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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's a solution; sure, making the site more accessible makes you reach more users even beyond the "disability" angle, but that doesn't make it a winning cost-benefit tradeoff immediately if ever.

EDIT: By analogy, it's very like software portability. If you make your software support Windows and MacOS and assorted Linux distros and the major BSDs and Haiku, you'll get more users. But if you only target Windows you'll get 80% of the market, and Windows+MacOS will get you 90%, and after that you really need to think about whether it's a good investment to target more platforms. By all means, be accessible because it's the right thing to do or legally required, but it's not obvious that it's a sound business move.

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The reason the ADA exists is that it's almost never a profitable cost-benefit tradeoff to accommodate people with disabilities.

But I'd much rather work at a company that was 1% less profitable or live in a society that was 1% less wealthy and accommodated people with disabilities than one that left them in the gutter.

Well, it’s easy to comply with ADA cheaply if you do it right the first time but a pain in the ass to retrofit things later.

At least with webdev the problem is most people stumble into it and are not formally taught much about webdev specifically if at all. My undergrad never taught me a single thing about webdev practice. It’s not like, say, architecture, where you not complying with accessibility regulations will be taught formally, or later when you actually implement it some code compliance inspector is going to deny you a permit to build. It really is the wild west in webdev still.

I was specifically responding to a comment that said accessibility wasn't expensive because it lets you reach more people (or at least that was my reading of it). Yes, by all means be accessible because it's the right thing to do - I object only to the idea that we should do it because it makes sense from a pure money perspective. It's a good thing, that's just not the reason.

I agree it's still not going to win the cost-benefit tradeoff in most markets. OTOH - I imagine making your software support more OSs is much more expensive than designing your website to be more accessible, at most $1M/year. If you've got billions in annual revenue that's pennies in the bucket.

In my view, it's about trying to provide more 'equal opportunity' in this world where it's financially feasible. This seems like a case where it is more often that not. Again, for medium+ businesses.

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