wouldn't be there if government market distortions didn't make it profitable or otherwise culturally unfit. If a corporation is a machine that purely maximizes income, disabled people are a tiny niche market for boutique shops.

You are wrong to think that every large corporation is just a machine that purely maximizes income. That is very, very far from being an accurate description of Google. Over time Google may lose its current idealism. But as long as the founders have influence, I have faith that there will be an idealistic streak to the company.

Secondly you underestimate Google's willingness to go after relative niche markets. For instance as of 2007, Google search was available in over 100 languages. (See http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/internationalizatio... for verification.) Google translate serves over 50 different languages. (Go to http://translate.google.com/ and count them.) Many other Google products have been translated into dozens of languages. Lots of those have very few people.

In the mid-90s 1.3 million people in the USA were legally blind. That's larger than the number of speakers of languages like Basque or Estonian. Furthermore people who speak such niche languages usually speak other languages as well. If you've put the work in to internationalize your application and go after those kinds of niches, why not go after blind people as well?

Actually, legally, theoretically and practically speaking, a corporation is and should be a machine to maximize income.

Whoever downmodded me is a fucking jackass. That's the definition. Legally, they're obligated to protect shareholder value as obligations #1, 2 and 3.

There is no reason that Google should behave any differently than Exxon Mobil or Phillip Morris or whatever corporation you want to call "less moral than google". Basing public policy on the expectation that corporations will be moral is the dumbest thing possible -- it's actually in their charter to be immoral.

Legally, they're obligated to protect shareholder value

People regurgitate this all the time, but there is no such "law."

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