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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

PSA: Codeberg currently does not implement accessible account registration. It is impossible for screen reader users to make a Codeberg account due to the image-only captcha. There's a manual fallback path, but no idea how long that takes. I've been forced to use the Wikimedia one, and that was about 3 months. This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.

If you didn't know what Codeberg's political stance really is and how they treat the inconvenient part of their userbase... I guess now you know.

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> This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.

On the exact page you're on is a link to an issue [0] acknowledging that the CAPTCHA is inaccessible and expressing that they plan to drop it (albeit with no concrete time-frame). I don't at all understand your argument that Codeberg must be slow at replying to emails (the "manual fallback path") because Wikimedia are; these are two completely unrelated entities and I don't see why you would make inferences about one from the other.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1797

It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling. It says something about our industry that accessibility is often viewed as a “luxury” feature that can be dealt with once you’ve reached some level of success or revenue or whatever.

I’m hopeful AI tools can improve qol for those who require screen readers and similar tools but have a sinking feeling that it will only transfer even more of the burden for accessible access from operator to user.

> It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling.

This really depends on company size, and the company in question.

Everything Microsoft does in this space is excellent, VS Code almost feels like an app specifically designed for the blind at times. Other large companies aren't as good, but their products are usually somewhat usable.

Startups are a mixed bag, Zed is notoriously and completely inaccessible for example. Most SaaS tools wouldn't pass an audit but can be used with significant annoyances.

Open Source is usually pretty bad. GTK still doesn't do any accessibility on non-Linux platforms. QT used to be completely inaccessible, although they've significantly improved in the last couple years. Linux in general has major issues that makes it almost unusable unless you understand it at a very deep level, and maybe not even then.

Accessibility isn't a sexy thing to do, so unless you're practicing manager-driven development, nobody wants to work on it.

> This really depends on company size

It mainly depends on whether the company is trying to sell to governments that have accessibility requirements anchored into their procurement process requirements. Of course there is some causality between company size and ability to service government contracts.

> Everything Microsoft does in this space is excellent, VS Code almost feels like an app specifically designed for the blind at times.

Yep. The start menu ads are also excellent as long as you're blind and can't see them.

I wonder why they didn't just enable audio captchas, which are supported by the captcha package I wrote that they use.

How is accessibility a political issue?

How is it not? In the not so distant past of the 1930s there were political parties advocating for the mass killing of people with disabilities, or at least the sterilization of those with heritable disabilities. There have been real campaigns in that period that did this type of forced sterilization, especially in some mental hospitals. You'll still find people espousing such beliefs, thankfully at the fringes for now.

Accessibility is the opposite position of that - but it's by no means a universally accepted good, unfortunately, especially when it requires extra effort to implement.

> In the not so distant past of the 1930s there were political parties advocating for the mass killing of people with disabilities

Those parties still exist today.

- https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fox-friends-h...

Going from "we're a small non-profit and we're struggling finding a good solution that's also accessible, this really sucks – we're sorry" to eugenics is quite a leap.

My response was to someone asking how accessibility can be considered a political topic. I assumed they were asking in general.

Seems weird to me that anyone would frame it like this.

In my country (Spain) we put eg ramps for wheelchairs no matter the political party. It's considered a human rights or moral issue, not a political one.

I would bet Franco was not really putting up ramps for disabled people. That a political party is not currently represented in your country (thankfully!!) doesn't mean that the topic is not political.

Spain under Franco was a dictatorship. Not really sure how it compares. If you're actually being cheeky that is actually quite distasteful.

And yes the far right is represented politically in most countries in Europe, including Spain with Vox.

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