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Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

"we need to make work more inclusive for people living with disabilites" - statements like this are pretty popular, and they sound nice to the first order. However, I have never once seen a statement like this accompanied by a utilitarian/economic analysis of whether this would actually be socially beneficial given the (usually) small number of people involved compared to the (often) large cost of making the change. And whenever someone says "would this really be worth it", responses vary from "Wow, why do you hate the disabled?" to "You should be glad you're not disabled" - in any case, shaming the person asking this question rather than addressing the (reasonable) question.

About 2 in 1000 people in the US are deaf, and most of those are deaf due to old age, so they are not working anymore. I think it's very unlikely that the marginal optimum is to spend more money optimizing for this subset of users.

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I would assume that there usually isn't an immediate economic benefit of doing so. Fortunately, we live in a society that is much more inclusive than it used to be. As Tim Cook said, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI".

Aside from the monetary benefits (or lack thereof), if one product focuses on accessibility and another doesn't, the small subset of users who need those features may encourage or force a larger number of users to use the more accessible product. So long-term, I think there is a benefit, even aside from helping make society more inclusive.

This sort of commentary betrays a stiflingly first-order thought process.

Sure, being "more inclusive" is a benefit - this is included in any utilitarian or economic analysis of the change. However, instead of spending X marginal dollars being more inclusive to deaf people, you could also spend that money on any number of other outcomes (pick your pleasant-sounding cause: cancer research, homeless outreach, just making everyday people's lives a bit better).

If you don't understand how "monetary benefits" tie in to scalable social optimization, you should probably not offer opinions on which causes people (and companies) should put money into.

Also, keep in mind that you have ~zero skin in the game here, and Zoom has a lot, so you should lend a lot of credence to what they choose to do.

Easy to say if you're not disabled.

One day, you might be. Just be glad you won't be left behind.

Edit: If you want a purely numbers based analysis, well, you're not considering second-order effects. Investment in accessibility represents an investment in technology. ASR in meetings, for example, is a necessary first step towards good auto-translation.

This is the exact stupid response I mentioned earlier: “be glad you’re not disabled!” How about you get a real argument instead of just shaming people?

You do realize you’re saying “It’s not worth including some people,” including those with hearing loss, as if their inclusion is worth less than everyone else.

Inclusive design recognizes that by simply recognizing the challenges the extreme ends of the spectrum of ability may be facing, you can design outcomes that create a better experience for everyone, not just those with permanent disabilities. It’s no harder or even necessarily more expensive to design for inclusion from the beginning—it’s a mindset that leads to better, more inclusive, and more human products.

Being charitable to centimeter, it sounds more like they're saying that their inclusion is more expensive than everyone else. And, well... it is.

That being said, the argument only works on purely utilitarian grounds. If you have any sense of deontological ethics, it kind of goes right out the window (even if you agree with the conclusion, the argument itself doesn't make much sense from a deontological viewpoint).

I do agree with this, and it’s one reason I’m a huge proponent of automated speech to text even if accuracy isn’t perfect. Having to bring in a third party to transcribe is expensive and exceptional and best when accuracy is crucial, or it’s serving a large audience. I’d rather we continue to push for better automated speech to text by default, everywhere.

I'm repeating this from below because it needs to be visible. Your statistics and conclusions are wrong. You're selling this fiction that deafness is just an "old persons" thing. You're cherry picking perhaps a statistic about people being totally deaf, but inclusion and accommodation doesn't just start when someone is fully deaf.

According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (see https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics...)...

Among adults aged 20-69, the overall annual prevalence of hearing loss dropped slightly from 16 percent (28.0 million) in the 1999-2004 period to 14 percent (27.7 million) in the 2011–2012 period.

Partial hearing loss isn't the same as deafness and doesn't require the same interventions. You are being misleading.

Making things accessible has positive unintended consequences. Building curb ramps doesn’t just help people in wheelchairs, it also helps parents with strollers and tourists with luggage. Adding subtitles to videos helps both deaf people and language learners. Making websites usable with a screen reader also makes it easier to build automated tests. Disabilities are also not always permanent or complete; people with low vision can also benefit from screen readers even if not legally blind, for example.

Specifically for technology, you also need to understand the true life changing difference it can make on a disabled person’s life. My dad is blind, and thanks to screen readers on his computer and phone, he can read books, make Zoom calls for work, correspond with people via email and WhatsApp, and so much more. He’s in his 60s too, and technology has allowed him be an independent and productive member of society.

I agree because those changes actually improve for a lot more people, not just the disabled. I wouldn't even call speech to text a disability feature.

But what if hypothetically the changes is strictly only benefit small subset of disabled people? That I wouldn't do.

Most people will encounter some sort of disability during their lives. Your position doesn’t hold water.

Lumping in the obese with the blind to prove a point?

As a person with a disability, I’d rather not be treated as a problem that needs to be optimized away.

The question is how to most effectively benefit everyone. Sometimes that means not investing a large marginal amount of money into one particular kind of disability.

Making an investment into serving the needs of those with disabilities serves everyone.

Wonderfully said.

I’m hard of hearing and need automatic meeting captions. At a company that uses Google Meet, these are free. If the company is on Zoom and needed to subscribe to a third-party transcription service, let’s say that’s maybe $25/month, which is a fraction of my hourly wage as an engineer. It’s possible for me to follow Zoom meetings without captions but presents a high enough cognitive load that 2-3 meetings in a day will exhaust my mental capacity to do engineering work for the rest of the day — so the cost of the month’s transcription service is at least an order of magnitude less than the cost to the company of forcing me to struggle through meetings.

I disagree that we should evaluate disability accommodations economically, but in this case the economic argument works out, too.

If you include HoH people, people who can't access audio at the moment, people who don't want to use audio at the moment (maybe have some music going on) etc. The number of people whose lives will have been improved through implementing usability for Deaf/deaf people will probably be a significant portion of the population.

I'm not HoH/deaf/Deaf but I know I'd definitely love the opportunity to have appropriate captions during calls because I sometimes struggle to pick up words when they're spoken quickly to me, especially on highly technical or complex subject matter as required for my job.

That's 656,400 people you are talking about not bothering to accommodate.

Most people >65 (i.e. the vast majority of deaf people) are not using Zoom.

No, you are wrong. The statement you make is true, but the implication is utterly false. You're selling this fiction that deafness is just an "old persons" thing.

According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (see https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics...)...

At least one of Zoom's competitors has made a point of marketing to seniors isolated by COVID-19.

With COVID lock-downs ?!?

> About 2 in 1000 people in the US are deaf

For people who want comprehensive data rather than this hopelessly wrong 'factoid' underestimate, for the UK at least, check out the following 1000-page study:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/2331216519887...

It has extensive tables that break down the types of hearing loss found across genders, age, employment types, etc, etc. It badly needs a TL;DR to communicate the key points to general readers, but 25 years it was written, is still cited by the UK's National Health Service as the primary reference for those who want to understand the prevalence of deafness.

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