Are you really arguing that I should not be able to buy a bagged salad because I can chop my own damn veggies? And I thought I was a moralist.
You do realize most of the people reading this work in an industry that spends billions on giant space heaters to provide snapchat and online poker and bitcoin and HFT and...
How about this: put the the convenience products next to their traditional brethren, charge not-outrageously more for them (to pay the extra costs and because they are more convenient) and stop trying to feel morally superior to random other people because you aren't interested in the product?
Not "shouldn't be able to," just "shouldn't."
The underlying problem is that we're not pricing externalities correctly. If the environmental and energy impact of plastic containers was required to be paid up front then the price would increase significantly and companies would stop using them in many cases. But until that happens, if you want to be environmentally conscious, you avoid such products where practical. And if you're an environmentally conscious company, you avoid selling them.
> You do realize most of the people reading this work in an industry that spends billions on giant space heaters to provide snapchat and online poker and bitcoin and HFT and...
...and people are spending billions of dollars to make those space heaters as energy efficient as possible going forward. And some of those practices (like HFT) are criticized for being incredibly wasteful and people have suggested curbing them.
And hypocrisy is not, in any event, a logical fallacy. Two wrongs don't make a right.
> The question is not necessity, it's cost/benefit.
Necessity is everything. Cost-benefit might factor in when comparing different options, but the cost is often very high, especially to retrofit accommodations onto existing systems, when compared to the benefit that the general population receives from those accommodations. But we do it anyway, because we live in a civilized society that recognizes not everybody is the same.
Comparing it to armored houses is stupid, because while armored houses might be sufficient for security, they are certainly not necessary. The threat model imposes a ceiling on any benefits: anything beyond that is not necessary, it's wasteful.
> When it takes as much or more effort to do the accessibility as to create the product in the first place, or requires a skill set the maker doesn't normally possess.
So there are two problems here.
* Accessibility is like (software) security. Both should be treated as part of the process, where they are incorporated into the design from the outset. Just like security, if you try to tack on accessibility after everything is designed and built, then it takes longer to implement, costs more, and integrates poorly due to working around the existing design rather than within it, and generally less convenient/usable.
* The biggest "skill" that people need is simply awareness and perspective -- not everybody is like you! Especially in software, good practices for accessibility are often reflective of generally good practices anyway.
If you're slinging HTML, use semantically correct elements, put alt tags with images, label your forms and make sure they are keyboard-navigable. Are you a web developer that's never heard of ARIA? Shame on you -- you're not much of a web developer if you only cherry-pick the parts you like to use. This stuff is not hard. Again, it's less of a skill and more of a broadening of your world view to recognize that not everybody is like you, and trying to take those people into consideration. Would you build a web site and ignore IE users completely, just because you don't use IE?
> The argument seems to be that disabled people shouldn't have to do something different
That's not the argument at all. They do things differently all the time -- and usually it's fine, as long as the accommodation is reasonable.
The gist of the article, by my reading, is that accessibility, convenience, and being environmentally friendly are often at odds with each other.
The argument is not that Whole Foods has a moral imperative to offer pre-peeled oranges, just that there are certain classes of people that actually do benefit from pre-peeled oranges, while acknowledging there is an environmental impact. Disabled people are acutely aware of the externalities that their handicap imposes on society, so it is a relief when mainstream goods and practices shift towards being more accessible by default, such as supermarkets offering pre-chopped vegetables or, yes, pre-peeled oranges.
We clearly don't do it anyway. There are plenty of things we could do that would help certain people in a big way but we don't because the cost would be prohibitive.
> Would you build a web site and ignore IE users completely, just because you don't use IE?
It has nothing to do with whether you use IE. It's a matter of how many other people do and how much it would cost to support them.
But web development is a completely different context, because then the cost is fixed rather than per-unit. Which means, if your site is at all popular, it is worth the cost most of the time.
It's basically fail fast. The first version isn't going to be particularly accessible because there is little point in doing that work if you're just going to close your doors next year. But if you succeed, now it's worth the effort to go back and do it, because 1% of a billion people can justify a lot of effort.
We certainly can't do everything (and what we can do is subject to constraints of scale), but there are key phrases here: readily achievable, reasonable accommodation. There are a lot of things that are required that are quite expensive, and the burden for providing those is entirely on the facility, service, employer, etc.
