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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

For people who have worked on accessibility related stuff in production projects, how much more expensive is it vs just ignoring it?

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We usually quote 50-100% increase for agency web dev stuff (mostly marketing sites) and I'd say we've underestimated a few times. For basic html layouts it's not too bad but the minute you move away from something that looks like Craigslist or Wikipedia stuff starts to get hard. We've used 3rd party consultants to do reviews and every reviewer picks out different problems on the same exact site. I've implemented consultant recommendations line for line only to have that code flagged by a different reviewer at the same company as non-compliant.

I did screenreader support in a rather popular Android app. It took me several days to get from "can't focus anything at all on the main screen" to "all icon buttons are labeled and most of the functionality is usable, including the many very complex custom views with clickable elements inside".

Does it matter? Tomorrow morning you can wake up needing those accessibility features.

Of course it matters. If your model of the world is “we need to spend infinite resources ensuring every system can be operated by anyone with any disability”, that’s obviously nonsense.

Accessibility is valuable but not infinitely so. Sometimes (usually) it’s best not to encumber an innovation just because the innovation doesn’t immediately apply to everyone.

You're answering a statement no one made.

They asked "what does it cost vs just ignoring it". The point is just ignoring it (in other words assigning it 0 value) shouldn't be on the table.

I'm also giving this person the benefit of the doubt and assuming they're not asking if accessibility costs infinity dollars.

I am trying to get a sense of how big an ask this is. Is it a million dollar ask? 100K? A million a year (does it need a full time team)?

It really depends on the specifics; for something like this I suspect it's a non-trivial investment. For a lot of other things it's not that hard.

For a lot of things a18y features are just good features in general; zooming text for example is something loads of people do, not just blind or low-vision people.

For the specific project of making this remote browser accessible, my wild guess is that if Cloudflare were to hire me to work on the project (no, not available at the moment), it could easily take a few months, but probably not more than a year. They could probably cut down that time if they hired away someone from the Chrome or Edge team who's actually an expert on Chromium accessibility specifically; I admit my main expertise is in Windows accessibility.

It’s part of every product team’s baseline requirements to own and assess. It’s considerably easier to do that up front than to retrofit. Think of it as analogous to security in this situation.

The cost is considerably lower if you watch out for a11y from the get-go, retrofitting it is more expensive since you have to retain the existing behavior, sometimes of existing and complex but non-accessible components. Add to that the need to e.g. caption all the existing pictures and it gets even worse.

That's like asking "is writing a feature is a million dollar ask" without defining "feature".

Need to define it at least a little to get anything resembling a useful answer.

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