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Comment by rhencke | Hacker News Reader

It was a serious suggestion.

By working to understand and solve the problem that seems easy on its surface, either:

1. It ends up harder than it seems. The original poster gains a better understanding of what is preventing the originally proposed solution from working, and is in a better place to judge what needs changing, and generally everyone wins.

2. It ends up as easy as it seems. Not much time is spent, the original poster makes a valuable suggestion in the form of a patch/PR, and generally everyone wins.

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I agree with 1 being possible, but if 2 is the case, then this will surely just be scratching the surface and it won't suddenly turn usable by fixing a single div.

The button can't both be an argument that the developer could have easily implemented accessibility and an argument that a it'd be a lot more work to implement accessibility in the same comment chain though.

Unless we're now talking about how to implement buttons for the sake of talking about buttons instead of the accessibility of this project in which case I don't think that's what the PR comment was intended to discuss, rather a PR to fix the actual accessibility issues the project was originally called out for.

I.e. if you think the scope of the should be bigger to address accessibility that doesn't make 2) invalid it just means you think it should be a larger PR.

> The button can't both be an argument that the developer could have easily implemented accessibility and an argument that a it'd be a lot more work to implement accessibility in the same comment chain though.

Sure it can: it'd have been zero extra work if it had been done while writing the code in the first place, but having to do it afterwards means you'd practically have to rewrite the entire thing.

That said, I wouldn't argue that the developer could easily have implemented it, otherwise I'm sure they'd have done so. I'm only lamenting the fact that it wasn't, and that it now can't be solved with a single small PR.

Small, positive steps in the right direction are how you get there.

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