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

I used to bring up accessibility concerns quite a lot on HN. I have stopped however, because it is always the same story. It doesn't seem to matter how nice I am about it, or how accommodating I am towards people just hacking. I never want to stop people's creative spirit. Ever. But I'm one of those people who uses a screen reader. If your app does not work with them, it will not work for me. The amount of weirdly hostile responses I get really puts me off commenting here, so I just don't do it anymore. That doesn't make the issue go away, but it also just does not help. This isn't entirely unique to HN. It is very easy to dismiss accessibility concerns if you're not affected by them, or don't have anyone close that is. I try not to take it personally, but when many people chime in with comments like it's OK that you can't use this app, you're a minority, your burdens aren't anybody elses, and don't listen to them and go make a cool thing without regard, (not an exaggeration it's all in my comment history) it's a bit hard not to be put off by it. If I was able to change one or two minds with my little comments, then I'm very happy about that because maybe it means I get to use your next cool app too. I'm just not going to look for it here, and if I find an accessibility flaw, HN will definitely not be where I comment about it. I've gotten some genuinely good responses too. Some of you also tried to defend my point of view. Like Sam. And I'm very grateful for that. Sadly it's the same fight every single time, and I'm a little bit exhausted by it.

I do my best to make all of my apps at least vision-impaired accessible.

The last app, I figured a way to make that easier to manage, and reward use by non-disabled folks.

I have a long-press help feature. If you long-press on any element in the UI, up pops a popover, with a header, and body text, pointing at the element. The popover explains that element.

It's fairly easy to have a long-press gesture recognizer applied to the main view, and dynamically figure out which element was hit. I then look for the accessibility items. If they are there, I do the popover.

I use the accessibilityLabel for the header, and the accessibilityHint for the text. It works extremely well, and no one has ever had it pop up when they weren't specifically trying for it.

Almost nobody is suggesting this and you can reply to whoever you think is wrong about something. It says 'sneer' in this thing but those are the values of 'sneer' that include 'harangue':

Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fun fact: it's far more than 16% because people tend to forget the two super most obvious accessibility requirements: being able to read text, and being able to interact with elements. About half of the planet has a visual disability that's bad enough to require a corrective medical device, and over 10% of the planet is just plain old. Tiny UI elements and small text are easily overlooked, huge problems.

I've worked for a couple of large corporations who were sued for accessibility issues.

This was about 5-6 years ago though and I was told back then that there was a number of people who are deliberately scouring the internet for websites with accessibility issues so they can sue them for not complying with US accessibility laws. These lawsuits I believe can be fairly costly for large organisations – I know I was given numbers in the millions, but I was on the technical team so I can't say for sure whether that number is accurate.

In one of the cases I was involved with we were given a period of time to take remedial action to make our site accessible otherwise we could face additional fines. I'd assume if you have a reasonable excuse that the penalties and remediation period would be more lenient.

I'll also add I'm from the UK, but our websites served US customers and our lawsuits came from the US. I believe the UK has similar accessibility laws, but I guess we don't have the same culture of suing businesses.