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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone.

Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect vision.

There are no blind soldiers in the army yet all Army digital communications are required to conform to federal regulations that accounts for accessibility. The result is higher quality products with greater availability.

Usually the best argument opposing accessibility is that the authors/developers don’t know what they are doing. When they say accessibility is too expensive that’s what they really mean, and it’s not a good argument.

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Developers often think about accessibility, or disabilities, as a stark binary. You're either completely "disabled" (whatever that means), or your not.

However reality is much more nuanced. We're all, at best, temporarily "abled". Whether you need glasses, or your fingers have raw chicken juice on them for cooking, or you started going to the gym and your muscles ache too much to walk, or have a newborn and can't turn the TV up too loud.

We all go through various levels of impairments over our lives that can make use of assistive technologies. "Accessibility" really is just usability, and building products for real people.

It is not universally true that accessibility efforts always benefit everyone. For example, implementing ARIA markup on HTML only benefits those using assistive technology.

If developers don't know how to make web services accessible, it IS expensive because it will take time to train them. Developer time is often a company's biggest expense.

Moreover, not every web product is simple to make accessible even by experts because eyes can process a lot of information very quickly across two dimensions, and UX designers often take this for granted. Translating complex experiences into comprehensible text-only applications often takes creativity and effort.

I'm not saying accessibility isn't important, but these kinds of arguments that it is always cheap and easy often actually make it harder for engineers to get the resources they need to implement it successfully.

Another thing to consider is that some design choices seem to be in contention whether they're accessible or not. Eg dark mode makes it harder to read with astigmatism and creates visual hallucinations afterwards (it looks as though you're looking through blinds). Others swear that light mode hurts their eyes.

I'm in that second group. I have an inherited, untreatable retinal disease that causes photophobia (light sensitivity) and contrast issues. When contrast is high enough for me to read text in light mode, total light emission from the screen is just way, way too high. When I can't wrangle something into dark mode, I usually wear sunglasses at my computer desk. I know of someone (my sister's friend) whose retinal disease makes her so light sensitive that she cannot comfortably look up at the moon when she's outside on a clear night with a full moon.

What accessibility demands all users have is neither light mode nor dark mode, but the ability to easily choose between them (and maybe other color or contrast options).

This is why accessibility is closely tied to hackability and customizability. There isn't one solution that works for everybody. Accessibility is about giving users flexibility and control in the way they access, consume, and produce content, etc., so that they can do so in ways that meet their specific needs. It's about user agency in the same sense as ye olde ’user agent'— and that's why it's something that should resonate with every hacker.

> ARIA markup on HTML only benefits those using assistive technology.

This specific case: ARIA labels also help search engine indexers find pages and extract information within pages more effectively. Excluding contemporary concerns about search engines intercepting advertising revenue by doing this, it is undoubtedly better for the able-sighted and blind user alike to have the option of finding an answer by visiting one page rather than two.

More philosophically: if accessibility makes things easier for people with a disability, that means it is easier for someone emulating a disability. For instance, whenever I'm holding something in one hand, I'm effectively emulating the abilities of a physically one-handed person, so if you make a design that works for one-handed people, you're also giving everyone else the extra opportunity to multitask.

> I'm not saying accessibility isn't important, but these kinds of arguments that it is always cheap and easy often actually make it harder for engineers to get the resources they need to implement it successfully.

Parent poster wasn't saying it is cheap and neither would I, but whilst the incidental benefit of accessibility improvements to able-bodied people might not seem obvious, it always exists.

> implementing ARIA markup on HTML only benefits those using assistive technology.

I'd argue that implementing ARIA markup properly also makes developers consider the general markup and structure of their product. Which in turn can lead to better UX in general, as it will lead to new insights. Yes, training developers does cost time so it is an expensive. That's often true for anything that will improve your product.

> Moreover, not every web product is simple to make accessible even by experts because eyes can process a lot of information very quickly across two dimensions, and UX designers often take this for granted.

Do you think that UX designers who take this for granted are good UX designers? I'd say that if they take it for granted that eyes can process more information, that they might need a refresher course on UX. Designs that lean heavily on visually cues and have a lot of them generally tend to be too complex and cause a visual overload.

