Hacker News Reader

Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

My point is that accessibility being a thing shouldn't ruin the UI for the people who don't need it. There's no need to visually redesign anything to introduce accessibility. Apps don't need to be made aware whether some control has focus because the user has pressed the tab key, or because it's being focused by a screen reader, or because of some other assistive technology. Colors and font sizes can also be configured and they've been configurable since at least Windows 3.1 — and that is exposed to apps.

Again, I don't see how the things you specified can't be built into existing win32 APIs and why anything needs to be designed from the ground up to support them.

View on HN

Your point about “apps don’t need to be made aware” is precisely the reason accessibility is part of the system UI framework.

Accessibility is also not something that is just a binary. You may be slightly short sighted and need larger text, you might need an OS specified colour palette that overrides the apps rendering. There’s just so many levels of nuance here. It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system

If you have the time, I really suggest watching the Apple developer videos on accessibility to see why it’s not just as simple as you put it. Microsoft do a lot of great work for accessibility too , they just don’t have much content up to delve into it.

As to why it has to be developed from the ground up, it doesn’t, but it needs to be at the foundation regardless. Apple for example didn’t redo their UI for accessibility, however Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs.

Also , again, I’d point out that you’re purposefully trying to trivialize something you don’t use.

> It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system

There is a system-provided color palette. I don't know where this UI is in modern Windows, but in versions where you could enable the "classic" theme, you could still configure these colors. They are, of course, exposed to apps, and apps are expected to use them to draw their controls. That, as well as theme elements since XP.

> Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs.

Making sure you don't break existing functionality is called regression testing. I'm sure Microsoft already does a lot of it for each release.

And actually it's not quite that. The transition from 9x to NT involved swapping an entire kernel from underneath apps. Most apps didn't notice it. In fact, the backwards compatibility is maintained so well that I can run apps from the 90s — built for, and only tested on, the old DOS-based Windows versions — on my modern ARM Mac, in a VM, through an x86 -> ARM translation layer.

> There's no need to visually redesign anything to introduce accessibility.

People with motion sickness (reduced animation), the deaf (captions!), and the colorblind would beg to differ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com