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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

I mean if I need to lower costs ASAP, nice to haves like A11y would be the first to get cut.

> nice to haves like A11y

People get upset about government regulation forcing companies to take accessibility seriously but then people like you come around to prove exactly why that kind of regulation is necessary.

I'd like to live in a world where it wasn't but comments like these make it abundantly clear that we're nowhere close to that world

> > nice to haves like A11y

> People get upset about government regulation forcing companies to take accessibility seriously but then people like you come around to prove exactly why that kind of regulation is necessary.

You can still have accessibility without having a whole dedicated team for it

> I'd like to live in a world where it wasn't but comments like these make it abundantly clear that we're nowhere close to that world

I meant it as having a dedicated accessibility the team not just going to Twitter and removing all accessibility settings.

how about "we believe so much in a11y being everyone's job, and a legal requirement of doing your job, that we didnt want engineers pawning off that essential task to a dedicated a11y team?"

obviously not true but theres a few ways to slice this news.

That's like saying we shouldn't have a security team because being keen on security concerns should be an expectation of every dev. Of course this is true to an extent, but obviously there's a whole field of specialization that would be unrealistic to expect of every single dev to have. Same business with a11y

Is A11y a nice to have? Doesn't the ADA mandate a certain level of accessibility on companies of a certain size.

Not the ADA specifically, but American courts have generally held that large commercial websites do need to be accessible in terms of the ADA.

That's aside from the cruelty of diminishing accessibility on a major social platform, slowly cutting off disabled users, despite its cost likely being a rounding error in the greater scheme of things.

There was a court case in recent memory mandating that universities caption any video they publish. It was specifically relying on the ADA.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahkim/2019/11/29/harvard-uni...

"In the United States alone, approximately 50 million people are considered deaf or hard of hearing. The failure to provide appropriate accommodations to this community is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973."

If you read through the case history, you can see that the ADA does not have specific language saying something like "websites above size x must be accessible, and that means a, b, and c need to be followed." Much of that has been developed into case law and precedent by judges ruling in numerous lawsuits over the years, which is why it's still a somewhat grey area for edge cases.

And that's why a ton of video lectures from UC Berkeley had to be taken down due to lack of captions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

The spirit of the law is good, but sometimes it just means that we lose "good enough" in pursuit of "perfect".

The current website already supports accessibility. The team being fired or laid off doesn't mean that suddenly goes away.

That's why I said diminishing accessibility and slowly cutting off disabled users. This obviously isn't going to happen immediately, but every new feature will be less accessible and maybe even not provide accommodations entirely.

Possibly true but I would imagine the team created an internal Bible of all accessibility requirements and that all of that information wasn't siloed in the heads of each employee in that department.

It's a sign of where it's going though. Will the accessibility info be kept up to date? Will the other teams pay attention to it as much if there's not an internal "force" keeping it on people's mind? Will it be considered at a similar level again in the future? The answer to all of these might be "yes," but getting rid of the employees who are most responsible for this doesn't exactly strike me as an act that views a11y favourably.

There's presumably a gap between the current level and what's legally required, and they can afford to let things slip a bit without getting in trouble.

It might not be a sign of where anything is going. He could just be cleaning house of undesirables. I'm just going to wait and see.

And I'm sure it'll stay on that unvisited Confluence page for a year or so till some doing some cleanup goes "A11y team? They left agees ago." and deletes it.

It's actually much cheaper to buy more disk drives than to pay somebody to delete files.

That “not-updated in years” confluence page that lists more incorrect things now than correct ones is frankly, useless.

insert another top HN post where Twitter already begs fired engineers to come back

I’m very impressed by the use of ‘cruelty’.

a11y is no more a "nice to have" than a wheelchair ramp. It's a legal and moral requirement.

This is like saying security is "nice to have"

I've worked in security for years. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that (security is a nice-to-have), either directly or implied, I could retire. LOL

Nope, security affects way more users than accessibility.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497445

And firing the A11y team doesn't immediately remove all accessibility from Twitter, they are forced by US law to follow accessibility standards and they would, they just won't do higher than what's required.

So you're saying it's a nice to have? /s

For all its pretense of wanting to be the Town Square, somehow I don't expect it to be a very inclusive one. Getting rid of a11y team is exactly what I would expect, crisis or not.