A bonus benefit of ARIA markup is that if you have any automated UI tests they benefit from good ARIA markup and generally tend to be a bit more stable than tests using regular classes and IDs.

When I said "UX designers often take this from granted", what I meant was "literally every single UX designer I have ever worked with professionally has taken this for granted".

I do think training developers and designers on accessibility is a core part of having them ship professional quality work. Even if product people and designers aren't thinking about it, I think it's reasonable to expect competent front-end developers to understand how to implement designs to some professional standard that doesn't make the page unusable for people with disabilities and expose the company to lawsuits.

On the other hand I don't think the business really knows/cares what HTML you use, they just can reasonably trust people to implement stuff in the "right" way, which 90% of time is identify the correct HTML to represent the nature and structure of the design and build out from there. You'd expect things to "just work" when you are paying for front-end specialists.

I think the argument is more along the lines of "if you look after the pennies, the pounds look after themselves," not the slight straw man of "every single little accessibility improvement benefits every single user." If you have accessibilty at the heart of what you're doing then it will almost inevitably improve the product for everyone to some extent. My argument would be stronger, in that I think there's a very high probability that it will improve the product significantly for a large proportion of your audience.

Accessibility is not always cheap and easy. I am only saying it isn’t more expensive if you know what you are doing.

In my 15 year career as a JavaScript developer all the biggest failures were directly attributed to poor training and leadership qualifying low standards. At some point people would do themselves a huge service by admitting they are too lazy/inept to train their staff and they deliver shit as a result. I got tired of all the weak excuses so now I do something else for a living.

If the problem is needing more competent people, that tends to be an expensive problem to solve because competent people generally cost more to hire.

While that sounds logical it’s completely false in practice. Competent people need jobs just as much as incompetent people but it’s challenging to distinguish the two. Most employers are just happy to put bodies in seats and will adjust expectations accordingly.

> When they say accessibility is too expensive that’s what they really mean, and it’s not a good argument.

Disabilities can be conflicting which makes catering to all difficult.

Consider, for example, that someone who is deaf will usually use a flashing light to wake them up. However, if you are someone that's prone to seizures, that flashing light is now something that can trigger a medical emergency.

Now consider how fire alarms typically work, big flashing lights and loud sirens.

With accessibility you kind of can't please everyone. Not saying you shouldn't try, but there needs to be some level of "best effort" applied.

Notably, none of this matters if you aren't an entitled jerk and make accessibility features an option!!

There's been a new trend in modern videogames to show you a screen with a few accessibility options before the game even finishes starting. I am not disabled, and yet often feel like I benefit from some options or others.

Stop pretending you know better than your customers/users/visitors. Let them make the choices that make your product best for their usages. Stop treating users like children and we stop having these kinds of problems.

Hey bro, it's unnecessary to call people jerks. Assume they're ignorant at worse, or really incapable of juggling all plates. Running a small software shop, especially a startup, is extremelly hard and stressful. You're constantly struggling to survive financially. To a lot of folks, this alone already takes up everything they have to give.

I say this with full understanding of the situation you are describing: ignoring accessibility is not a reasonable cost saving measure, to a degree is immoral, and ignores that almost everyone will be temporary or permanently in need of accessibility at some point.

Not every object needs accessibility - a flashlight might not need braille - but this should be the absolute exception that proves a business is viable in its delivery.

It's not about saving costs. When you don't know how you're gonna pay next month salaries and bills, you don't have mental capacity to think about screen readers, font sizes or whatever

Agreed, despite your justifications being cost-driven. A business is supposed to deliver. Accessibility is part of that. Much like we wouldn't accept rotten food at a restaurant in whole or in part, we shouldn't be okay with leaving out accessibility to at least some standard. If a restaurant can't deliver and serves rotten food, we should be okay with it going out of business. This holds for software companies that view accessibility as technical debt/#todo items.

Especially web accessibility standards are so tenplatizable and test driven now, there really is no excuse.

Your comparison is flawed, in my opinion.

