It really didn't seem like he was all that inflamatory, either. He just pointed out the accessibility challenges that I myself face every single day because, what, blindness isn't all that common? Great, so either kill me off[1] or give me enough UBI to not need a job, because there's really no other path for me and my uncommon condition other than, it seems, to constantly assert my existence. Should we make hammers accessible to the disarmed? Ugh, should I have to waste any more of my time because someone on the internet put up yet another straw man for me to knock down?
Look, I'd get it if his initial message was like mine, and I fully expect and don't care that I'll get downvoted for this. And to be clear, this comment is more about the intolerance and dismissiveness I've seen in the replies of what appeared to be a fairly constructive piece of criticism of someone who does accessibility work professionally and gave out free advice. Hell, how often does a Show HN get pissed on because the design looks outdated, and that's just taken as par for the course? People criticized the Thoughter design a few days ago (I don't recall how it was spelled and don't want to look it up) and no one said "Damn, the guy made a product and all you can do is complain about how it looks?" Yet someone voices accessibility concerns and look what happens. I myself have held off on posting some Show HNs because I can't make a website look good. But someone makes a constructive comment about a thing not being accessible along with tips on what might fix it and it's like "OMG get teh blinds outa here!" And now we know why I don't even seek out tech work anymore. Queue up the "maybe you'd have better luck if you behaved better" comments. :)
And to be more constructive, I am a bit worried about the "render everything to a canvas and call it progress" trends I've seen with Web Assembly lately. It isn't just this, but the projects to compile QT and other native GUIs to wasm. Do that and you lose access to the native OS accessibility layers these tools use. I've wondered if there might be a way to create parallel HTML versions of these same widgets so your GTK button might compile to a <button/> with GTK-like styling. But I don't know anyone working in that direction, and I'm not smart enough to pull it off myself. I'm just worried that one day we'll have a pile of thin clients all running in their own canvases. My girlfriend's law firm uses timekeeping software written in the 90s with a web interface. I imagine it's a GUI app running on some basement server with a VNC client in front of it. That's an outlyer, but wasm makes it likely that it won't be, and Matt's concerns as an accessibility professional are completely on-point.
1. To be clear, not a cry for help or anything, but it sort of blows my mind that on one hand people dismiss disabilities because they're not that common. On the other, a large subset of society expects us to try harder to compensate for that apathy. So you either do, and become exceptional, or you just give up to some degree or other and accept that you'll likely never have the nice salary and such. On the gripping hand, most of you are likely to have one of these "uncommon" disabilities when you age. Hope you enjoy whatever you do while you can do it. It's going to be fun learning how to keep coding in your 70s when half the tools you took for granted aren't accessible to the screen reader you use because your glasses no longer cut it. :) I don't expect folks to bow and scrape when a thing isn't accessible, but to shit on someone for politely pointing that out is quite an unfortunate reaction.