Comment by ndarilek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndarilek | Hacker News Reader

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And again I ask, when someone else produces some technically great achievement and people pile on about the design looking bad, why is that treated any differently? Why isn't that raining on the parade?

In a parallel universe, someone might have said "You're right, it isn't accessible. That wasn't my goal, and if this ever does take off then I might have to investigate other options."

But that isn't what happened, it's a bit of a double standard, and that double standard has real consequences for some of us. The bulk of the pile-on doesn't seem to be coming from my friend, but rather from a bunch of folks criticizing him for daring to politely suggest that there's another perspective worth considering.

If your response is "because more people care about the visual design of a technically sound concept than whether it is accessible because looks matter," then I'd agree with that, and we can just leave it there without casually dismissing an entire group of real people who matter. But again, that isn't what happened here.

I wish I could post web apps I've made here without contending with the half dozen "your design sucks" comments I'd likely get. But if I got them then I'd expect them, and that frustrates me to no end.

FWIW, I'm not actually all that upset. I'm kind of used to this, actually. And I know you're just trying to explain why things are what they are, which is exactly what I'm doing. :)

"And again I ask, when someone else produces some technically great achievement and people pile on about the design looking bad, why is that treated any differently? Why isn't that raining on the parade?"

It is. HN rains on a lot of parades. It's a bit notorious for it. There are people who have posted that they have things they want to Show HN but don't particularly want... well, exactly this.

Fair point. On one hand it makes me a little sad to see parades rained on. On the other, I assume folks want some degree of criticism if their ideas have some sort of flaw. On the gripping hand (such a useful metaphor, that) if we're going to tolerate some amount of politely-phrased negative feedback, then we probably shouldn't sweep some of it under the rug because it isn't the "acceptable" kind of feedback. Not that you are doing that, mind you. But it seems like some of that may have happened here.

Full disclosure: I know Matt and think he's a good guy, and he reached out to me wondering if he'd done something wrong. And I can actually kind of see both sides of this situation. But unlike him, I know I'm kind of a hard-ass about access issues not because I want to be, but because today's cool idea might be tomorrow's "no job for you, Nolan," and not because anyone wants that, but well, what do you tell someone who wants to work for a company but can't because most of the tools they use aren't accessible, so you literally can't do the job they need? And yes, this has happened to me before. And we can sit around and talk about privilege or who is at fault all day, which may certainly be a worthwhile discussion to have, but at the end of the day, the discussion I most want to have is "are you going to change your company's workflow to account for the fact that I'm qualified to do this job but can't as things stand?" and the answer is usually "nah, easier to find someone else, sorry."

So that's where Matt and I are coming from, and I wish folks hadn't piled onto him for trying to express that. And while I'd like to be nice and polite about that, well, what do I get when I am? A cookie? I'll try to pay the rent and do fun stuff with that cookie, thanks. :P

Enough novels from me. Got stuff to do. :)

This is not limited to HN. In any group setting, arguing against a thing is frequently counterproductive.

Social settings are "attention economies." Piling on to the argument adds attention to the thing you nominally want less of, yet are fueling. I generally try to not add to such situations.

I used to say "Fighting against the fighting is still fighting." If I am going to wade in, ideally, I should do so without being combative about it.

I have been debating whether or not to send the comment about how this is not accessible for the blind to a group I co-own called Blind Dev Works. Not sure if it is relevant to the interests of others there. I'm visually impaired and generally interested in accessibility, but I'm not blind, nor really a developer (though I actually want to learn to code and I'm trying to do something about that).

I don't know if it would just be seen as salt in an open wound or an interesting discussion.

I don't think it'd be salt in a wound--or at least I wouldn't see it as such. I do wish someone smarter than I am could come up with an accessibility backend to map GUIs to accessible HTML interfaces. So just as QT apps push accessibility objects to Linux/Windows-native accessibility APIs, something could push either ARIA-enhanced <div>s to the browser, or could just output fully-accessible HTML. So instead of QT rendering to a canvas, it could render to another target that just happens to be HTML elements. Substitute any other GUI toolkit with an accessible object representation for QT in my previous paragraph to get a sense for the scope of the problem.

I've just never dived into how those particular APIs work mainly because, well, there are so many problems needing solutions, and I happen to be focusing on others. Surely I'm not the only one to have thought of this, though, and on the off-chance that I am, the best thing I can do is keep mentioning it until someone else decides it's worth trying. :)

Thanks. I've sent some links and excerpts from the discussion (to Blind Dev Works).

(Anyone on HN interested in joining Blind Dev Works is welcome to shoot me an email. I"m happy to send an invitation. It's a small, low traffic group.)

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