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Comment by isykt | Hacker News Reader

Accessibility seems to be a blind spot for most in tech because we don’t think disability will happen to us, or if it does, it will be a long time from now.

What people often don’t consider is that even if that is true, the likelihood that you will care for someone with a disability — an aging parent, a spouse, or a child - increases the likelihood of lack of accessibility impacting your ability to enjoy your (shared) life.

My partner had a stroke. They can no longer walk steadily, and they likely never will. The number of times a certain thing we wanted to do went from idea to “guess not” is now incalculable. The logistics just become too onerous… and we’re lucky. We are high earners in a developed city.

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> What people often don’t consider is that even if that is true, the likelihood that you will care for someone with a disability — an aging parent, a spouse, or a child - increases the likelihood of lack of accessibility impacting your ability to enjoy your (shared) life.

Yes. Many many many people don't realize that their future holds experience with disabilities.

And wait until they have to deal with the young tech people calling all the shots on how products look, change, evolve, etc. This idea that we should constantly be updating our UI, workflows, and shoving new features in front of users as a way to push people to expand (and spend more) of what they do has created such a huge problem in our family for our aging relatives. We've had to constantly shift which tech we use to find stuff that's going to be the most simple and easy to help through through while on the phone.

The only solution, dear reader, if you make it this far, is that you — not metaphorically but literally, you, the abled reader - must advocate loudly for accessibility. Even when it’s annoying. Even when it’s more work on top of your already huge pile of work. You’re not advocating for an abstract other. You’re advocating for your future self.

Heck, it’s already catching up with me in subtle ways. For instance, scroll bars constantly mess me up because they keep making such low contrast between the slider and the background (I don’t know the technical terms). So sometimes I can’t even see where I am on the page without scrolling to see the slider move. But lately when the slider is small enough, I can’t even see it when I’m moving the page! It’s practically invisible to me.

Like, why does it have to be light gray on slightly lighter gray? Whose 20 year old eyeballs decided on this?

This lack of contrast can be annoying. It can sometimes be remedied on our end by playing with non-obvious graphics settings or monitor settings. But it's unfortunately not always as simple as adjusting the contrast.

You can also point out that this is an issue with photos and people will act like you're using trash hardware even if you aren't (had this issue with my nicest monitor, while the cheaper displays were fine). And they really should be also designing for non-premium displays, or displays being used in extremely bright, or extremely dark settings, etc.

I’m with you. I’ve spent a huge amount of my time working with older folks in particular, and the complaints about change have essentially shifted from $every_major_release_or_two to, we’ll, every release. My grandparents started shopping online during the pandemic and every week they had a new complaint about some change on the site. (I saw most of those changes and they certainly weren’t user-friendly!)

I’ve felt myself being able to relate more and more. I have a lot more work on my plate now that requires synthesizing previous experience and existing expertise, and that is challenging to do when entire teams at virtually every vendor seem to exist solely to implement changes for the sake of changes. Software moves fast these days and that can be fine, but it doesn’t seem like all that velocity is really genuine in the UX space.

My experience isn’t everyone’s experience of course, but requiring that _everyone_ learn new ways of interacting with essentially every product regularly, makes me feel like it’s just busy work to keep up with the proverbial software UX Joneses. (And everything looks the same now, so I’m not sure that’s the hottest take around…)

> Like, why does it have to be light gray on slightly lighter gray? Whose 20 year old eyeballs decided on this?

"It looks fine on my 32" 8K screen in perfect light conditions 60 centimetres from my face – what are you complaining about?"

I really think lots of people should just use €400 low-end hardware, as that's representative of what people actually use, and all these kind of problems will stand out much sooner.

400 EU is low end now. My what a time to be alive.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly?

I'm surprised the low end has such a high entry point. IME a low end phone was usually 20-100. Above that and the specs are usually good enough for a few years of decent performance.

Oh right; I was talking about laptops/dev machines, not phones. I do most of my dev work on old/cheap laptops, which works quite well for me because any performance issues and whatnot stand out immediately.

> slider and the background (I don’t know the technical terms)

I have seen used “thumb” and “gutter”, respectively.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/scrollbar-c...

Uses thumb and track.

Track sounds right. From a search, it looks like “gutter” is the space the scrollbar might take up.

>Like, why does it have to be light gray on slightly lighter gray? Whose 20 year old eyeballs decided on this?

Heh, we had a young UI/UX designer in his 20's who liked to put light gray on slightly lighter gray everywhere. When the project was taken over by another designer in her 40's she introduced more contrast.

>Accessibility seems to be a blind spot for most in tech because we don’t think disability will happen to us, or if it does, it will be a long time from now.