What you're saying is equivalent to a restaurant owner who doesn't serve meals adequate to allergic people is a jerk and should go out of business.

I disagree from a conceptual/philosophical perspective (broken accessibility is bad delivery, not just occasional mishap/edge case for some small set of customer) and from a practical perspective. It's not an occasional customer, it's a huge chunk of the marketplace. Here are some stats: https://themeisle.com/blog/web-accessibility-statistics/

I don't think software shop owners that are ignorant of or ignoring accessibility are necessarily jerks. Before being informed, they are transgressive to good sense; after being informed, immoral. How they act directly towards someone is what defines whether they are a jerk or not, and that, in my mind, is not really connected to the conversation.

I think it’s only immoral to ignore it if you know it’s an issue in the first place. I was never taught about it in undergrad. I knew that blind people existed, but hadn’t been around a blind person using a computer to appreciate what a pain in the ass it could be.

Whether it’s from disregard or ignorance, the end result for users is the same: lack of accessibility. I don’t think the well meaning but ignorant person is bad, though. I’m sure I’ve inadvertently made software that was challenging in ways I’d never have anticipated. “Click Cancel in the next 10 seconds to stop erasing your hard drive. 9. 8.” (Guy with ALS desperately tries to move the cursor over to the Cancel button.)

There are so many ways a person’s abilities can be different that the norm. Someone can be quite empathetic and still miss a lot of things they could be doing better.

As someone who's legally blind, this has always bugged me. It's like the trend of "dark mode", I've always found it easier to see white text on a black background but it seems like a relatively recent trend that it's becoming normal for apps/sites to actually be designed with that in mind.

Also as a slight tangent, public transportation! The US being so car dependant really hinders my independence, and better public transportation would benefit everyone (except car manufacturers, I suppose)

I don't get the last part of your comment. They can know what they are doing but the costs might be a problem. There are added costs to supporting accessibility, that's just a fact. No level of competency would make adding accessibility features not more expensive. I can bet you that whatever code you've ever written isn't fully accessible. That's impossible, as accessibility is a spectrum.

The question is which features are a must and a bare minimum and which of them are not. If your job doesn't care about accessibility (which is bad, don't get me wrong) and doesn't pay you for adding say, colorblindness support or TTS, that has nothing to do with being competent.

Accessibility is also in huge part related to cultural context. Sure, blind people and people in wheelchairs exist everywhere, but as an example where I'm from literacy is not universal. People can read for the most part but some have a very hard time reading, and TTS doesn't solve the issue in my experience. Does your website support that? Does it support a lot of visual elements/videos instead of text? Or a simplified version of the language? Does it make you incompetent, and does it make sense to add a completely different UI mode for them? That's what I mean with it being a spectrum.

In what world is cost not a good argument?

In fact, assume cost is not a good argument – then why should it even be legal to compile programs that aren’t universally accessible? It’s always beneficial, and just a matter of cost after all.

Or are you perhaps being completely one-sided and unreasonable?

You're shoving the strawman down the slippery slope. That is not an honest/genuine question.

I don't get where the strawman is, the parent comment said:

>Usually the best argument opposing accessibility is that the authors/developers don’t know what they are doing. When they say accessibility is too expensive that’s what they really mean, and it’s not a good argument.

There's no slippery slope either. If lack of accessibility is just a matter of incompetence and not cost, then there's no downside or cost to adding it everywhere. I don't get the point of not acknowledging that there are costs to accessibility. I get that it's not a good justification in most cases, but there's no benefit in denying that it has costs too. It just discredits the rest of the argument imo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

“Cost is not a good argument [to not do it]” is the actual line taken with the ADA for public accommodations (which includes most private businesses). There is a reasonable accommodation rule as to how an accessibility function may be implemented, but not if, and the rule scales with the resources of the provider.

The result of which is, in the USA, a person in a wheelchair can enter nearly every business, use many public restrooms, and generally participate in life on their own.

Right, but the ADA is not held accountable to the cost. They get their federal budget chunk whether or not Main St, USA can afford to stay in business.

They may not be the best authority on the question of whether cost is a good enough argument.

