Some Software Designers Don’t Seem to Care About the Elderly

The problem is not that software designers don't care, but that accessibility is very expensive and doesn't get rewarded proportionally by the market.

I like to automate boring menial tasks. I've often had the problem though that I automate something as a cli tool for myself, then colleagues ask me how I did that, and I show it to them. The first thing they want is a GUI, and I tell them I don't have the time for that. Creating a GUI would take more time than the cli app itself.

Often creating a good GUI will take more time than the automation. And then when you want to add in accessibility that takes even more time to get right. All of a sudden you need a team to do that, because there are almost infinite ways to be disabled. And many different systems you need to Target. Low vision, different types of color blindness, low hearing, etc.

Every accommodation takes time to make. It's just not feasible to make everything accessible.

I know how to design a good UX, but I also know it's hard.

And making an accessible UX for everyone, is even harder.

Making that UX work on every old system like mentioned in the article adds another multiplier.

My parents are getting up there, and this last operating system transition has been eye opening for me. To level set my father's technical competence, he bought the family a Commodore 64 when it first came out, he programmed punch cards, was extremely proficient in Lotus 1-2-3 and then Excel v5. His first OS versions were DOS based.

He has been scraping by on Win7 until he was forced to upgrade to Win10. While he's been able to work out some problems on his own, I've had to take a way more active role in helping through the migration. Some tasks are of my own making (did he install uBlock Origin? Is Windows Defender turned on) but others have been right fiddly troublesome issues that have taken us multiple hours over several days to hammer out (I'm looking at you Dropbox!).

What I've noticed is that he has trouble with the fact that things have moved around on him. I spend a lot of time telling him he's looking in the wrong corner. This is the first time we've needed to look at TeamViewer on his machine so I can do direct maintenance. Part is lack of interest (he want's to make knives in his shop these days), partly it's a somewhat confusing how the GUI interface has changed in Explorer / Settings.

Somehow it feels like nagging open source project maintainers to support the functionality one needs.