You still can't apply a strict cost-benefit analysis, because that would fail almost every time. That's what the ADA is for: to compel (necessitate!) accommodations that would not be made otherwise. Take a look at an ADA checklist sometime: http://www.adachecklist.org/doc/fullchecklist/ada-checklist....
> It's a matter of how many other people do and how much it would cost to support them.
That's not the point. The point is that you're aware there are users different from yourself, so you take them into consideration. Empathy, not market share. That's what accessibility is all about.
> The first version isn't going to be particularly accessible
That doesn't have to be true, if you are aware of the simple things you can do to make pages more accessible. Then it's not difficult to put those in as you're building things. As I keep saying, if accessibility is incorporated into the process from the beginning, then it is much easier to ensure ongoing support. It's not hard.
> it's worth the effort to go back and do it
This kind of mindset is exactly the problem. Going back and re-evaluating your accessibility from scratch is a complete waste of time and resources [1]. Take an afternoon off from faffing around on HN, read up on accessible design, apply those few simple steps as you're building each page. Believe me, you'll feel a lot better about it knowing that your pages are accessible: there is something satisfying as an engineer knowing that your product is resilient and usable in various circumstances.
[1] Most new public construction is required to be ADA compliant at the outset, because there are laws on the books that mandate it. Now imagine if architects didn't actually consider accessibility when designing the facility. Or if they were completely clueless about accessibility issues. That situation is unfortunately exactly what we have with software developers today -- and devs have it even easier, so there is not really an excuse not to make even a passing attempt at accessibility from the outset.
In other words, the cost/benefit has to be reasonable.
> There are a lot of things that are required that are quite expensive, and the burden for providing those is entirely on the facility, service, employer, etc.
Suppose you have something like a wheelchair ramp, which might cost $2000. A particular store has maybe 10 customers who need it, the customers each spend ~$200/month in the store, the store's margin is ~10%, so the store pays for the ramp in less than a year. A rational owner of that store is going to build the ramp regardless of whether the law requires it.
Now consider private homes. The people who need ramps would have installed them regardless and everywhere else they would rarely if ever be used. But it would still cost the same per home as it would for a store with a lot of profitable business. So the law [in most places] doesn't require ramps in private homes.
Here's the problem with the law. Very small shops are in the same boat as private residences. The cost of the ramp is fixed but the value depends on how many people go there and need it. For very small shops that number is often zero. And the cost of the ramp is nothing to Walmart because they do a lot of business, but the same cost is real money to a tiny shop owner. It's the sort of thing that, repeated a few of times in similar contexts, will put the tiny shop out of business. So there is a real case to be made that very small shops shouldn't be required to build ramps.
Because it's all cost/benefit. There is no use building a ramp to a shuttered shop.
> That's not the point. The point is that you're aware there are users different from yourself, so you take them into consideration. Empathy, not market share. That's what accessibility is all about.
Inefficiency is not empathy. Doing the thing that results in the least waste leaves more resources that can be used to improve peoples' lives. Imagine the inefficiently-spent money was instead put toward medical research to cure the people affected. Or do any other thing that benefits them with a higher cost/benefit ratio than the more wasteful thing. How is that not more empathetic than wasting resources that could have been better used to help people?
> Going back and re-evaluating your accessibility from scratch is a complete waste of time and resources
Only if you already know you'll have to. If you're today's Facebook, you know that. If you're a small startup, you don't. You're probably going to fail and then it isn't going to matter.
It can be more efficient to not spend resources doing it right the first time when there is a high probability of failure, because the high cost of doing it over is only paid if you succeed, and in that case you can afford it.
You keep talking about cost-benefit, but the whole reason we have laws like the ADA is because people will not make accommodations, because the math does not work out. Moreover, there is much more to it than just installing (and maintaining!) structural accommodations. And of course a mom-and-pop isn't held to the same standard as Wal-Mart... that is already the case.
> Doing the thing that results in the least waste leaves more resources that can be used to improve peoples' lives.
What? No. I can barely parse the other things you're trying to say about efficiency. The world does not work that way. If it did, we wouldn't have this discussion, because everyone would do the "right thing" and allocate surplus resources towards "improving peoples' lives". They don't.
> It can be more efficient to not spend resources
Read everything I wrote again. You're not spending any resources (in software) except a few extra keystrokes. This stuff is not hard. This is what it sounds like to me: you're trying to justify being a lazy, inconsiderate jerk.
