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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

Accessibility is for more than just disabled people!

I've recently had surgery on my shoulder, and have to have my left arm in a sling with no use for 6 weeks. I've made heavy use of my phone's one handed mode, and window's sticky keys

When my partner goes to bed at night, I can keep watching Star Trek TNG with subtitles.

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You’re a disabled person then. Sure, you’re temporarily disabled rather than permanently, but that doesn’t matter.

One lens for looking at disability is that a disability is a system’s inability to cope with a particular user’s set of needs.

Right. Disability seems to convey a negative still, much like there's something missing and it's a bad thing. There is a study that said a majority of disabled people with invisible disabilities would never identify publicly as disabled. So I'm willing to bet most of those people don't take to the idea that having a disability is more of a social issue then anything else.

Yes, for my first example, I am temporarily disabled in regards to my arm, but my hearing is just fine. Accessibility for subtitles still helps me.

I think the classic example of accessibility being better for everyone is the ramps at crosswalks. They help people with wheel chairs, they let blind people know they're walking into a crosswalk. But they also give people more traction, or help people with strollers move around.

This is so true. I once saw a diagram[1] in an accessibility training that drove this point very well for me. You don't need to have a disability to appreciate accessible software.

[1] It looked like this: https://www.coursearc.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Persona...

Yeah, it's not all about permanent disabilities, it's also about temporary and situational ones (like say, having your hands full due to work, or being in an area which isn't well lit and needing better contrast).

> When my partner goes to bed at night, I can keep watching Star Trek TNG with subtitles.

Don't take this as a snarky remark, but why are subtitles the solution to this over headphones?

Lot harder to hook headphones up to a sonos surround sound system than it is to just mute it and read subtitles.

Yep. And anything that makes a website easier to use with a screenreader, also makes it easier to write addons that enhance the UI for everyone.

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