I work at $LARGE_CORPORATION and our product a11y team's most recent major ship was a new palette of colors with improved contrast ratios. A UI change that makes the site easier to read for < 1% of users does not contribute meaningfully to incremental revenue. If I were Musk I would have cut this team too.
The moral of the story is that users who don't need a feature will still use it.
I’m not visually impaired, but the UI is just so much better now. It’s made me stop and fiddle with the accessibility settings in other things too.
From what I've heard from people in the industry, apparently a significant portion of users consuming audio described movies and TV shows, originally aimed at blind people, are truck drivers who have to look at the road, not the screen.
Audiobooks and OCR technology, also originally developed with the blind in mind, are now used by many fully-abled people in their lives.
Closed captions, originally intended for the hearing-impaired, are now a staple of many bars, where the chatter is so loud that nobody can hear the TV.
There are many more examples.
Some very brief googling suggests about 3% of Americans are visually disabled. Having a team ensure your product is available to an extra 3% of people seems like a potentially reasonable investment.
It's ok to just make the platform inaccessible for a large number of people?
Really? You were on the team then? I assume you found out that they had an entirely empty Jira backlog and no more accessibility updates to do on main, so they were let go?
I appreciate your insight, former Twitter employee. What else can you tell us about how your job went?
he didn't freeze shit.