151–159 of 159 posts
I mean if I need to lower costs ASAP, nice to haves like A11y would be the first to get cut.
saying a11y is a nice-to-have is like saying Unicode is a nice-to-have. if you cut Unicode support, the only thing you'll personally notice is lack of emojis, but Chinese/Hindi/Russian speakers won't be able to use it at all, without resorting to Pinyin or something.
I mean if I need to lower costs ASAP, nice to haves like A11y would be the first to get cut.
> nice to haves like A11y People get upset about government regulation forcing companies to take accessibility seriously but then people like you come around to prove exactly why that kind of regulation is necessary. I'd like to live in a world where it wasn't but comments like these make it abundantly clear that we're nowhere close to that world
> People get upset about government regulation forcing companies to take accessibility seriously but then people like you come around to prove exactly why that kind of regulation is necessary.
You can still have accessibility without having a whole dedicated team for it
> I'd like to live in a world where it wasn't but comments like these make it abundantly clear that we're nowhere close to that world
I meant it as having a dedicated accessibility the team not just going to Twitter and removing all accessibility settings.
Would be great if everybody could be a little less hysterical. Maybe the team was just sh*t and expensive. They get rid of them, so they can hire better people at a better price. Which make a lot of sense now that many tech companies have big layoffs.
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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…
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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…
It's ok to just make the platform inaccessible for a large number of people?
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There are many philosophers who disagree with Kant's categorical imperative though – even among those who agree that ethics is objective (in some sense). The categorical imperative gives morality a deontological flavour, to which many will object–such as consequentialists. And there are others who don't object to the deontological flavour per se , but who think there are better foundations for such a morality (e.g. n…
It was a somewhat rushed point, admittedly. I was reaching for enlightenment-era imagery to challenge the seeming disavowal of morality itself. I note that OP extended those remarks elsewhere to claim that the law is the preferred source of moral constraint. I'm not even sure of what to say to that. But I very much appreciate the depth of your point. I've always found validation (?) in the deontological aspect of Kan…
It is interesting you bring up that example, because it connects with the moral universalism vs moral particularism debate: moral universalists argue that an essential component of a valid ethical principle is it must be universal in scope (equally applicable to everyone at all times), even though it may still produce quite different outcomes when applied to differing situations. Particularists claim by contrast that one can have moral obligations which are non-universal in character - I owe special obligations to my children because they are mine, beyond those which I owe to children-in-general. Moral universalists have to either deny the existence of such particular obligations, or else insist that they are ultimately universal rather than particular in character. Anyway, the categorical imperative is a classic statement of moral universalism, yet you are invoking one of the favourite examples of moral particularists to support it.
Personally, I think the best way to defend the objectivity of morality is the “companions in the guilt” argument - for every argument that is put forward against the objectivity of morality, there is a closely parallel argument against the objectivity of (theoretical) rationality. If that’s true, then how is it not special pleading to grant objectivity to one yet deny it to the other?
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Not the ADA specifically, but American courts have generally held that large commercial websites do need to be accessible in terms of the ADA. That's aside from the cruelty of diminishing accessibility on a major social platform, slowly cutting off disabled users, despite its cost likely being a rounding error in the greater scheme of things.
There was a court case in recent memory mandating that universities caption any video they publish. It was specifically relying on the ADA. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahkim/2019/11/29/harvard-uni... "In the United States alone, approximately 50 million people are considered deaf or hard of hearing. The failure to provide appropriate accommodations to this community is a violation of the Americans with Disabiliti…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856
The spirit of the law is good, but sometimes it just means that we lose "good enough" in pursuit of "perfect".
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Pass single payer healthcare so that being fired isn't a potentially life or death scenario and there may be some merit to your comment. If people are safe whether employed or not then by all means fire at will. It's rude but not morally bankrupt in that case.
Life happens. And no being fired is not life and death scenario. If you want healthcare you need to find other work. If you can’t find other work then move to other places. If you can’t move to other places then you need to question what made you got into this hole of dependence to your employer from the first place. If you are skillfull and bring value to your employer why would the fire you and why would other empl…
Most places at least require a hefty sum of rent up front to even get in somewhere else.
Then if you don't have a job, at least in the US, they recommend you get COBRA, so you don't have any gaps in your health insurance record. Because they decided that was bad. And COBRA is _expensive_. Again, not something you can afford if you are living paycheck to paycheck.