There are no moral requirements

Immanuel Kant came up with the idea of a categorical imperative. It’s one of the foundation stones in the field of moral philosophy (or ethics). An example would be the moral requirement not to kill other people. The only way to successfully prove that there are no moral requirements is by arguing the point with people who don’t know any better.

There are many philosophers who disagree with Kant's categorical imperative though – even among those who agree that ethics is objective (in some sense). The categorical imperative gives morality a deontological flavour, to which many will object–such as consequentialists. And there are others who don't object to the deontological flavour per se, but who think there are better foundations for such a morality (e.g. natural law theorists).

I agree with your position that ethics is objective, but I don't think Kant's categorical imperative is a very good argument for its objectivity – a person can coherently accept ethics/morality as being objective, yet doubt or deny the categorical imperative. I think "ethics is objective" is one of those things where very many people can agree on a conclusion, yet disagree massively on what is the correct reasoning to reach that conclusion.

It was a somewhat rushed point, admittedly. I was reaching for enlightenment-era imagery to challenge the seeming disavowal of morality itself. I note that OP extended those remarks elsewhere to claim that the law is the preferred source of moral constraint. I'm not even sure of what to say to that.

But I very much appreciate the depth of your point. I've always found validation (?) in the deontological aspect of Kant's idealism because I think it neatly describes why people feel obligations to those they interact with most closely (i.e. I feed my child because I should, rather than to avoid his hunger). I certainly take your point that the categorical imperative isn't the best or only tool for interpreting moral dilemmas. Honestly, I was bringing it up in part because it's a recognisable phrase that might infer that there's more to the question of ethics than unexamined instinct.

> I've always found validation (?) in the deontological aspect of Kant's idealism because I think it neatly describes why people feel obligations to those they interact with most closely (i.e. I feed my child because I should, rather than to avoid his hunger).

It is interesting you bring up that example, because it connects with the moral universalism vs moral particularism debate: moral universalists argue that an essential component of a valid ethical principle is it must be universal in scope (equally applicable to everyone at all times), even though it may still produce quite different outcomes when applied to differing situations. Particularists claim by contrast that one can have moral obligations which are non-universal in character - I owe special obligations to my children because they are mine, beyond those which I owe to children-in-general. Moral universalists have to either deny the existence of such particular obligations, or else insist that they are ultimately universal rather than particular in character. Anyway, the categorical imperative is a classic statement of moral universalism, yet you are invoking one of the favourite examples of moral particularists to support it.

Personally, I think the best way to defend the objectivity of morality is the “companions in the guilt” argument - for every argument that is put forward against the objectivity of morality, there is a closely parallel argument against the objectivity of (theoretical) rationality. If that’s true, then how is it not special pleading to grant objectivity to one yet deny it to the other?

Unless you're trying to be edgy (which is not obvious), this make you sound like a psychopath.

I’m simply stating the obvious. The parent commenter is factually incorrect.

Relying on companies to self police morality is an idealistic view that results in failure. That’s where the democracy and government part comes in.

Twitter is required by law to be compliant with accessibility standards, and so they will be. Whether or not this team is laid off doesn’t change that

And I agree, but that is not how I read your comment.

If you expanded it with "There are no moral requirements... for companies to provide accessibility features" it would have been entirely different story.

People can read into it whatever they want. I was just stating a fact.

Personally I’m perturbed that so many people expect society to work out of goodwill and not through enforced regulations decided by the voters.

Certainly that world would be nice, but it’s naive and ineffective

I don't think people downvote you because we "expect society to work out of goodwill and not through enforced regulations decided by the voters", but because your blanket statmenet denying the existince of moral requirements is interpreted negatively. I for one agree that relying just on morals is not enough and that regulations is needed, but your sentence is obviously not universally interpreted in that light.

Certainly not for "free speech" that costs $8/month.

AFAIK that’s a misconstrual. Having a “verified” blue checkmark will cost $8 a month, but using Twitter and saying whatever you want on it will still be free.

I have no horse in this race — I'm not on Twitter — but does anyone know if the blue checkmark boosts your posts in the feed/recommendation engine?

I'd expect it does implicitly at least because people must interact with those users differently.

It does, verified accounts get prioritized ranking and are listed first in tweet responses.

