If your company cares one iota about accessibility, you can usually get those features off the table instantly just by arguing that point. "Yeah, well it's pretty clear that competitor doesn't care about blind people" is a pretty easy argument.
I invite you to learn to use a screen reader and try using your app (whatever it happens to be). It's seriously pretty terrible for some of these websites with all the fancy crap.
Yeah, you are right accessibility is one of those edge areas that most companies don't make it a priority. But in the U.S there's a federal law that requires if you have a website or an app that is meant for public use, that website or app must be accessible to blind people, Dominos was sued recently for making their website not accessible to blind folk. It is like of those issues where companies don't act until the government forces their hand.
Get blind employees/coworkers. You'll find that you'll be making damn sure your page is accessible. I enjoy it a lot because you don't generally think about it, but accessibility does affect many people.
I learned one thing from this post - Wow, blind people are pissed off.
In the past I've made a few websites where the owner required images incorporated into the menu. I've spoken to owners about accessibility, countless times, but more often then not I end up having to do some retarded flash intro coupled with a graphic heavy menu. Owners don't care, they want it to match their vision, and of course they don't want to pay extra to have everything made accessible to the blind as they are probably some percentage of a point of their customer base.
Agreed. One of our employees is visually impaired, and it is shocking how many Spas are entirely incompatible with a screen reader and standard keyboard nav. With a MPA, most of the things that a screenreader needs come for 'free' just by being standard components. When everything is wrapped in JS and is slightly different for each page, it's frustrating.
We have changed quite a bit of our software systems in the past 1.5 years, and I have dropped multiple vendors from consideration over accessibility. Many B2B SaaS salespeople just give you a blank look if you ask about usability for a blind user.
I feel for you and am very sorry that you have to deal with it.
In my experience as a web dev it's simply that the "market" of blind people is too small for many companies to justify the expenses. I work in a B2B shop which sells a fairly expensive product so our potential visitor base is maybe in the low 1000s of people.
I'm certain there are at least some who are visually impaired and are unable to use our latest online offerings. However, comparing the ROI of fixing that versus the ROI of implementing a new feature that helps ~99% of our customers lead to only one conclusion.
It is my believe that the only route too improve the situation is through regulation. It worked for making public buildings more accessible in many places on this planet.
Threaten noncomplient entities with big fines and see the market adjust.
It's a hard fight to fight, certainly, but a common tactic I've employed to counter this is "Web standards exist for a reason and we don't want our website called out for being inaccessible to the blind community. Additionally - these standards have been revised and refined over decades and I don't feel comfortable subverting some of these rules without considering them all - it may break out compatibility with some browsers."
I know people with severe visual disabilities. They have readers or tools to help them read things with far less objectionable layouts and designs than this one.
Saying every site has to avoid all interesting design so that people who are legally blind can—through supreme effort—read your page unassisted seems to be unreasonable at best and disingenuous at worst. Readability and screen readers and accessibility helpers and style removers exist for a reason and people who need them use them.
As a blind person, I'll be the first to tell you that a vast majority of web technologies are built with accessibility as an afterthought at most. Just about when we've figured out how to make good accessible native apps, everything's going into the browser and it's a giant mess. Ugh.
It's really really hard to get companies to care about accessibility. I have a background in accessible web coding, Section 508 accessibility stuff, and I've seen how people think about accessibility.
Basically -- they don't.
In real terms, unless a decision maker at a company personally knows a disabled person, they won't care. Fix that, and the problems will start fixing themselves.
You don't need to hire a blind person to be compliant with regulations. What if you are building consumer facing products? Can you pick who your consumer will be? What stops a blind person from using your product? And what if the user is suffering from another physical disability which doesn't let the user operate a keyboard/mouse? What if the employee were a medically fit person but met with an unfortunate accident and lost his/her eyesight/limb and have to now continue job after recovery? How can s/he continue their job? Will you fire the person? You never hired a physically challenged person but s/he can always become physically challenged due to some accident later.
> Do you know of cases where not implementing accessibility really did become a big financial hazard?
"Jason Camacho, a blind resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., is suing 50 colleges over the accessibility of their websites.
