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Comment by vaylian | Hacker News Reader

VR/AR needs to be collaborative to achieve a breakthrough. Being able to interact with digital objects in 3D space that other people can also interact with will change how we work together.

Just consider code review: You can literally walk through the code together, take a look at different parts of the system and discuss how to improve things.

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Your blind coworker will love the sudden destruction of accessibility. Without the 3d code review, he might have been a constructive team member. With the new tech, you can send him home and let him think about the fact that he is now useless.

Blind developers are extremely rare, accommodating them is not going to affect the adoption of the vision pro, or really anything.

People with your attitude are a reason why the number of blind devs is low and will get even lower in the future.

Not at all. I am all for accommodating blind developers, and blind people in general. I even used to work as a narrator of audio textbooks for blind people and worked on side project apps to help the blind, so I am quite passionate about this.

But I also know that no blind developer would want their sighted fellow developers to miss out on something useful on their behalf, especially not in some kind of preemptive gesture of sympathy.

Its not about missing out. When all your coworkers switch to the new shiny thing which is not accessible, the reality of the situation is that you are now no longer a useful coworker, at least when it comes to that particular activity. True, you can try to find another corner of the tech activities world to regain usefulness, but the truth is, if enough shiny tech is established, at one point you are no longer able to cooperate with the rest of the bunch. No pity or sympathy talk necessary. Its just reality. If accessibility is ignored long enough, the digital divide gets bigger, thats just a fact. Talking about sympathy and all that jazz is really missing the harsh reality of the matter.

That is a flawed argument. Alternative solutions have to be found for people who are physically handicapped. That is nothing new and AR/VR doesn't change that.

Speaking from experience, the argument is everything else but flawed. Because the reality is, new tech gets rolled out, and then there is the expectation that alternatives should be implemented for people with handicaps. However, that step either never happens, or comes to late.

This is still not sound reasoning. Otherwise we would not allow ourselves to have bikes because there are people without legs. The actual problem is not that new technology empowers able-bodied people, but that the existence of that technology can create false expectations of what all people should be able to do with that technology.

The option to do code reviews in a 3D environment does not automatically mean that older technologies can't be used for the same task. And it does not imply that blind people will get fired if 3D code reviews become popular.

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