Too many people think that checkmark = free speech and all us peasants using Twitter without it aren't worthy of the mark.

Before it was that private companies could do whatever they wanted, now many trying to impose their will on Twitter’s actions all of a sudden.

Huh

> Huh

Before you let that cynicism build up too much, for the record, not all of us Elon+Twitter skeptics have a problem with the $8 thing. You're just not going to hear from any one who didn't have an issue with it.

Related: Is there a quippy term or a fallacy for the (very natural!) habit of treating a random sample of a million voices and expecting a coherent message from them? I feel like it's related but distinct from a strawman.

After thinking on it, maybe it is a form of unintentional straw man. People are attacking a hypothetical position and view that is a synthesis of many people and only is combined in their mind.

There is also a reverse no true Scotsman, I've seen referenced as dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid. Not as catchy as no true Scotsman but you're basically imagining a perfect Scotsman and then attacking them when they don't exist

"Weak man" is when you take a genuine-but-weak take from one of your opponents and treat them as representing your opposition in general. (That's not quite what you're asking for though, I think)

That's definitely close, thanks!

Are you looking for logical fallacies used in debates/arguments?

Conflation might work as well but Im not good at debating

Perhaps a miss-atribution error

> Before it was that private companies could do whatever they wanted,

No, it was that “free speech” means private actors are free to make decisions about what content to relay.

Not that everything they choose on that (or any other) is equally good, nor that they shouldn’t be punished in the marketplace (not by the state) for their bad choices.

Yup

That’s why in a free marketplace, Elon asserted his free speech to take over Twitter due to their perceived poor management.

Maybe if they had managed more equitably, none of this would have happened. But the market giveth and the market taketh

> That’s why in a free marketplace, Elon asserted his free speech to take over Twitter due to their perceived poor management.

That’s not really accurate. Twitter’s management took Elon to court to force him to take over so the stockholders they worked for could reap thr windfall ofnthe premium price he regretted offering and tried to tun away from.

Private companies explicitly shouldn’t do whatever they want at all. They don’t even get to decide totally whom to serve, as doing so against a protected class will quickly lead to a really bad outcome for the company.

And that’s a good thing. It is frankly ridiculous that private companies get to decide the public opinion by tweaking their algorithms, it should be managed in a similar way how we don’t allow food companies to put cocaine into their products.

In what delusional world could private companies ever 'do whatever they wanted'? We have huge legal tomes filled with laws to prevent this sort of sociopathic thinking from becoming reality for the sake of profit.

Before it was about freedom of speech for private corporations to control their platforms however they wanted.

Now it’s all about rules and regulations.

Huh

"Anyone can get it for $8/month" is a lot closer to free speech ideals than "You can get it if you're lefty enough".

If you think the bannable offenses on Twitter only gave enough room for the left, you are not just to the right of that, but more like far right extremism. Twitter did and does, in fact, tolerate right-wing and conservative views. It is full of them.

Don't mistake hate speech, disinfo, racism or whatever you think twitter was violating 'free speech' for as being the right wing. It is not.

Yes, like when they banned people for proposing that Covid came from a lab.

Or when they banned people for stating that the vaccine doesn’t eliminate transmission.

Both largely consensus views now.

Very hospitable to alternative viewpoints indeed. Maybe in a bubble

The American Disabilities Act would like a word with you.

saying a11y is a nice-to-have is like saying Unicode is a nice-to-have. if you cut Unicode support, the only thing you'll personally notice is lack of emojis, but Chinese/Hindi/Russian speakers won't be able to use it at all, without resorting to Pinyin or something.

And if you don’t have customers who use those, it won’t be a huge loss. That covers the vast majority of businesses.

Probably not Twitter though.

It depends on the users? Twitter has a large and diverse user base, so supporting Unicode is a priority but A11y isn't.

Not sure why this is downvoted, it's a pretty obvious assessment.

It could be accurate, but it's hard to imagine having this little empathy.

No need to imagine, you are living it.

Accessibility on Quantbase is abysmal. Maybe bring that up before telling others how to handle it on their stuff?

Score of 53 out of 100 with 4 critical issues, knocking it out of compliance.

https://www.accessibilitychecker.org/audit/?website=https%3A...

No it’s quite easy. Executives all over the country are doing the exact same thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com