ADA unfortunately doesn't have the authority to decide what constitutes a good argument or not. That being said, they do have the authority to enforce rules that exist in spite of the excellent arguments against them.

> The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone.

I think there are many cases where it benefits everyone, but probably many more cases where it has no positive OR negative effect for the median user. It doesn't improve the UX in a way that makes a difference to them.

The question in this, as in all things, is whether enough of your users will benefit from accessibility improvements to justify the marginal cost of implementing them versus not implementing them. And, at a more granular level, which improvements can be made to get the most benefit for the least cost.

You could probably more accurately say that accessibility never hurts anyone. But even that might get an objection, because there is a cost to implementing it, compared to working on new features, or polishing old ones.

That’s your experience/opinion but it’s a step too far to claim ADA reqs should be applied universally and are an unalloyed good. For instance, some badly needed housing has routinely been denied because it’s too often impossible to make, say, accessory dwelling units wheelchair friendly. These ADA requirements thus limit supply, in turn raising rents, and causing real harm to younger, poorer people who are without affordable homes. Your example about contrast correction reeks of entitlement as well. I am also older, and bought a pair of reading glasses instead of expecting to push the cost onto society as a whole.

As someone with an architecture, building science and accessibility background I challenge that.

Done well, building new affordable housing with appropriate accessibility does nothing to cut into profit margins for builders. The tax breaks and other pubic dollars almost always deliver more than the cost of ensuring common areas are accessible and a few units have slightly varied doors and bathrooms (mostly.)

That builders don't want to build more affordable housing is its own problem, but not because of ADA requirements. In general, the ADA doesn't say much about low income housing except explicitly government owned and managed housing, BTW. The ADA is overwhelmingly concerned with public accommodations (businesses open to the public) and government and public spaces, not private home construction.)

It's almost exclusively the lower profit margins for price capped construction and not the minimal a11y requirements easily covered for anyone taking public money and who is building affordable housing and not taking government money, that are the root of our affordable housing shortage.

Accessibility is an unalloyed good and your bogus attempt at providing an alternative example is easily shot down. Pick an example you actually know something about and try again.

> Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect vision.

I saw another IRL example of this in yet another football match over the weekend where one team was in a blue jersey with the other team in a black jersey. I'm not even color blind, yet it was hard for me to immediately distinguish players. I really miss the old days of home team in their club's color, with the away team in a predominately white jersey.

So not even remotely UI/front-end related to a tech forum, but color contrast is a basic way humans separate things. It is not nice to mess with that for normal things.

Am I the only person who finds that subtitles often detract from the experience rather than enhance? I mostly watch either comedy shows or quiz shows, and am a fast reader. I find that the subtitles often come up too early and mess with the timing. Bad for the comedy; inexcusable for the quizzes.

What I dislike about all the comments here saying something similar is that it suggests that empathy only go in one direction. I sometimes run into situations where society isn’t set up for my needs in a particular way (for personal reasons, I won’t go into specific details). But my reaction isn’t “society should do whatever it takes to remove this issue I’m experiencing, no matter the cost.” I know that doing more to improve my personal situation is going to insure a cost that means that others are going to have less of something. None of this is free.

Where that line gets drawn is open for debate, but a lot of comments seem to be livid that people are suggesting the line should be drawn somewhere. Life is about compromise, and trying to do the most with finite resources. Understanding that tradeoffs exist is a basic requirement for creating a functioning society.

> But my reaction isn’t “society should do whatever it takes to remove this issue I’m experiencing, no matter the cost.”

I think few people have that reaction, and it's invidious to treat the statement "everyone should always think about accessibility" (true, for a properly charitably interpretation of "everyone" and "always") as equivalent to the statement "everyone's product should be equally accessible to everyone" (false and impossible).

The problem usually isn't that a reasonable, good-faith effort at accessibility isn't a perfect solution, but rather that no effort at accessibility is made at all, and that it's often regarded as an acceptable response to tell people that acknowledging their existence is too inconvenient. That's what's outrageous, and it should be made as universally socially unacceptable as any other societal taboo.

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