However reality is much more nuanced. We're all, at best, temporarily "abled". Whether you need glasses, or your fingers have raw chicken juice on them for cooking, or you started going to the gym and your muscles ache too much to walk, or have a newborn and can't turn the TV up too loud.
We all go through various levels of impairments over our lives that can make use of assistive technologies. "Accessibility" really is just usability, and building products for real people.
If developers don't know how to make web services accessible, it IS expensive because it will take time to train them. Developer time is often a company's biggest expense.
Moreover, not every web product is simple to make accessible even by experts because eyes can process a lot of information very quickly across two dimensions, and UX designers often take this for granted. Translating complex experiences into comprehensible text-only applications often takes creativity and effort.
I'm not saying accessibility isn't important, but these kinds of arguments that it is always cheap and easy often actually make it harder for engineers to get the resources they need to implement it successfully.
I'd argue that implementing ARIA markup properly also makes developers consider the general markup and structure of their product. Which in turn can lead to better UX in general, as it will lead to new insights. Yes, training developers does cost time so it is an expensive. That's often true for anything that will improve your product.
> Moreover, not every web product is simple to make accessible even by experts because eyes can process a lot of information very quickly across two dimensions, and UX designers often take this for granted.
Do you think that UX designers who take this for granted are good UX designers? I'd say that if they take it for granted that eyes can process more information, that they might need a refresher course on UX. Designs that lean heavily on visually cues and have a lot of them generally tend to be too complex and cause a visual overload.
A bonus benefit of ARIA markup is that if you have any automated UI tests they benefit from good ARIA markup and generally tend to be a bit more stable than tests using regular classes and IDs.
In my 15 year career as a JavaScript developer all the biggest failures were directly attributed to poor training and leadership qualifying low standards. At some point people would do themselves a huge service by admitting they are too lazy/inept to train their staff and they deliver shit as a result. I got tired of all the weak excuses so now I do something else for a living.
This specific case: ARIA labels also help search engine indexers find pages and extract information within pages more effectively. Excluding contemporary concerns about search engines intercepting advertising revenue by doing this, it is undoubtedly better for the able-sighted and blind user alike to have the option of finding an answer by visiting one page rather than two.
More philosophically: if accessibility makes things easier for people with a disability, that means it is easier for someone emulating a disability. For instance, whenever I'm holding something in one hand, I'm effectively emulating the abilities of a physically one-handed person, so if you make a design that works for one-handed people, you're also giving everyone else the extra opportunity to multitask.
> I'm not saying accessibility isn't important, but these kinds of arguments that it is always cheap and easy often actually make it harder for engineers to get the resources they need to implement it successfully.
Parent poster wasn't saying it is cheap and neither would I, but whilst the incidental benefit of accessibility improvements to able-bodied people might not seem obvious, it always exists.
On the other hand I don't think the business really knows/cares what HTML you use, they just can reasonably trust people to implement stuff in the "right" way, which 90% of time is identify the correct HTML to represent the nature and structure of the design and build out from there. You'd expect things to "just work" when you are paying for front-end specialists.
What accessibility demands all users have is neither light mode nor dark mode, but the ability to easily choose between them (and maybe other color or contrast options).
This is why accessibility is closely tied to hackability and customizability. There isn't one solution that works for everybody. Accessibility is about giving users flexibility and control in the way they access, consume, and produce content, etc., so that they can do so in ways that meet their specific needs. It's about user agency in the same sense as ye olde ’user agent'— and that's why it's something that should resonate with every hacker.
Also as a slight tangent, public transportation! The US being so car dependant really hinders my independence, and better public transportation would benefit everyone (except car manufacturers, I suppose)
Disabilities can be conflicting which makes catering to all difficult.
Consider, for example, that someone who is deaf will usually use a flashing light to wake them up. However, if you are someone that's prone to seizures, that flashing light is now something that can trigger a medical emergency.
Now consider how fire alarms typically work, big flashing lights and loud sirens.
With accessibility you kind of can't please everyone. Not saying you shouldn't try, but there needs to be some level of "best effort" applied.
There's been a new trend in modern videogames to show you a screen with a few accessibility options before the game even finishes starting. I am not disabled, and yet often feel like I benefit from some options or others.
Stop pretending you know better than your customers/users/visitors. Let them make the choices that make your product best for their usages. Stop treating users like children and we stop having these kinds of problems.
Not every object needs accessibility - a flashlight might not need braille - but this should be the absolute exception that proves a business is viable in its delivery.
Whether it’s from disregard or ignorance, the end result for users is the same: lack of accessibility. I don’t think the well meaning but ignorant person is bad, though. I’m sure I’ve inadvertently made software that was challenging in ways I’d never have anticipated. “Click Cancel in the next 10 seconds to stop erasing your hard drive. 9. 8.” (Guy with ALS desperately tries to move the cursor over to the Cancel button.)
