You can't be the public square if a significant fraction of people are excluded.
I work at $LARGE_CORPORATION and our product a11y team's most recent major ship was a new palette of colors with improved contrast ratios. A UI change that makes the site easier to read for < 1% of users does not contribute meaningfully to incremental revenue. If I were Musk I would have cut this team too.
A8y "A11y" s4s f1r accesibility. (Apparently "A11y" stands for accesibility). "Twitter is better in the app" is not a sign of "accesibility". Sign in is not a sign of "accesibility".
- alt text on images which is helpful for blind people (but also helpful for search and ML image categorisation)
- keyboard navigation which is helpful for users with motor problems (also helpful for power users)
- responsive design, which is very helpful for screen readers because it controls information flow (also helpful for users on devices that don't have the specific viewport specs that the designer aimed for)
Literally every accessibility feature you can name is like this - they all improve accessibility for disabled users and make things better for everyone else. Throwing out accessibility doesn't just hurt a minority of users who needed those features. It hurts everyone.
Doesn’t apply to accessibility except in the sense that widgets must be operable 1) by sighted persons using the keyboard, and by non-sighted persons 2) using screen reader shortcuts or 3) accessibility devices such as game controllers or sip-and-puff controls mapped to those shortcuts.
No but many studies have shown that designs (in architecture as well as web and print design) that focus on accessibility are rated as having better UX by the general populace as well
Cutting a11y likely will also lead to a decline in UX in general
This has been a common term since a few decades ago. No need to be snarky if you don't understand something.
If you are into making software for something more than just the naive "one market" your first introduction would be internationalization which should be the most widespread. When you make things for government in the EU/US you will most probably have laws demanding accessibility features. The problem isn't the numeronym but that so few people care about accessibility.
Tbh a11y is the main one that makes sense. I don't get what the point of i18n and l10n acronyms is besides saving us some typing and generally fitting into the vague category of "giving a crap about users often not considered in design"
It’s also the reason why Arabic text can be output on the screen, Ruby characters can be used and screen mirroring is usable for UIs that need RTL layouts. You really should look it up before criticising it.
It deals with things as small and as important as date formats, number seperators, punctuation marks, monetary formats, support for different calendar systems, capitalisation rules… you name it, it encompasses it.
It’s a genuine discipline. It’s used extensively in Windows, Mozilla and LibreOffice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...
The point was that having a landing page that goes to a Sign Up option before showing all the content is not necessarily an accessibility issue, it's a decision made to drive sign ups and therefore revenue and it's not something the a11y team would've been in charge of. Blind people can still navigate the page provided the components are accessible in the same way sighted users can.
People get upset about government regulation forcing companies to take accessibility seriously but then people like you come around to prove exactly why that kind of regulation is necessary.
I'd like to live in a world where it wasn't but comments like these make it abundantly clear that we're nowhere close to that world
> People get upset about government regulation forcing companies to take accessibility seriously but then people like you come around to prove exactly why that kind of regulation is necessary.
You can still have accessibility without having a whole dedicated team for it
> I'd like to live in a world where it wasn't but comments like these make it abundantly clear that we're nowhere close to that world
I meant it as having a dedicated accessibility the team not just going to Twitter and removing all accessibility settings.
obviously not true but theres a few ways to slice this news.
That's aside from the cruelty of diminishing accessibility on a major social platform, slowly cutting off disabled users, despite its cost likely being a rounding error in the greater scheme of things.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahkim/2019/11/29/harvard-uni...
"In the United States alone, approximately 50 million people are considered deaf or hard of hearing. The failure to provide appropriate accommodations to this community is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973."
This is like saying security is "nice to have"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497445
And firing the A11y team doesn't immediately remove all accessibility from Twitter, they are forced by US law to follow accessibility standards and they would, they just won't do higher than what's required.
For all its pretense of wanting to be the Town Square, somehow I don't expect it to be a very inclusive one. Getting rid of a11y team is exactly what I would expect, crisis or not.
Accessibility on Quantbase is abysmal. Maybe bring that up before telling others how to handle it on their stuff?
Score of 53 out of 100 with 4 critical issues, knocking it out of compliance.
https://www.accessibilitychecker.org/audit/?website=https%3A...
Maybe the team was just sh*t and expensive. They get rid of them, so they can hire better people at a better price. Which make a lot of sense now that many tech companies have big layoffs.
If people are safe whether employed or not then by all means fire at will. It's rude but not morally bankrupt in that case.
I think every headline about layoffs and restructurings and companies shutting down are proof that some people do in fact get to fire whoever they want whenever they want.
Teams generally don't have expertise in all areas, which is why cross-functional teams with deep experience in a specific area can be a great way to organize resources. This is why design teams, performance teams, security teams, etc. exist.
The same arguments are valid for performance and security. They shouldn't be added after product development.
If you get to the point of having a performance or security team, you realize your org is big enough you need a couple people focusing on it full time (and their role is often helping other developers implement best practices.) By ditching them, you’re acknowledging literally that you’d like to focus less on that area in the future. As a result, product teams will do their best, but it’s impossible for every dev to be up to date on every best practice for every topic in web development. So you won’t do as well.
Maybe that’s ok as a small startup, but when your audience is incredibly large and you operate at scale, it’s not reasonable to have subpar security, performance, accessibility, etc. If you are subpar in these areas, you loose money because your audience is large enough that many are impacted.
Let's be honest, Twitter has underperformed for a long time. It has been openly known as the rest and vest place. This type of flowery nonsense would be difficult to believe about the better half of their engineers, much less the bottom half that was let go
I saw one thread where people who were one day posting #lovewhereyouwork got fired the next day after working over the weekend for a project Musk announced by email on a Saturday. It’s like they couldn’t imagine that a flippant billionaire was working them and slaughtering them like sheep. So used to a corporation that coddled them, that they walked into it smiling. I don’t use terms like bullshit hatefully…I think it is bullshit. Smart and well intentioned people, but sort of delusional nonetheless. Talking about missing time with family because, “I get to solve problems at scale no one else does.” Companies are not families, what you are doing is not always important. I think calling each other “Tweeps” is an example of this. You forgot that when the easy money party stops they will treat you like what you are to them, a line item.
For example, if someone were cut from a sports team and the coach went and talked about how good that person was, and how hard they worked. Well it raises the obvious question, if they were so good and did work so hard, why did they get cut? And why does everyone get so upset when people ask the obvious question?
Cutting an entire team is a pretty good way to say "not at all important".
For some things there are very low hanging fruit. Having at least one expert review a new feature in a screen reader can be the difference of not at all usable to mostly usable with just a few minor tweaks. Not having this at all, sends a message about priorities and the new shape of twitter and what the company values
a) Twitter was acquired only a few days before the layoffs
b) the previous CEO indicated no intention of laying off staff
c) the large percentage of the work force laid off (~50%?)
d) the new owner who ordered the layoffs is the richest person alive (at least in terms of publicly known wealth)
e) the layoffs were foretold in a novel way (via Tweet), prior to the acquisition
f) political tension underlying the layoffs, with some blaming Twitter’s moderation policies on the company’s employees, and some seeing the layoffs as a pivot point in Twitter’s cultural identity rather than the typical motivation for a layoff which is a financial decision
So it does feel different to me.
Similarly, the reaction to the layoffs seems different with many here on HN and elsewhere making various comments about the employees, their ideological bent, their work ethic, etc.
Whereas in other layoffs it seems like more focus in put on the management decisions or macro economic factors that put the company in a position where layoffs were necessary, and the employees are viewed more as getting caught up in the mix.
See also: i18n.
