Three kinds of disability:
1. Permanent (eg, blind)
2. Temporary (eg, pregnant/new parent, recoverable injury)
3. Contextual (eg, holding something with one hand, loud environment)
When people think about accessibility, they often think about 1. But the long-tails for 2 and 3 are huge, and ultimately affect everyone at some point.
One might wonder (wrongly) why everyone should care about the special and expensive needs of a few (or old) people when designing public spaces.
But a majority will actually need to use these spaces with a baby stroller. Not a few. Baby strollers are a driving power of our society! Enable them!
I personally never noticed this before becoming a parent, but there's a lot of spaces that are "almost" stroller friendly, but for some reason there is a small obstacle that would not be expensive to remove (if accounted for during planning). For example, a few steps that could easily be a ramp, blocks of flats with a lift that is accessible after ascending a few steps, even high shop entrances.
For me it's not a problem, because I can easily carry stroller with a baby inside up, but for most mothers I know this is usually a huge or unsurmountable obstacle.
And people drag luggage around on city streets all the time. Many tourist destinations are pedestrian cities even outside their most central downtown areas. And luggage also needs to be dragged around hotels — and in suburban areas their absurdly large parking lots.
The skate wheels are a plausible argument, though.
accessibility work isn't just about making things possible for folks with disabilities, it's about making things better for everyone.
Which like, we're all eventually gonna be odd folk! That's what age does to us. But we should understand these accommodations as being a net positive, not a cost, to society.
In your situation, a couple possible solutions come to mind. 1) turn on "mouse keys" which lets you use the numpad to move the mouse and click, 2) a vim addon for the browser (e.g. vimperator or tridactyl) likely could've clicked the button via the hints mode. It's in the past now so maybe these wouldn't have worked or you didn't know, of course, just fun to think of what I would've done.
Anyway, it's not even an option anymore, under the European Accessibility Act, government and (since last year) public services (websites, apps, appliances, etc) all need to be accessible; for websites this means implementing WCAG 2.something to level AA, which includes things like minimum contrast requirements, captioned videos, and increasing font size without losing information.
And it's often considered an afterthought because by and large, designers and developers are relatively young, 20-40 some year olds working on Macbooks with 4K displays. Some may be wearing glasses but broadly speaking that's the extent of their disabilities.
- accessibility is just usability. all it is is making sure your product is as usable by as many people as possible.
- it's a myth that "people with disabilities" are some other that excludes you, and 'accessibility' or assistive technologies only benefits other people. Everyone is only temporarily 'abled'. You need to use prescription glasses to comfortable read a computer screen? You're a parent trying to watch some TV while getting your child to sleep? All benefit from assistive technologies.
Not always. There are things that increase usability for fully abled people but decrease it for disabled people. Color-coding is a common one. Another is using smaller font size to make more info visible at once, or advanced touch gestures that can be accidentally triggered by shaky hands.
Then there are accessibility features that actively harm fully abled users, like sticky keys or screen readers that automatically follow focused UI elements.
A good common framework helps here. Then, it's up to each user to set their settings properly.
If they did, they'd just be called "features".
Disabling high-contrast display makes the colors more aesthetically pleasing.
Disabling large-print text allows you to view more text on the screen at one time.
Why don't you run your apps/OS with every usability feature enabled? Share your reasons.
Other than that, is enabling/disabling any of the aforementioned features ever a question of aesthetics?
I’ve installed a utility on my laptop that supports “sub-zero” display dimming for nighttime use because monitors are now over-optimized for max brightness, with min brightness being retina-searing for eyes adjusted to a dim room.
This doesn't sound very usable to me.
I'm someone who enjoys this kind of work, especially when the target is a stylized drop down - I got to spend a week with the MDN page for the ARIA combobox open, trudging through all of the ins and outs of keyboard accessibility and I know I'm still missing a couple things (typing when the control is focused but not open, for example), and having clearly defined specs is something we don't seem to get a lot in webdev
Landmarks are important, but to navigate by landmark, you need to be experienced enough to know the right quicknav keys. Some beginner users might not be.
It doesn't scroll to the "useful" part of an article. It doesn't skip past the introduction / filler / two pages of "this is how my grandma used to make it." The only thing it does is getting you past the top navbar and such, and moving focus straight to the beginning of the article.