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

This is a very common attitude; part of why I wrote this article was to demonstrate how easy it is to do the bare minimum!

You have one backend and two frontends, one of which is simplified and all-about-the-data. I daresay there's the possibility that it's easier to create two websites than it is to make one website do two things.

I had some big life events bring a lot of this to my attention this year. I've always cared about accessibility, but never had to deal with it personally before[0]. Luckily I'm not in charge of anything that has real impact here. There are just so many little things that you might think are actually helpful but aren't. This can be something like the slope of a ramp, making it essentially useless for a wheelchair. You can tell that this was made by someone who referenced a manual which was created by some bureaucrat and there was probably no actual handicapped person involved. Or similarly gaps on the subway, she'd have to roll herself, get stuck, and wait for someone to help. OR because she _can_ walk, get out of her wheel chair, push it over the gap, and then sit back down, with everyone looking at her thinking she's a fraud. There's no winning. Sometimes to get to elevators we have to walk/roll past several flights of stairs...

Even a lot of phone UXs. The one that really infuriates me is when apps still zoom by sliding your finger up and down on the screen. It sucks as a normal person, it's impossible as a disabled person.

But the things we've noticed, is that essentially the things she struggles with are no different than what older people struggle with. Reduced grip, reduced hand mobility, getting tired more easily, difficulties walking, etc. She's still recovering and we're hopeful she'll keep increasing mobility, but it still gave us insight we'd never have seen without it.

Here's the thing, the world is just fucking complex and nuanced. We're never upset when we hit a piece of friction where we can tell someone was thinking but that the implementation was just incorrect, or where environments disrupt the implementation, or just when things are difficult to accommodate. I have a very "fit it" mindset (and used to be a traditional engineer, so do try to too).[1]

And here's the thing we've also found. Anything that helps us helps the elderly. Anything that helps us ALSO HELPS NORMAL PEOPLE. Most of the issues -- and certainly the most difficult to overcome -- look like they were implemented that way to save a few cents or because they were just rushing. Move fast and break things is a great strategy for getting to learn how something works and get prototypes, but it is not a good strategy for even moderately mature products. So move fast, break things, but make sure you come back and clean up and fix things. It is easy to push off because you're trying to get to the next thing, but I promise you that actually going back and fixing things will make your whole product develop faster. Think about how much of your time is spent rewriting your coworkers' code, or fixing things that should have never been done, or hacking around things (compounding the issue) because you can't directly access the thing you need. A significant amount of this is also reduced. Having a different mentality is needed to think about accessibility but if you focus on thinking deeply and about nuances of issues you'll automatically capture a lot of things that help disabled people too! e.g. the gap in the rail can be motivated for many reasons: things falling in between, people pushing strollers over, rolling bags, etc. If you had thought clearly about any of these issues you would have also helped the person in the wheelchair without having ever thought about them. Making an app more usable for the visually impaired helps normal people see from farther away, when they're sleepy, or hell, even drunk. So you don't need to spend hours thinking about every single possible disability, just think about the nuance of things and think about your tech illiterate family members. If you remember how complex the world is and just keep that in mind (you don't have to address everything!) you will be going above and beyond. The bar is low.

[0] Long story short, my partner had some amputations (we're only a tad over 30) because of a freak accident. Lost a thumb and partial movement in that index finger. Also has foot damage and so walking is hard. But other than that, she looks absolutely normal and strangely, this is problematic. She's been shoved by old people when she's trying to sit on the subway because they think she's just being a lazy young person. Or just realizing how many stairs there are... especially outside the US.

[1] On the other hand, we also get very excited when we see well implemented things. And the joy we get to see how people thought things through, even if it is something that is more helpful to disabilities we (she) doesn't face. Disabled people are well aware that the world isn't made for them, and most people aren't expecting the world to bend to fit them, but of course every person is frustrated when they experience unique frictions (especially when you're going through the shock of change).

Look, accessibility* is great and important to many people, and if you can afford to prioritize it early on in your product development, that's great - but it is not productive to treat commercial products like critical infrastructure, ignore the costs of implementing accessibility features (common tooling and standardization make it much easier, thankfully), and exaggerate the benefits.

The article starts off with the over-cited and misunderstood 1/6 figure, which comes from the WHO's claim that 1/6 of the world suffers from a "significant disability". I couldn't find a breakdown of what the WHO considers a significant disability in the first place, but the CDC in the US lists the following six disability categories in one of its studies: hearing, vision, cognitive, mobility, self-care, and independent living. How many of these are actually relevant in software? I have never once heard calls to make software more accessible to people with cognitive disabilities, and mobility/self-care/independent living categories are simply irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of software use cases. So no, you're not growing your audience by 1/6 by implementing screen-reader support for your website. If your product is growing, you're better off focusing on internationalization (which, technically, is a form of accessibility, but obviously not the subject of the article).

* Do we really need to abbreviate "accessibility" everywhere? It's just nine more characters than "a11y" and - speaking of accessibility - is more readable!

Speaking of curb cuts, recently in my town, they ripped up the sidewalks with already existing curb cuts, and added a new yellow pad with raised bumps in addition to new curbs (with the cuts). I was going to ask what this was for, but a quick search indicates that it is likely for blind users to feel the end of the sidewalk with a cane.

https://www.simplemost.com/sidewalk-bumps/?utm_partner=gray_...