There are actually two pieces of this. One is that some people wouldn't make the accommodations even though it would make economic sense simply because they never considered it. But this could be addressed by, for example, requiring builders to explicitly offer to build the accommodations even if the owner is allowed to decline.
But you want to talk about the case where it doesn't make economic sense. The business is going to spend $1000 in order for customers to buy $50 worth of merchandise. This should be clearly crazy to you. The customer is not receiving $950 worth of value from this arrangement. If you asked the customer whether they would rather have the accommodation in that one shop or the $950, they're going to pick the money.
> And of course a mom-and-pop isn't held to the same standard as Wal-Mart... that is already the case.
Sometimes. And only because cost/benefit has prevailed in those cases. It's a clear case of people asking for something irrational and then clawing it back when the destructive force is actually brought to bear.
> What? No. I can barely parse the other things you're trying to say about efficiency. The world does not work that way. If it did, we wouldn't have this discussion, because everyone would do the "right thing" and allocate surplus resources towards "improving peoples' lives". They don't.
Of course they do, they just improve the lives of different people. They use it to pay for their employees' health insurance and send their own kids to college and make a donation to a local shelter. They buy themselves a sandwich. The money goes somewhere. It's not like they're setting it on fire, which is what building accommodations that are never used is equivalent to.
Realize that you're combining two pieces. The first is that money should be taken from businesses and used to help the disabled, and the second is that the money should be spent on specific accommodations. Since the things are combined it looks like the options are "spend the money on poor cost/benefit accommodations" or "the businesses keep the money". Which are two options, but there are two more: We could build the accommodations but get the money from somewhere else, or we could tax businesses in order to help the disabled but help them in some other way.
The first of those makes a good thought experiment. Imagine the money to build the accommodations came directly from those who need them. Would they still want the same accommodations as are currently required, if they each personally had to pay their proportion of the cost? Clearly not. The ones with poor cost/benefit ratios would be objected to, and there would be no one to oppose the objection because the beneficiaries would be the ones objecting.
That doesn't work if the idea was to be charitable, but I think it makes a certain point that leads directly into the last option. Suppose we've already decided we're going to take money from businesses and use it to help such people. We clearly shouldn't spend it on something that they themselves would not have spent it on if it had been their own money, because we know that those cases benefit them less than would just giving them the money as cold hard cash.
> Read everything I wrote again. You're not spending any resources (in software) except a few extra keystrokes. This stuff is not hard. This is what it sounds like to me: you're trying to justify being a lazy, inconsiderate jerk.
You can't have it both ways. Being lazy implies reduced effort. If you're a small business with so few customers that approximately none of them need special accommodations then you're spending your very limited resources to help no one.
You've made the argument that you're going to have to spend more later when you have to do it over. But it's more likely that you fail before that ever happens. And in the less likely event you do succeed, then you're successful and can easily afford that cost.
There is a common wrongthink among people who believe they're helping some people that if you don't want to help them in exactly the same way, even if that way is demonstrably less effective than helping in other ways, then you're some kind of inconsiderate bastard who deserves to be shot. Try not to be that guy.
That doesn't actually tell you anything. Things would be "more secure" if houses were armored like tanks and everyone was prohibited from leaving their homes without a police escort. The question is not necessity, it's cost/benefit.
The whole problem with accessibility is that there are contexts when the required effort is disproportional. When it takes as much or more effort to do the accessibility as to create the product in the first place, or requires a skill set the maker doesn't normally possess.
And that's pretty much always when people want to impose it. Because if you can buy a machine for $50 that will peel your oranges, that's what people who need one will do and then nobody else has to do anything. It's when such a machine is too expensive or doesn't work well enough that people want to impose the cost on someone else.
That's what we're talking about here. Because there is nothing wrong with a disabled person needing to buy a peeled orange, but there is something wrong with everyone else doing the same thing. The vast majority of customers don't need it, and in that case it's wasteful and environmentally unsound and should be discouraged.
The argument seems to be that disabled people shouldn't have to do something different, like asking the produce clerk to peel their oranges. But that argument burns itself to the ground. Then everyone needs to use the more expensive accessible version to avoid special-casing the people who specifically need it. Which moves the cost/benefit analysis away from accessibility, because you have to justify the added cost across the whole population rather than only where it is needed. The result would be fewer accessible products that are more expensive for everyone.