I strongly disagree, and I worry that people are now trained to think the worst of themselves.

Abledness is the Chrome of people: we code for the mainstream, the healthy, able people, and then if we have time we add support for the others. I don't think this is evil, or even wrong: it's a wise use of limited resources. There are far, far more error modes in a system (like the human body) than non-error modes. That's why people with disabilities really are more dependent on others. Like in the OP's case, they (quite reasonably) suggested that he get someone to help him on the phone. Why is that bad? I mean, consider the "disability" of not speaking the supported natural languages. Are all customer service teams supposed to speak all natural languages?

Instead of self-flagellating, or flagellating orgs and govs for not covering an infinite number of issues, I think you should instead volunteer to be a helper for someone with a disability. If more people did that, then this issue would be all but moot. Putting the burden on service providers to do the job your friends, family, or helpers should be doing for the disabled doesn't seem fair. (And I say this as someone with a strong bias against central authority).

It is not a wise use of limited resources when we aim to build a society that serves all. A human without access to basic civilization is not an "error mode." They are a person that we need to help.

Human civilization doesn't have to be a world where those with means get to enjoy consumption while those without starve. We have the resources to do better by everyone, not only the abled.

The error modes to which I refer are not people, but bodily injury and disease. Your words are the empty product of a mind addicted to the sensation of outrage.

Judgemental idealists have caused more damage to the world in the name of compassion and love than any other class of people. May you continue to use your rhetoric proudly, so that it may continue to serve as a warning to others.

> Judgemental idealists have caused more damage to the world in the name of compassion and love than any other class of people.

Are you counting eugenicists as 'judgmental idealists'?

What about death penalty supporters/tough justice advocates?

Zero-tolerance school administrators?

Abstinence-only-sex-ed proclaimers?

Think-of-the-children law pushers that get teens stuck on sex-offender lists?

All-human-life-is-sacred religious groups that have made it so that our pets can die in peace, dignity, and without suffering but elderly humans have to suffer in agony for years and then get tortured to death by 'life saving efforts' at the very end?

Those judgmental idealists?

Certainly not the ones who simply say that disabled people should be able to access public spaces.

There has to be room in the conversation between extremes. He's saying "everything" and accusing me of saying "nothing" when I'm saying "everything is impossible; something is possible."

It seems you are the one pushing extremes and calling it moderation.

Consider that everyone experiences being less capable at various points and to various degrees, even in an otherwise healthy life; injured, ill, tired, carrying too many groceries, bad breakup etc.

Designing for accessibility helps everyone. I attended a lecture on the topic and an example I found compelling was curb cuts - a person in a wheelchair makes the need obvious, but they are good to have for a variety of other reasons; pushing something with wheels, hurt ankle, being sick or absolutely ancient etc.

I agree that we don't need to self flagellate or see ourselves as deficient, design is hard after all.

Don't forget being pregnant or having to lug around a baby after it's born! Which is not an error mode. I'm well aware that "disability" is something we all go through; but my central point stands. It's not possible to accommodate all or even most types of disabilities and its reasonable to expect individual disabled people to BYOH (bring your own helper) in many cases, such as the OP's case of a speech disability wanting to do business over the phone. In other cases, like with ramps, BYOH won't help so its reasonable to expect/regulate those measures.

Yeah this blows my mind when working with other tech people. None of y'all ever broke a hand? Smashed a fingernail in a door or burned your thumb cooking? Noticed how hard it us to use the computer or shit even open a rounded doorknob sometimes?

Being fully able-bodied is barely even the baseline state, even for "able bodied" people. Temporary changes to that state have been common in my life and the lives of the people I am closest too, and it's always obvious how poorly the world is suited to those deviations. And also clear how small and cheap many of the changes would be to improve it.

If all goes well, you will be disabled for the final years of your life, we all will, and more than a small handful of years too. It is life why don't we plan for it, build our world for it?

> Accessibility seems to be a blind spot for most in tech because we don’t think disability will happen to us, or if it does, it will be a long time from now.

This goes for everything. People don't realize that the golden rule is in their own self-interest and they're often harming themselves when they work against things like welfare and other protections.

Even just helping your parents with tech as they age makes you realize just how insane software alone has become; everything in the damn UI changes day-to-day and it's all completely incomprehensible to explain.

Drives me up the absolute wall; next time their phone dies I'm going to recommend they get a Light Phone: https://www.thelightphone.com

>Accessibility seems to be a blind spot for most in tech because we don’t think disability will happen to us

Which is particularly silly because 1/2 of people end up with presbyopia (far-sighted). My older eyes are often frustrated with tech choices made by web/app designers half my age.

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