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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Accessibility helps everyone. All humans should be on the side opposite Domino's here.

Trying to be non-snarky here: How does it help someone who doesn't need any of today's typical accessibility features?

Accessible design tends to be easier to read in general, helping everyone. Non-blind people may like to use a screen reader so they can do stuff by ear. I suspect a lot of HN readers like to navigate web sites by keyboard, something a lot of sites fail at and something accessibility design ensures. Lots of people who would never describe themselves as "disabled" require corrective lenses and accessibility can help them when their glasses are in the next room. And everyone will reach that point eventually, unless they die young. So my post was not 100% correct. There are some people who do not benefit from accessibility at all: those who are in excellent health and will die a sudden death before they age too much.

More discussion about how both digital and physical accessibility helps everyone:

https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibilit...

https://medium.com/@mosaicofminds/the-curb-cut-effect-how-ma...

https://www.npr.org/2015/07/24/423230927/-a-gift-to-the-non-...

> Accessible design tends to be easier to read in general, helping everyone.

This is not necessarily so. I develop mobile apps for a large corp. Our designers are often told by the accessibility team to change their design in ways that make the more accessible, but reduce the usability for normal users. I'm talking about simple controls that most people take for granted, like date/time pickers, carousels etc.

Can you give a specific example?

Thank you, that's exactly the kind of answer I was looking for.

Glad to be of service. It's not obvious if you don't already know about it, but once you do, you start to see how "accessibility" is so much more than "accommodate a few disabled people."

You may not need any of the features today.

What about your older customers? I have it on good authority old people also enjoy pizza.

And how do you know you're not going to need that accessibility when you least expect it? You don't wake up expecting a retinal detachment or an accident, but sometimes shit happens.

And, though I'm a designer and not a developer, accessibility has had a strong correlation with technical debt. Semantic class names, well structured HTML, not rendering your headline fonts as a bitmap so you can have your on-brand typeface…accessible code tends to go along with resilient code.

How do you think search engines work?

Making pages that a program can easily read is pretty fundamental to how everyone uses the web.

1336X768 laptop and desktop screens which are unreadable in natural light are still sold in India. Our designer made a UI with white on wine-red and and it was a pixelated mess bleeding into the background on our developers' machines.

It doesn't, but even that person might need accessibility tomorrow — like literally tomorrow. I suspect that most anyone who breaks their leg quickly becomes a fan of the ADA.

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