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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

>If you care about... ensuring the content you create is accessible to all

why should i care that the content i create is accessible to all? The content on my website would have no relevance to somebody browsing in africa or asia. Furthermore, despite the fact that small-screen phones with web browsers exist, that doesn't mean that people actually use them to browse the web. I'm not going to waste time and energy targeting a browser that there's approximately 0.00001% of somebody actually viewing my site with. and it's not like the prevalence of 100px-wide screens is increasing.

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> Furthermore, despite the fact that small-screen phones with web browsers exist, that doesn't mean that people actually use them to browse the web.

Actually they do. Over 90% of African's use their mobile phone for internet access. Around 5% of African's have an internet connection and computer. For people in the developing world, a mobile phone is 'good enough'. It provides them will access to email, facebook, and google.

I understand that you do not intend on making your content to African's-- my website has not been optimized for these devices. But, keep in mind that by doing this, both you and I are restricting our content from roughly one billion people.

Even more than that, if you are ad supported, often the ad networks have nothing worthwhile to run in places where these phones are used. If you are freemium in many cases the people using these phones don't tend to spend money on premium features, and certainly are not the rabid buyers that iPhone users with their credit cards already entered and ready to go are on app stores. Sometimes it just doesn't make any sense from a business perspective to adapt a site or an app to cheaper phones or different markets where the profits are not worth the expense.

Often the ad networks for non-Western countries are different, so you really need to look to domain-specific partners.

For example, AdMob may be a great choice for your app in the US and Europe, but a terrible choice for distributing an app in China.

Expect to see more Western ad networks acquiring or partnering region-specific ad providers (I speak from experience, my employer owns both a popular EU/US mobile ad network and one of the larger Chinese networks).

>why should i care that the content i create is accessible to all?

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." - Tim Berners-Lee

So..how do you know that your content will never ever be relevant to for example one of the children in this video? http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2012/09/06/educating-banglades...

why should i care that the content i create is accessible to all?

Lots of reasons, depending on what you are doing. You don't have to though, and if you don't care then the advice on that site isn't for you. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful advice.

If I was setting up something like a global payment network, or any other service where accessing people with minimal browsers would be useful, then I would care about it a lot.

Of course people use them, what a fucking stupid thing to say.

Please try to keep your responses civil and add value; if you disagree, why not tell us why (for example point to some stats for mobile browser usage)?

Stats on browser usage are in the original article ...

I also thought it was a fairly fucking stupid thing to say, but perhaps saying bluntly that it is a fucking stupid thing to say is also a fucking stupid thing to say, given that people often react quite badly to being told that what they are saying is fucking stupid.

Therefore logically, this whole post is also a fucking stupid thing for me to to say, but once I had thought of it I felt compelled to post it anyway, due to a deep love of both recursion and swearing.

If you believe sites are missing out by not supporting these phones there would be an untapped market for you to get into.

Personally, running a ecommerce site with low resources, places with high fraud and average shipping support aren't high on our list. So when developing for phones we aren't going to bother with the real low end that is common in these places.

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