Thoughtless design is everywhere. My company uses Discord for comms and I’m active in several Discord communities, but my vision impaired co-worker isn’t. Not because of a lack of want, but because Discord has been coasting on accessible design for years. https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/4tn00z/when_wil... Everything takes more resources than we expect, but surely a theme for their client (we do have some proof that it is theme-able) that is friendlier for screen readers shouldn’t take more time than an entire games store?
For me, the big takeaway from this article and companies like Discord is that people just don’t seem to care. And that’s often the status quo until an Apple comes along. We forget this, but back before the resurgence of Apple design was an afterthought, not a forethought even though there were obvious gains to be had and a better future to lead towards. But the vast majority of companies avoided the obvious win until Apple’s stock price shocked them into caring.
A significant fraction of everyone’s user base (including the core users) would benefit from accessible and thoughtful design, because like the article says, we’re all disabled sometimes. Now, we just need to figure out which company will have to show the world how to do it.
The dismal accessibility adoption on the web is horrendous, but working for a company that has to deliver accessible web apps to comply with Federal law has really opened my eyes to how terrible to ecosystem of accessibility is.
My team spends about a quarter of our time working strictly on accessibility, and we find ourselves straying from the beaten path often in order to accommodate a specific screenreader/OS combo. We run into situations all the time where we're unable to get insight from the docs because something is buried deep in the spec.
We also have to draw a line in the sand about which screenreaders to support and which ones to pass on, which pisses off clients that use screenreaders that we don't support.
Automated accessibility audit results sometimes contradict documentation around best practices, which can be frustrating.
The other thing I've learned is that developers usually hate working on accessibility issues because the screenreaders are much less intuitive to use and can really muck up your workflow if you're trying to ensure that an interface is completely accessible.
While I agree that we as a community can do better, I think that web accessibility in its current form is largely a failure because people see it as a cost that they're not interested in incurring, possibly because of the issues I've listed above.
Since website frameworks like Bootstrap are a thing, would it make sense to implement accessibility guidelines at that level, so that designers/people who don't know are encouraged to use sane defaults?
Or is it too content/layout specific?
Eg: I might like to roll my own static blog, but I don't know how to ensure that it is accessible.
I think making frameworks like bootstrap accessible-by-default is a great idea, but it won't be catch-all solution. A11y needs to be a conscious part of the design/development process, just like security.
One of the things we've learned is that much of the complex, dynamic UI things one can do with frameworks like React/Angular is really, really, really hard and frustrating to make fully accessible because people never design React components that are easy to use with a keyboard.
We live in this world where the capabilities of UIs for enabled people continue to grow at the cost of accessibility for the disabled. With the shift towards frontend frameworks, the problem needs to be addressed at the markup level IMO.
Yep, back in the day when BetterDiscord was a thing we'd be making CSS and some JS to change font sizes, change the color of icons for colorblindness IIRC, things like that. Discord's staff continually acted in bad faith about it, to the point of spreading outright lies about the program being malware. Was a big post going around all the public discords, few ever just popped into the betterdiscord server to simply see how that wasn't true. Also when the server got big enough Discord refused to allow more users, so it was continually broken to everyone. Crazy how wanting to change the chat background into doritos and help people was such an evil threat to them.
If you read the original C&D they clearly did not just want to stop use of the trademark (or if they did, they certainly claimed otherwise, and got the extension should down vs renamed). It's nice that they could be convinced otherwise, but they clearly complained about the nature of the extension, not just the name.
For me, the big takeaway from this article and companies like Discord is that people just don’t seem to care. And that’s often the status quo until an Apple comes along. We forget this, but back before the resurgence of Apple design was an afterthought, not a forethought even though there were obvious gains to be had and a better future to lead towards. But the vast majority of companies avoided the obvious win until Apple’s stock price shocked them into caring.
A significant fraction of everyone’s user base (including the core users) would benefit from accessible and thoughtful design, because like the article says, we’re all disabled sometimes. Now, we just need to figure out which company will have to show the world how to do it.