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Comment by Apfel | Hacker News Reader

A question for everyone reading this comment thread (as I assume most will have some interest in accessibility).

Have any of you had any successes in getting your colleagues or organisation to really care about accessibility and not see it as an afterthought?

I find it really hard to get folk on board with a11y efforts, as most people see a11y tests as an annoyance above else.

When I raise it in meetings etc, I get quite a lot of positive responses but no concrete action.

My main means of trying to get this to change so far is to try and get in touch with a group of users with accessibility needs to show my Devs the impact of their work. Any other ideas would be strongly appreciated.

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I worked at a company which strongly focused on accessibility. Some of the mobile and front end devs had learnt to test stuff the voiceover and even have a company wide presentation on how these worked and what kind of improvements they’d managed to make. Often times making things accessible for people with special needs also makes it easier to use for everyone else.

I also worked at another company which didn’t give a fuck. I was sometimes asked to review frontend components and would point out how things didn’t work with keyboard-only or how some information was only present colour-coded in blue and red. The devs were very pleased at getting good feedback (eg: getting their components to work with keyboard-only). Management couldn’t care less, and treated my observations as distractions.

An easy selling point to at least start is that universally using accessibility labeling makes automated app testing phenomenally easier to write and maintain.

In many cases, you can show how designing for disabled users improves the experience of an average user.

For example, anything that reduces cognitive load for a disabled user increases the efficiency of an average user. The average user isn't necessarily aware of the cognitive load because their brains are able to compensate for it automatically. But this compensation still uses resources that could be used elsewhere.

This is also why involving disabled users in the testing process is advantageous. An average user can automatically compensate for many problems, and may not even notice what is causing the problem. A disabled user will not have the luxury of ignoring problems, resulting in more accurate feedback.

> In many cases, you can show how designing for disabled users improves the experience of an average user.

Unfortunately, that is the opposite of what many companies aim for. Attention economy means money isn't made on making user experience better and more efficient, but rather worse and less efficient, because money is made through friction this generates.

I've come to call accessibility important to regular users because it's the only tool we have that has enough moral and legal backing to make companies deliver more value, even as they desperately try not to.

Using disability as a baseball bat results in companies forming adversarial relationships with disabled people. If the goal is simply to create more value for a company that is built to make an inefficient product, is it worth using disabled people in this way?

You can't "use disability as a baseball bat". Pressuring company to care for accessibility is done primarily to benefit the disabled. I'm just pointing out that it also happens to be the last lifeline for the rest of us.

There's the common meme of curb cutting, that you should care about accessibility because it helps everyone. My point is that the companies don't need to be gently nudged into cutting curbs; they already actively want to replace curbs with 2-meter fences, so they can put toll booths at regular intervals. Accessibility is the morally and legally backed way you can force them, kicking and screaming to make a cut curb instead, and as a side effect, prevent them from putting up the fence.

You describe using disability as a tool:

>it's the only tool we have that has enough moral and legal backing to make companies deliver more value

I describe your use of disability as a moral and legal baseball bat (tool). Speak softly and carry a big stick: the big stick is disability protections.

Using disability as an moral and legal offensive weapon incentivises companies to erode the rights of disabled people and prevent the advancement of new rights. Sure, some product somewhere is temporarily friendlier to disabled people: and the world will remain blind to the advantages that disabled people can bring to the table. The system will continue to design poor products with a veneer of usability, technically meeting moral and legal requirements instead of failing like it should. Nothing will change for the better.

Disability as a baseball bat is simply the only tool that you're familiar with using, because it is easy to use.

> When I raise it in meetings etc, I get quite a lot of positive responses but no concrete action.

Responding to this generally rather than in the full context, but my recommendation for this situation in general is that you should come to the meeting already knowing what concrete action you'd like to take and then seek buy-in. Ideally you should aim to end the meeting with some specific action items assigned to individuals, but at least you should have gained enough information so that the next time you meet you can push for specific actions to be taken.

This will probably fly poorly, but:

Have a "handicap day". Use duct tape and take people's ability to use fingers or eyes away temporarily, then make them use the software. Give them black and white (Or cyan and white etc) monitors (might be difficult to arrange). Set up a router that introduces high jiitter and 500ms delay to every packet that passes through it, make them use your sites through that.

Its really hard to imagine these limitations when one has never experienced them.

I don’t think this is a bad idea but I think it’s something you would have to do in conjunction with disability advocates. If you just say “we’re gonna pretend to be blind to help design well” then you’re kind of just patting yourselves on the back and missing the point

But if you work with a disability advocate it could be a valuable tool that could help you design for populations that feel shunned by designers.

my experience is that I have a degenerative eye issue that causes low vision. I wear glasses and can see but have obstruction in my central vision that causes me to rely on peripheral vision, poor perception of contrast, blurry vision requiring larger text, etc. AAA games have become better at accommodating this in recent years which is wonderful. But for a long time and still even now tech people were like “vision disabilities mean you’re blind, need glasses, or colorblind”. This is why a proper advocate is so important; they will educate you on populations that you may not be aware of.

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