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Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

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Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#111

Post by fzeroracer »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #58
izacus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh... Why?

Because Twitter as-is is a finished product. There's no immediate need to review accessibility issues since there are no new product features/updates for the foreseeable future. Musk froze everything. So what were those people supposed to do? Nothing? Might as well let them move on to new jobs.

> There's no immediate need to review accessibility issues since there are no new product features/updates for the foreseeable future

Really? You were on the team then? I assume you found out that they had an entirely empty Jira backlog and no more accessibility updates to do on main, so they were let go?

I appreciate your insight, former Twitter employee. What else can you tell us about how your job went?

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#112

Post by kaba0 »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #64
culi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhh I don't consider making an app accessible to be contributing to the problem of a "bloated headcount". Maybe the team itself had too many people on it, but to axe the entire team is pretty disgusting and shows a complete disregard for an entire class of people's needs

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 t…

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

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#114

Post by kaba0 »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #58
izacus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh... Why?

Because Twitter as-is is a finished product. There's no immediate need to review accessibility issues since there are no new product features/updates for the foreseeable future. Musk froze everything. So what were those people supposed to do? Nothing? Might as well let them move on to new jobs.

Yeah we all know big applications work like that and will get finished sometime. Like google search which definitely didn’t change since its first iteration, it does the same doesn’t it?

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#115

Post by kaba0 »

adam_arthur wrote: post #37
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not for "free speech" that costs $8/month.

Before it was that private companies could do whatever they wanted, now many trying to impose their will on Twitter’s actions all of a sudden. Huh

Private companies explicitly shouldn’t do whatever they want at all. They don’t even get to decide totally whom to serve, as doing so against a protected class will quickly lead to a really bad outcome for the company.

And that’s a good thing. It is frankly ridiculous that private companies get to decide the public opinion by tweaking their algorithms, it should be managed in a similar way how we don’t allow food companies to put cocaine into their products.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#116

Post by kaba0 »

decremental wrote: post #39
_djo_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I said diminishing accessibility and slowly cutting off disabled users. This obviously isn't going to happen immediately, but every new feature will be less accessible and maybe even not provide accommodations entirely.

Possibly true but I would imagine the team created an internal Bible of all accessibility requirements and that all of that information wasn't siloed in the heads of each employee in that department.

insert another top HN post where Twitter already begs fired engineers to come back

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#117

Post by whoIsYou »

sudosysgen wrote: post #55
fullsend wrote: post #14

The extreme and somehow flowery language in all these posts from Twitter engineers is so indicative to me of some kind of delusional rot. “My team worked SO hard every single day to Change The World, the smartest people on the planet Earth, the greatest engineers ever to touch a keyboard, no one has our scale, no one has our problems.” So caught up in their own bullshit that they are like fat, happy hens who don’t se…

This is ridiculous. This is clearly a manager trying his best to soften the blow to his team after they were just fired by talking up their work and impact.

I think OP's point was that clearly there is a disconnect between what people at Twitter are/were saying/thinking, and reality. Unfortunately, when your words or ideas come into conflict with reality, it is rarely reality that is wrong

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?

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#118

Post by kaba0 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #94
deadbunny wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm sure it'll stay on that unvisited Confluence page for a year or so till some doing some cleanup goes "A11y team? They left agees ago." and deletes it.

It's actually much cheaper to buy more disk drives than to pay somebody to delete files.

That “not-updated in years” confluence page that lists more incorrect things now than correct ones is frankly, useless.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#119

Post by [deleted] »

jimt1234 wrote: post #30
superb-owl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a11y is no more a "nice to have" than a wheelchair ramp. It's a legal and moral requirement. This is like saying security is "nice to have"

I've worked in security for years. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that (security is a nice-to-have), either directly or implied, I could retire. LOL

[deleted]

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#120

Post by koshergweilo »

culi wrote: post #66
koshergweilo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessibility mostly means that the intended experience is preserved if you need to use tools like screen readers. Accessibility != User Friendly

> Accessibility != User Friendly 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

I agree, but that doesn't extend to top level stuff like gating content behind logins. That's kinda what I was trying to say.
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