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Re:When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful by prezjordan on Thursday March 10, 2016 @07:50AM (#11258847)
Yes, I support an X% increase on my taxes to pay for wheelchair lifts on public buses.

> Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more complicated than it otherwise would be.

If your original design excludes a non-trivial amount of human beings then it's probably not a very good design.

Of course context is necessary here, and I can't just throw a snarky one-liner at you. If you're building a puzzle game, then yeah, blind people might not be able to play it and that's okay. If you're making a signup form, then it is inexcusable to leave out folks using assistive technologies because it's "complicated."

Re:When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful by CalRobert on Thursday March 10, 2016 @01:27PM (#11260970)
> Yes, I support an X% increase on my taxes to pay for wheelchair lifts on public buses.

I agree. Considering we're happy to spend loads on the dangerous roads that often put people in wheelchairs, spending a much smaller amount to help people maimed on those roads seems only fair.

Re:When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful by IanCal on Thursday March 10, 2016 @08:05AM (#11258911)
This is why laws around disabled access usually have use the term "reasonable adjustments" or similar.

It's worth pointing out that the UK law also covers a businesses website:

http://www.out-law.com/page-330

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/equality-act-2010-guidance

Re:When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful by chrishynes on Thursday March 10, 2016 @09:07AM (#11259229)
Right, but there are also shades if grey... What if you're building a signup form _for_ a puzzle game, or a website about it?
Re:When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful by potatolicious on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:07PM (#11261336)
There are many tools around these shades of grey, not all of which requires onerous effort.

For example, I make mobile apps for a living - and both Android and iOS provide many tools that automatically make apps compatible by default with things like braille keyboard and screen readers. But through apathy, carelessness, and bad design/engineering, many apps break this automatic compatibility they got for free.

Ditto for the web - if you're building a website for a puzzle game you'll want at least some kind of reasonable fallback, so to a blind person the website would at least make some kind of comprehensible sense rather than merely be a black hole that eats their screen reader.

There are definitely cases where product creators need to go out of their way for accessibility's sake, but throughout all of software the tools to ensure a rudimentary level of accessibility already exist and are low-effort.