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Comment by zooq_ai | Hacker News Reader

Your App is successful because you didn't spend time on useless things like a11y, i18n during the p-m-f stage. If you look at every successful product in history, they didn't focus on a11y or i18n right from the bat.

Now, that it is successful, you can think about it and spend resources.

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This is a very common attitude; part of why I wrote this article was to demonstrate how easy it is to do the bare minimum!

Are you really going to use the word “useless” here?

Yes, if you offer something useful, people will jump through hoops to get it.

Remember all the original Download/Porn sites. Those had a11y issues even for regular users, yet it was popular. a11y matters only for useless websites because they can't afford for users to leave

It seems like quite an indictment of the tech sector to say that success happens because accessibility is ignored.

Not really.

Solving a new problem / use case is going to help you be successful, accessibility isn't novel. It's a feature.

Succes requires quickly testing if something works at all. Those tests don't need accessibility to be accurate, so they don't have accessibility.

What is important is that, when you found that something works and you start profiting from it, that you make it accessible. incidentally, this is how the EU law works aswell.

I think it is safer to say that accessibility is an one of many edge cases. Not important ... until it suddenly is.

I had many tricks to "sell" accessibility to the various clients and one of them was "What percentage of your potential users would you like to immediately piss off?" "How comfortable are you with random lawsuits? [Then you have to talk about the Target lawsuit]"

Once you make an interface accessible, it becomes much harder to change that interface and add new functionality while maintaining accessibility.

This is why tech first finds an interface that works and makes money, and then turns around and makes it accessible.

And furthermore, that accessibility is useless.

Now, this is why I like to see such things regulated with law. Because then a competitor, who spares the effort to care about, say, a11y, doesn't get ahead, but is instead punished.

It's not that a11y is a bad consideration, it's that creators are badly incentivized.

no. All it'll do is empower those who are in lead esp the big techs because now a startup has to spend a significant amount of time fighting a11y stuff. There's a reason most (successful) startups are not from Europe. Too much bureaucracy for little ones to innovate.

If you become really big, you get x amount of time to implement a11y. Good enough balance.

>If you become really big, you get x amount of time to implement a11y.

What's that if not regulation?

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