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0 pointslopkeny12ko3y ago0 comments

Accessibility is not a critical business function the same way running Twitter's datacenters is a critical business function.

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.

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onion2k3y ago

When I added a similar feature to an app a few years ago I found about 5% of users selected the high contrast theme. Our UX person talked to users and found loads of people using crappy old corporate LCD monitors that should have gone in the bin years ago found it really useful.

The moral of the story is that users who don't need a feature will still use it.

miki1232113y ago

This is how accommodations work, and have always worked.

From what I've heard from people in the industry, apparently a significant portion of users consuming audio described movies and TV shows, originally aimed at blind people, are truck drivers who have to look at the road, not the screen.

Audiobooks and OCR technology, also originally developed with the blind in mind, are now used by many fully-abled people in their lives.

Closed captions, originally intended for the hearing-impaired, are now a staple of many bars, where the chatter is so loud that nobody can hear the TV.

There are many more examples.

TheNewsIsHere3y ago

A few months back I enabled some high contrast and white point settings on my iPhone.

I’m not visually impaired, but the UI is just so much better now. It’s made me stop and fiddle with the accessibility settings in other things too.

kaba03y ago

Preventing all the lawsuits that might result from bad accessibility seems like quite a business critical feature to me.

CodeAndCuffs3y ago

Circa 2017 when IE8 compatibility was still a thing, I saw a metric that said more people use screen readers and/or have poor enough vision to need some sort of UI accomodation than there were IE8 users

Some very brief googling suggests about 3% of Americans are visually disabled. Having a team ensure your product is available to an extra 3% of people seems like a potentially reasonable investment.

slenk3y ago

If accessibility isn't a critical function I would say your business needs to think over some priorities.

It's ok to just make the platform inaccessible for a large number of people?

pjbeam3y ago

Ask your business counsel if accessibility is important.

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