There are so many ways a person’s abilities can be different that the norm. Someone can be quite empathetic and still miss a lot of things they could be doing better.
Especially web accessibility standards are so tenplatizable and test driven now, there really is no excuse.
What you're saying is equivalent to a restaurant owner who doesn't serve meals adequate to allergic people is a jerk and should go out of business.
I don't think software shop owners that are ignorant of or ignoring accessibility are necessarily jerks. Before being informed, they are transgressive to good sense; after being informed, immoral. How they act directly towards someone is what defines whether they are a jerk or not, and that, in my mind, is not really connected to the conversation.
The question is which features are a must and a bare minimum and which of them are not. If your job doesn't care about accessibility (which is bad, don't get me wrong) and doesn't pay you for adding say, colorblindness support or TTS, that has nothing to do with being competent.
Accessibility is also in huge part related to cultural context. Sure, blind people and people in wheelchairs exist everywhere, but as an example where I'm from literacy is not universal. People can read for the most part but some have a very hard time reading, and TTS doesn't solve the issue in my experience. Does your website support that? Does it support a lot of visual elements/videos instead of text? Or a simplified version of the language? Does it make you incompetent, and does it make sense to add a completely different UI mode for them? That's what I mean with it being a spectrum.
In fact, assume cost is not a good argument – then why should it even be legal to compile programs that aren’t universally accessible? It’s always beneficial, and just a matter of cost after all.
Or are you perhaps being completely one-sided and unreasonable?
The result of which is, in the USA, a person in a wheelchair can enter nearly every business, use many public restrooms, and generally participate in life on their own.
They may not be the best authority on the question of whether cost is a good enough argument.
>Usually the best argument opposing accessibility is that the authors/developers don’t know what they are doing. When they say accessibility is too expensive that’s what they really mean, and it’s not a good argument.
There's no slippery slope either. If lack of accessibility is just a matter of incompetence and not cost, then there's no downside or cost to adding it everywhere. I don't get the point of not acknowledging that there are costs to accessibility. I get that it's not a good justification in most cases, but there's no benefit in denying that it has costs too. It just discredits the rest of the argument imo.
I think there are many cases where it benefits everyone, but probably many more cases where it has no positive OR negative effect for the median user. It doesn't improve the UX in a way that makes a difference to them.
The question in this, as in all things, is whether enough of your users will benefit from accessibility improvements to justify the marginal cost of implementing them versus not implementing them. And, at a more granular level, which improvements can be made to get the most benefit for the least cost.
You could probably more accurately say that accessibility never hurts anyone. But even that might get an objection, because there is a cost to implementing it, compared to working on new features, or polishing old ones.
Done well, building new affordable housing with appropriate accessibility does nothing to cut into profit margins for builders. The tax breaks and other pubic dollars almost always deliver more than the cost of ensuring common areas are accessible and a few units have slightly varied doors and bathrooms (mostly.)
That builders don't want to build more affordable housing is its own problem, but not because of ADA requirements. In general, the ADA doesn't say much about low income housing except explicitly government owned and managed housing, BTW. The ADA is overwhelmingly concerned with public accommodations (businesses open to the public) and government and public spaces, not private home construction.)
It's almost exclusively the lower profit margins for price capped construction and not the minimal a11y requirements easily covered for anyone taking public money and who is building affordable housing and not taking government money, that are the root of our affordable housing shortage.
Accessibility is an unalloyed good and your bogus attempt at providing an alternative example is easily shot down. Pick an example you actually know something about and try again.
I saw another IRL example of this in yet another football match over the weekend where one team was in a blue jersey with the other team in a black jersey. I'm not even color blind, yet it was hard for me to immediately distinguish players. I really miss the old days of home team in their club's color, with the away team in a predominately white jersey.
So not even remotely UI/front-end related to a tech forum, but color contrast is a basic way humans separate things. It is not nice to mess with that for normal things.
Where that line gets drawn is open for debate, but a lot of comments seem to be livid that people are suggesting the line should be drawn somewhere. Life is about compromise, and trying to do the most with finite resources. Understanding that tradeoffs exist is a basic requirement for creating a functioning society.
I think few people have that reaction, and it's invidious to treat the statement "everyone should always think about accessibility" (true, for a properly charitably interpretation of "everyone" and "always") as equivalent to the statement "everyone's product should be equally accessible to everyone" (false and impossible).
The problem usually isn't that a reasonable, good-faith effort at accessibility isn't a perfect solution, but rather that no effort at accessibility is made at all, and that it's often regarded as an acceptable response to tell people that acknowledging their existence is too inconvenient. That's what's outrageous, and it should be made as universally socially unacceptable as any other societal taboo.
Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect vision.
There are no blind soldiers in the army yet all Army digital communications are required to conform to federal regulations that accounts for accessibility. The result is higher quality products with greater availability.
Usually the best argument opposing accessibility is that the authors/developers don’t know what they are doing. When they say accessibility is too expensive that’s what they really mean, and it’s not a good argument.