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Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

jacobbartlett.substack.com

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Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

#51

Post by jnovek »

nsxwolf wrote: post #35
jnovek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who uses accessibility features on his devices, this attitude is why we depend on regulation to ensure that we (disabled people) can do stuff. No company implements accessibility features out of the kindness of their heart.

If I'm putting out a free app as a single developer, I don't have the time or money to do everything. If it becomes popular, I can use metrics to improve the accessibility situation. If government regulations are going to insist I have to put that investment in day 1, I'll just take up badminton or something.

I mean, isn't that kind of a false dichotomy, though? There's plenty of middle ground between "no required support" and "must fully support on day one".

For example, the ADA doesn't require employers to accommodate disability needs until a business has 15 employees.

Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

#52

Post by jtriangle »

jnovek wrote: post #30
jtriangle wrote: post #18

>1 in 6 people think your app is broken >16% of people have some kind of accessibility requirement 16% is 4 in 25 people, also no guarantee you'll be able to accommodate their specific accessibility requirement, depending on the app, and depending on the requirement. That's not to say the app shouldn't be accessible, more that, you should think about when you spend the money to implement things like this, and how tha…

As a person who uses accessibility features on his devices, this attitude is why we depend on regulation to ensure that we (disabled people) can do stuff. No company implements accessibility features out of the kindness of their heart.

I wouldn't say "no company", there do exist companies that are run by kind, thoughtful people. Never large companies granted, it seems the heart in something gets replaced by MBA grad nonsense past a certain size, but they very well do exist, and there's probably more of them than there are large companies that would just as soon put us all in a meat grinder if it helped their margins.

It's part of why I've really tried to stay employed with smallish businesses, because they're more human.

Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

#53

Post by seanwilson »

Nice practical article. Accessibility is really important, but one of my pet peeves is when people call developers lazy for not making apps accessible by default. There really is a lot of concepts to learn, conflicting priorities, and tools to get familiar with, on top of making the business case to do it. Most developers and designers I've worked aren't that familiar with WCAG rules either.

By the way, the blue on yellow, and blue on green buttons won't pass color contrast requirements. Black on yellow will work, and white on blue (for darker blues) will work. Finding a set of branded colors that contrast as needed is tricky too.

Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

#54

Post by jnovek »

SamBorick wrote: post #46

It's amazing how many people in this thread are seriously suggesting that these a11y features are not important. Do HN readers not understand that someday they will grow old, and their eyesight will fail, and they will find themselves increasing the font size on their devices?

This is what gets me -- almost everyone who reaches old age will eventually be disabled. Some folks just get there faster.

Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

#55

Post by serial_dev »

nsxwolf wrote: post #35
jnovek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who uses accessibility features on his devices, this attitude is why we depend on regulation to ensure that we (disabled people) can do stuff. No company implements accessibility features out of the kindness of their heart.

If I'm putting out a free app as a single developer, I don't have the time or money to do everything. If it becomes popular, I can use metrics to improve the accessibility situation. If government regulations are going to insist I have to put that investment in day 1, I'll just take up badminton or something.

I disagree with this take, most app frameworks do accessibility mostly right out of the box, it's just most developers never enabled voice over in their life, so they keep modifying the UI and messing up accessibility out of ignorance.

It's not that hard, and if every developer spent an afternoon looking into things, they'd realize how easy it is to get it right if the team is aware of it.

I'd not mind if like developers need to go through security and privacy training, they'd also go through accessibility training. A little investment would go really far.

Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

#56

Post by jtriangle »

jakey_bakey wrote: post #33
jtriangle wrote: post #18

>1 in 6 people think your app is broken >16% of people have some kind of accessibility requirement 16% is 4 in 25 people, also no guarantee you'll be able to accommodate their specific accessibility requirement, depending on the app, and depending on the requirement. That's not to say the app shouldn't be accessible, more that, you should think about when you spend the money to implement things like this, and how tha…

I hope that this article can do some small work in changing that perception! My apologies for the math inaccuracy is in the mail.

I think that pointing out there are easy (read: cheap) ways of baking in accessibility is a valuable thing Jacob, and, there's certainly wisdom in baking some of that in as part of your development process. Nothing's worse than pushing something into alpha for QA and immediately having it tossed back to the dev team because they have to rework something obvious. Big morale hit all around.

I wasn't really trying for pedantry, but, if the check's in the mail, thanks for 0.666% of a coffee ;)

Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

#57

Post by sircastor »

For the last 12 years of his life, my father was in an electric wheelchair as a result of a stroke. Prior to that, I was vaguely aware of ADA compliance - basically because there were posted signs everywhere about parking spaces and restroom stalls.

It was only after seeing the ease with which he could navigate the world in spite of his chair that I appreciated how important that law was, because I also saw so many things that he wasn't able to do even though there was a law. Our entire world is built around and for people who see, hear, speak, walk, climb, and crawl.

As developers, I would say we're second only (maybe) to government in the ability to make the world accessible. I'm as guilty as anybody at this. Please make the effort to make your work as accessible as possible to everyone.

Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

#58

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

edent wrote: post #49
nsxwolf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm putting out a free app as a single developer, I don't have the time or money to do everything. If it becomes popular, I can use metrics to improve the accessibility situation. If government regulations are going to insist I have to put that investment in day 1, I'll just take up badminton or something.

[flagged]

Bad analogy.

Preparing food unhygienically is bad for everyone at the picnic.

A more appropriate analogy is disallowing watermelon at the picnic because one person can't eat watermelon.

> Please go play badminton.

Love the irony of including this comment in a post about making your app inclusive

Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility

#59

Post by at_a_remove »

bee_rider wrote: post #37
zooq_ai wrote: post #23

Your App is successful because you didn't spend time on useless things like a11y, i18n during the p-m-f stage. If you look at every successful product in history, they didn't focus on a11y or i18n right from the bat. Now, that it is successful, you can think about it and spend resources.

It seems like quite an indictment of the tech sector to say that success happens because accessibility is ignored.

I think it is safer to say that accessibility is an one of many edge cases. Not important ... until it suddenly is.

I had many tricks to "sell" accessibility to the various clients and one of them was "What percentage of your potential users would you like to immediately piss off?" "How comfortable are you with random lawsuits? [Then you have to talk about the Target lawsuit]"

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