The 50 lawsuits, filed in November, say the colleges are in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, as their websites are not accessible to people with disabilities. Camacho uses a screen reader and said he experienced barriers when trying to access the colleges' websites."
This is a very valid point. All the pages produced by the places I've worked at were 100% accessible, mainly because the developers could see that I am unable to use the website, and I told them how easy it is to make content accessible. It is really simple once you do know that it is possible, and having a blind colleague who serves as a human tester is, as you said, really cool in this regard.
Blind developer here. Even though web technology might move fast, things move slowly in the world of accessibility.
You're saying it's too hard to catch up with the latest technology - I wouldn't agree with this in the context of accessibility. What happens in practice is that a frontend developer develops for example a fancy combobox that needs to be clicked on with a mouse without thinking twice. And that combo box stays on the website for years. Now suppose that's a website to book flights. I go there and I spend half an hour trying to click that damn combobox with a keyboard and still it wouldn't allow me to select anything. Well too bad, it turns out I cannot fly XXX airlines. Or I'd have to wait for my sighted assistant who comes once a week to deal with these websites.
And what if I told you that half of websites on the internet are like this - that is not accessible or extremely ahrd to use? I have to avoid certain online stores, certain airlines, certain hotels because of that. Finally I work in faang company and so many internal web tools here are not accessible. I found my way around, but I have seen blind people being fired for not being able to perform while every other tool that is required for you to use doesn't work with your screenreader and nobody cares to fix that?
And what's the price to fix it? Educate developers to use simple combobox instead of fancy one? Try to test it with keyboard? Are blind people really asking for too much?
And also regarding getting sued - I have no idea what kind of lawyers can sue for this, I have never heard of actual blind people being able to sue someone because the website was not accessible. If that was the case I would be able to sue half of Internet including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so many more. I suspect certain lawyers are taking advantage of the system - e.g. there was this american life episode years ago about a lawyer who is specializing on suing hotels that claim to provide acomodations for disabled people -wheel chair users - and they don't satisfy ADA requirements or something. I suspect this Domino pizza lawsuit was initiated by similar type of ADA troll lawyer. Don't compare blind people to troll lawyers!
I'm pretty sure blind people don't even notice this 'terrible UX' problem you describe, and that sighted folks aren't quite as jarred by it as you think.
This 'taste' issue probably matters more in some organizations than others. Hopefully they don't involve blind people in their business, because SPAs are notorious for being unusable to them. You can design an SPA with accessibility in mind (https://www.deque.com/blog/accessibility-tips-in-single-page...) but most devs either can't be bothered or aren't even aware of the issue.
I have never read a comment on HN that I found so rage inducing, stupid and disconnected from reality. With the attitude you have, you should think about applying for a job at Uber, because you would fit right in there.
Accessibility isn't hard, go spend some time with a screen reader and your going to start to grasp how dead easy these things are.
If you think the extent of the issues is "tags" then your mistaken. Lets take your color pallet.... have you cut out a rather hefty segment of the population because you chose to do something that made your site impossible to use for the color blind? Were not talking about a small portion of the population either, and the last time checked their money was as good as everyone else's.
"Also $37k to add features for the blind is ridiculously low." Uhhh, it depends on how bad your programers fucked things up. I can name a major financial institution that went through this same process years ago (including the lawsuit). The end result was that the engineering costs were far lower than the costs for lawyers to try to weasel out of it. They literally hired some one to babysit the process, and that was total overkill.
"This will set a dangerous precedent and cost businesses a lot of money and adding zero value to most existing paying customers."
As you age, your eyes start to go, your hearing starts to fade, these "precedents" are likely to apply to you as well. The assistive technology that makes access possible might be something that you want, or even need. You better hope that what every product your hoping to sell only works for or is consumed by the young and healthy.
Right, but at what point does some of the burden of making a website accessible fall on the screen reader application used by those with disabilities? Like, if there's nothing technically preventing the screen reader from reading the website, it's just that the site does not do things the way the screen reader wants them to, why does the onus fall on the site owner?
I invite you to learn to use a screen reader and try using your app (whatever it happens to be). It's seriously pretty terrible for some of these websites with all the fancy crap.
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