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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

There's this thing called the "curb-cut effect," where you make a change in order to accommodate people with a specific disability, and it turns out that the change is way more broadly useful than you anticipated. It's named after the ramps at intersections that were mandated by the ADA for folks in wheelchairs, but they turned out to be really good ideas in general and helped folks with strollers, on bicycles, and more. Similar things happened with closed captioning. Lots of other examples.

I bring it up because I wonder if this isn't the opposite of that. You come up with a technology aimed at healthy people, study how healthy people can adapt to using it, and maybe popularize it one day with healthy people. Because there are so many more people whose digits all work, it's a much broader audience. But once it's productionized and popular, I bet it'd probably do a lot of good for folks who'd need it.

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This is absolutely the case - in software, accessibility features are in many cases identical to power user and engineering quality features. Color-theme support is necessary functionality for color vision deficiency modes, labels and tags on UI elements enable screen-readers just as much as they enable automated testing suites, configurable keybindings make it easier to get your app working with assistive input devices. It's such a strong relationship that even bigcorps know it's a thing; I got talks about it during Google employee trainings.

The opposite, dark patterns, are an accessibility nightmare.

Yeah. If you ever thought it was annoying to have to spend two hours on the phone to get Comcast to cancel your internet, imagine how much it would suck to try to do that with a sign language interpreter sitting next to you, or with text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems in the loop.

If anyone needs further convincing, remember that the journey from power user to experiencing disability is inevitable (age-related sensory & skeletal-muscular decline) and in some cases, abrupt (traffic accident, keyboard/mouse related RSI). We all eventually benefit from accessibility features.

There are some lucky circumstances where this is true, but most such accommodations are not like that. Usually some trade-off must be made, in cost or in functionality. For example, with those same cut curbs, we now need to put a bumpy panel to allow blind and visually impaired people to feel the transition from curb to street, but these make the cut much worse for anything with wheels.

> but these make the cut much worse for anything with wheels.

Worse than the original curbs? Not in my experience.

I found that whatever material they used in San Francisco for those bumpy curb ramps was incredibly slippery when it rained. Wouldn't surprise me if someone ends up disabled because of them at some point.

All the panels I've encountered in Georgia have had plenty of grip when wet. I wonder what the difference is. Maybe it's because we get more rain and less slippery oil and goop is able to accumulate. I've heard that's part of why drivers in southern California have so much trouble with rain.

Do they use plastic bricks there? I've heard about such things existing, but ours are molded concrete at least. And the pattern is quite unobtrusive as well.

I would say actually in the vast majority of cases of accessibility interventions, it benefits everyone. Everyone is, at various points in their lives, a varying degree of disabled (defined in terms of functional deficits). Whether injured, pregnant, chronically ill, a wheelchair user, elderly, or — heh — even intoxicated, thinking broadly about users of the spaces and tools we design is always going to yield more positive than negative externalities imho.

In cases where this is not true, I’d challenge designers and engineers to find more novel designs that can genuinely be used by anyone and not cost too much inconvenience. This can sometimes mean starting from scratch and questioning our assumptions. Eg. Even the need for a curb-to-street indicator presupposes a street that is used by both big metal vehicles and pedestrians, whereas perhaps there’s a solution that means those paths never cross. Ie. More fundamental urban and transport design instead of band-aiding atop legacy systems.

I don't find it that hard to cycle between the bumps. If you know what to expect, it's easier than a cattle grid.

Any more example where it needs to be a tradeoff? I've been very skeptical about the concept since first hearing it. Seems too good to be true.

Frankly it's harder to come up with examples where it's actually just a Pareto improvement that was undiscovered until considering accessibility. This isn't to say that this is not worthwhile anyway to make tradeoffs but claiming that tradeoffs don't exist is just magical thinking.

Some obvious examples (even ignoring higher cost, since they are all also higher cost):

* Coloring for colorblind people is worse for people with normal vision.

* Large format type is cumbersome for people with normal vision.

* Traffic signals that are long enough for the elderly to cross cost everyone time every time they are used.

* Stalls in bathrooms suitable for disabled people means fewer stalls can fit.

* Ramps for wheelchairs require way more space than stairs and take much longer to traverse.

Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't do these things.

Speaking of productionalizing and economies of scale... I sometimes imagine an especially enlightened* medieval king would subsidize certain operations for peasants, just to improve the state of the art for whenever he himself might need it.

* But presumably not so enlightened as to transition the structure of government.

It's like the overpopularization of the gluten free diet. It serves gluten intolerant people a lot.

Rolled our eyes at fad diets like gluten free (while knowing celiacs is a real thing) only for my wife to develop both lactose and gluten intolerance at 40. And I thought cutting HFCS was difficult. I’m glad that gluten free picked up in popularity now, but it’s still very difficult to shop at conventional grocery stores. Allergens listed on menus has been amazing.

gluten itself doesn't seem to be the problem for many ppl, but it opens the pores in the gut lining and lets other allergens through. There's another one glutinin on which there isn't much research, seems to have same effect.

I grew up with a celiac relative. It's great that there are so many gluten free options available now.

One rare downside is that all the people who only do gluten free as a fad don't really need to care about small amounts of gluten. So the 'gluten free' labelling aimed squarely at them can sometimes be rather misleading, ie some restaurants have gluten-light options but still label them as gluten free.

We need to make up an severe allergy to single-family zoning

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