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Comment by hereforthecake2 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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