Re:Losing Sight
by PhasmaFelis on Saturday October 03, 2015 @10:07PM
(#10326122)
> I guess I'm saying don't be a jerk, be mindful of sight-impaired people when designing your products.
At a job I had five years back, new US government standards for handicapped accessibility came down, and I was asked pretty explicitly to do the absolute minimum necessary to make our web app technically comply with the letter of the rule. This essentially amounted to adding one- or two-word alt-text tags to image buttons, and nothing else. I wasn't happy with that, and I investigated to see if I could do better, but really doing it right would have taken weeks or months of work and a lot of inter-department cooperation, and I was just a contractor and the decision had been made many levels above me, so ultimately I had to do what was asked and move on to my next task. :(
So I guess my point is, don't assume that just having accessibility standards is enough, when there are people in the pipeline who view them as an annoyance. Whether you're a manager or a low-level dev, do what you can--more than I did--to make your coworkers understand that this stuff actually matters.
At a job I had five years back, new US government standards for handicapped accessibility came down, and I was asked pretty explicitly to do the absolute minimum necessary to make our web app technically comply with the letter of the rule. This essentially amounted to adding one- or two-word alt-text tags to image buttons, and nothing else. I wasn't happy with that, and I investigated to see if I could do better, but really doing it right would have taken weeks or months of work and a lot of inter-department cooperation, and I was just a contractor and the decision had been made many levels above me, so ultimately I had to do what was asked and move on to my next task. :(
So I guess my point is, don't assume that just having accessibility standards is enough, when there are people in the pipeline who view them as an annoyance. Whether you're a manager or a low-level dev, do what you can--more than I did--to make your coworkers understand that this stuff actually matters.