Worth noting that disability accommodations often benefit everyone, not just disabled people. A classic example is wheelchair accessibility. Those ramps and elevators are also useful to parents pushing a stroller, to someone walking a bicycle, or to someone towing a heavy load on wheels.

In the Web context, accessible websites also work better for search indexing, and for semantic processing, and for manipulating with Javascript (ie: addons). Text annotations for images are a huge help to all sorts of people and software, not just folks who can't see the image.

The main reason to support accessibility work is that it is the right thing to do for disabled people. But if that doesn't motivate you, there are selfish reasons for people without disabilities too.

One of the weird parts I find about accessibility is that it tends to be considered as ‘something the developers do’. That we can solve accessibility just through technical means, and generally just by playing around with the user interface. In organization after organization I see accessibility as something the tech org has to champion to get time to deliver on, so it gets seen as an ‘extra cost’ of developing a feature. But the fact is that some features, as requested, are really hard to deliver in an accessible way - but if you thought about what you wanted to deliver from an accessible angle in the first place you might find there’s a way to solve the problem that is intrinsically more accessible.

In general not enough attention is paid to just flat out whether an entire business process is accessible. Or perhaps more - how you can adjust your business, your offering, or your process in order to make it possible for more people to access it, or to be employed by you in delivering it.

If you treat accessibility as a box checking exercise done by web and app devs you can end up worrying about making the driver portal of your ride sharing app work for a blind user, rather than thinking about what features are needed to make it possible for a person in a wheelchair to hire a rideshare that can accommodate them.

Accessibility doesn’t begin and end at screenreader support and text contrast levels. But if you leave it up to developers to do then that may be all you’re going to be able to get.

Agree with this. As much shade as I tend to throw at engineers for not considering the consequences of our actions, finance, sales, and marketing are absolutely different beasts here, and you're right that it often does wind up being engineering that's trying to push for these viewpoints.

The baby stroller's a classic - the number of people I know who've suddenly gained an appreciation for the ADA after having kids...

All of this is right, except for this part:

> We are well-paid professionals being asked to make our tools usable by the entire public

“Asked” is wrong here. I can “ask” someone to do something. The government can “force” someone to do something, ultimately at gunpoint. That’s what I don’t like about this.

The government needs to do that when the market fails to do it.

I don't think somebody should honestly call themselves an "engineer" if they can't be bothered to make their systems usable by the masses. It is an utter lack of professionalism.

I think the parent comment makes a fair point. No matter how small the issue, the government's rules are ultimately backed by the threat of deadly violence [0].

I think the rhetorical difference between "ask" and "force" is ripe for abuse in discussions regarding contentious government roles.

[0] If this seems implausible, consider this thought experiment (U.S.-based). A police officer gives you a ticket jaywalking. If you don't pay it, you're at risk of being the target of an arrest warrant. If the police find you, they will attempt to put you in cuffs. It goes downhill from there. For jaywalking.

I'm not arguing for or against things working this way, but I do think it's reality.

All social compacts are ultimately backed with force. If you and a dozen people fucked off to SeaLand and lived in an anarchic commune, your agreements with one another would _still_ ultimately be backed by force, in the same way that everything here is: Your SeaLand commune agrees on some principles for behavior - say, no pushing other people; someone in the group decides to push other people; the group intervenes, attempts to talk the person out of pushing other people; the Pusher refuses to see reason; the group either resorts to force or abandons the commune to a pushocracy. If you want to argue the government is illegitimate, then go ahead, but to just point vaguely to "socially defined rules are backed by force" isn't really _saying_ anything without that.

In that scenario, you are not being arrested for jaywalking

> In that scenario, you are not being arrested for jaywalking

I agree. But you are being arrested for the consequences of fully refusing to accept the jaywalking rule.

No, I don't think you are. You're being arrested for not paying the fine. Each was an independent choice on your part.

In the same way that architects and contractors are forced to follow building codes, yes.

I'm looking for the day when someone has a gun held to their head for not making their website accessible. More likely, you'll just be fired for not doing your job.

By that logic, I can refuse to follow this law without consequence? Sounds to me like my options are to comply, pay fines until I can’t and then comply, or go to jail (which would be done at gunpoint).

What am I missing? What’s the magic way to avoid complying with this new government edict without escalating to violence?

> What’s the magic way to avoid complying with this new government edict without escalating to violence?

Move to the mountains and farm turnips.

If you mean "how do I avoid complying with laws while still participating in polite society," you're right, that one you can't do.

Right, but the law doesn’t prohibit me from farming turnips*. It prohibits me from running a website without doing certain things. That’s what will be enforced, in escalating fashion up to and including violence.

If someone “asks” me to do something, they usually don’t mean “otherwise I will take your money and/or jail you”. But all laws have that threat, otherwise they wouldn’t mean anything. Hence why I take issue with saying the govt is “asking” us to do something - even though that thing is good and honorable, it’s still not an “ask”.

*well, I mean, there’s probably mountain turnip preservation zones or something, where it would prohibit me from farming mountain turnips.

What do you propose instead? All governance has force at its roots.

Certainly, no disagreement there. What I propose is that we avoid being cavalier about the implications of creating law.

Using the force of government is, or should be, a serious affair, and I think we water it down by using language like “they’re just asking”, etc. The force of government never “just asks” - when Trump was deporting people, no one (reputable) said they were “asked to leave”.

That sense of seriousness about government force would help us see clearly what is, and is not, worth bringing government into.

I really do love the fact that mass deportation and the digital equivalent of building codes are being treated as equivalent. Peak HN.

I don't think anyone is really unclear on law. You are expected to follow it, lest you be punished.

Have you put an accurate description on every image you've every uploaded to the web? No? You're going to jail or pay a fine since you didn't accommodate blind people. You uploaded 40k images and it will take you an entire year 8yrs a day 5days a week to tag and annotate every single on of them and not working your kids will go hungry and your pets starve. Too bad for you.

Note: I have around 160k images on the net, all marked as CC-BY. Thought I was doing something good by sharing but now I'm told if I don't make them all blind accessible then I'm a criminal.

I also have ~200 open source projects, 10 or so are fairly popular. Volunteered lots of time to make them, don't believe I should be forced under threat of fines and jail to have to put more time into them.

> 26% have some form of disability

Find that hard to believe purely on common experience + if not, likely not "disabled" in the sense of being affected to a degree of not being able to use a standard website. in the same vein, counterargument here is a lot of disabled people _can_ indeed use a standard website.

> Are you really telling me you're just ignoring 26% of the population?

Irregardless of what kind of of business I'm running, I'm targeting only tiny sliver of population. I'm easily ignoring 90%, sometimes 99.9% of population, as long as it allows me to make a better product for the remaining few.