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Comment by koshergweilo | Hacker News Reader

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’.

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