As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision to eliminate the accessibility team. I am myself moving to Mastodon. I was amazed in doing this that the UI/UX of Mastodon is much better than Twitter. I feel better.
An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team
Musk is a driven, childish, stubborn, fairly intelligent, 90s era libertarian who really likes first principles reasoning and this leads to both success (SpaceX) and failure (Boring company).
So anecdotal evidence?
> they're mostly pretty hating him for things he hasnt done, views he doesnt hold and traits he doesnt have
So they have actual reasons to hate him. Superficial reasons, but you didn't once mention anything having to do with it being in vogue. Evidence of it being in vogue would be people who don't know why they hate Elon, but they do know their friends hate Elon.
> no, he isnt a success because he had an uber wealthy father who owned an emerald mine, it was a tiny share in a mine and his father contributed little to Musks business ventures
This is debatable by reasonable people.
> Musk is a driven, childish, stubborn
These sound like real reasons he could be disliked rather than it being your claim that it's simply in vogue or "traits he doesnt have" in your words.
> who really likes first principles reasoning
That's part of his PR and the image he tries to convey. He fails at it quite often because of his childishness and impulsive knee jerk reactions that he falls victim to on a regular basis. He is far more driven by emotion than by reason. I mean it's highly probable he owns Twitter now by being legally held to a poorly written contract he had no real intention of following through on. It ironically seems like neither he nor many of his customers want to be at this party he ended up at.
What percentage of Twitter users are saying this?
https://twitter.com/thebillygregory/status/55246601271378329...
I think the article mentioned the dismissal of Twitter's whole accessibility team as a sign that Musk has no respect or understanding of what the fired people did or why it was important. Ditto for other dismissed teams, like those researching machine learning ethics.
> An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team
I used to think that, I used to think that understanding accessibility was a part of doing a good job on front-end so people who care about doing a good job will address it. Now I think formal and informal education about is so bad about not including accessibility concerns as a part of creating interfaces that there's too much for people to unlearn. Everyone has some responsibility for the accessibility of the final product but few will give it enough time or consideration.
Additionally, if an application is big enough to have a team working on it, that means there are some specialists in a variety of areas. With sufficient team size, that should include accessibility specialists who know what the right thing to do is or conduct research to make a decision about what the right thing to do is.
If anything, you may end up with a higher quality of accessibility (and moderation, spam filtering, whatever) down the line. Or not. Who knows. The current iteration of the company has ossified - not making changes is arguably against the long term interests of your blind father.
other members of the dev team can/are already doing this
Maybe he plans to make it part of everyone's job
Maybe he has his own team to replace it
We have zero knowledge of what's going to happen so jumping ship without knowing the full picture seems haphazard to me.
That's a gross mismanagement of sweeping changes. Which is in itself an indication. Anyone could have predicted people leaving the platform if they were told ahead of time how the layoffs and extra hours would be so poorly communicated.
So a grossly mismanaged change from a PR perspective. Of course there is going to be fallout from that.
FB was among the first social sites crawling the links and creating a thumbnail with crucial info. When OG tags were introduced (by them nonetheless!), FB started honoring them. Twitter some year later finally decided to do the card thing and thought that skipping OG and having their own syntax under meta would be best way.
"Day 2: still accessible? check. Day 3: still accessible? check."....
Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do. Likewise, Twitter remains fairly static, with only minor changes over the years.
> As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision...
So you could stomach the decision if you didn't have a blind father? That's not how shared values of accessibility should work - the care factor depending on who you know.
Accessibility should be part of every design team. Any new features being developed need accessibility input. This includes all the different mobile apps and integrations with native accessible platforms and accessibility tools. It also needs full internationalisation and language support too, which increases complexity. It needs a few more people than just ticking boxes or building workarounds or ramps after a feature has been developed.
Additionally, Twitter also takes in external links from webpages and so can influence the meta markup of these via their API / open graph / social sharing. So it works on the wider web accessibility standards too.
I imagine bootstrap and all the other libraries twitter publishes are also part of the teams remit.
Yes but that doesn't mean dedicated people. Accessibility knowledge is already well understood by designers and developers, particularly at the big end of town.
The previous team would have presumably written plenty of documents and guidelines and generally fostered a culture of thinking about accessibility. No reason why that will disappear.
Patterns and best practice methodologies are common in tech, precisely for efficiency reasons. They belong in standards, and shared knowledge - which is better for the industry as a whole. If every small team needed dedicated accessibility staff, the system is BROKEN.
it seems easier to have a team focused on a features like that keeping things consistant and whatever dosen't seem that crazy.. fatter than what a startup would but twitter is a multinational worth tens of billions
Okay, now see how well that wheelchair user can use the elevators and bathrooms. Do you have braille signs everywhere someone goes? Does your building have ambient features which are difficult for people with sensory processing issues? Are there controls which are hard for people with limited motor skills or only one hand? Did the market change and now people are using motorized wheelchairs which are larger than you designed the ramp for?
Accessibility is like performance or cost optimization: there isn’t a point where you’re done and everything you do affects it. An accessibility team should be working with the developers closely to make sure that their changes don’t impact accessibility and working with users to identify where they could be doing better. Some of that requires fairly deep skills (e.g. screen reader proficiency) where it makes sense to have dedicated specialists to help everyone else understand challenges and evaluate trade offs.
Ramps are built according to a strict building code. Your suggestion the ramp might need modifying in only the Twitter building by a dedicated team, doesn't add up when considering all ramps in all buildings.
> there isn’t a point where you’re done
My point is accessibility is inherently part of the design process anyway. Designers are not just making things pretty, clueless to accessibility. After all, Twitter is primarily text. You can always recruit outsiders from time to time, who will stress test and audit. That's a good way to keep on top of accessibility, by getting actual users who need accessibility features, to evaluate your service. But full time in-house? No.
This is like saying you don’t need ML specialists because it’s just math, or that we don’t need those expensive security people because Accenture told the CIO they could us experts any time we need them.
Accessibility is far more than just “can a screen reader produce text for this element” — starting from the fact that there are many accessibility concerns to which the issue of media forms is irrelevant but going much deeper into how you organize that information. Even if we ignore the prevalence of non-text content, Twitter isn’t a single chunk of prose but the much harder problem of a lot of complex elements which update frequently. You can’t treat this as some quarterly exercise where a consultant runs a scanner - there’s a lot of behavior which must be designed in and tested continuously.
When you talk about meeting outside users, yes, that’s good. Guess which team organizes that? Guess which team makes sure you get representative users? Guess who helps make sure developers and designers get the training and time they need?