Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no moral requirements
Certainly not for "free speech" that costs $8/month.
"Anyone can get it for $8/month" is a lot closer to free speech ideals than "You can get it if you're lefty enough".
Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
71–80 of 159 posts
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#72I 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
how about "we believe so much in a11y being everyone's job, and a legal requirement of doing your job, that we didnt want engineers pawning off that essential task to a dedicated a11y team?"
obviously not true but theres a few ways to slice this news.
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
We all hate to see people losing their jobs, but it's been known for a very long time that Twitter had an extremely bloated headcount. I'm not at all surprised that something called the "Accessibility Experience Team" was one of the first groups to get cut.
And when a high profile app isn't accessible by legal standards, it'll be the easiest money for a competent lawyer to make.
I don't think Twitter is worrying about that right now.
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
how about "we believe so much in a11y being everyone's job, and a legal requirement of doing your job, that we didnt want engineers pawning off that essential task to a dedicated a11y team?" obviously not true but theres a few ways to slice this news.
That's like saying we shouldn't have a security team because being keen on security concerns should be an expectation of every dev. Of course this is true to an extent, but obviously there's a whole field of specialization that would be unrealistic to expect of every single dev to have. Same business with a11y
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Accessibility shouldn't be a separate team. It should be a consideration for all product development. Teams generally don't have expertise in all areas, which is why cross-functional teams with deep experience in a specific area can be a great way to organize resources. This is why design teams, performance teams, security teams, etc. exist.
This may also have been the case with localization and translations. At a certain scale the problem is solved and tooling is put in place. Now on the project I work on, we have a process for creating translation templates that get populated for other languages. But it's everyone's responsibility for using the template mechanisms put in place. The same arguments are valid for performance and security. They shouldn't b…
Sure, developers should be mindful of all of these things. But if one person or team spends a lot of effort creating solid internal tools, and then they all get fired, you’ve lost a very significant amount of internal knowledge. Then who maintains the tools and updates them as the product changes? Or as industry best practices improve, as is often the case with security?
If you get to the point of having a performance or security team, you realize your org is big enough you need a couple people focusing on it full time (and their role is often helping other developers implement best practices.) By ditching them, you’re acknowledging literally that you’d like to focus less on that area in the future. As a result, product teams will do their best, but it’s impossible for every dev to be up to date on every best practice for every topic in web development. So you won’t do as well.
Maybe that’s ok as a small startup, but when your audience is incredibly large and you operate at scale, it’s not reasonable to have subpar security, performance, accessibility, etc. If you are subpar in these areas, you loose money because your audience is large enough that many are impacted.
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> Huh Before you let that cynicism build up too much, for the record, not all of us Elon+Twitter skeptics have a problem with the $8 thing. You're just not going to hear from any one who didn't have an issue with it. Related: Is there a quippy term or a fallacy for the (very natural!) habit of treating a random sample of a million voices and expecting a coherent message from them? I feel like it's related but distinc…
"Weak man" is when you take a genuine-but-weak take from one of your opponents and treat them as representing your opposition in general. (That's not quite what you're asking for though, I think)
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#77> Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go A8y "A11y" s4s f1r accesibility. (Apparently "A11y" stands for accesibility). "Twitter is better in the app" is not a sign of "accesibility". Sign in is not a sign of "accesibility".
Accessibility mostly means that the intended experience is preserved if you need to use tools like screen readers. Accessibility != User Friendly
This isn't really true. There are three common "accessibility tools" that most apps aim for;
- alt text on images which is helpful for blind people (but also helpful for search and ML image categorisation)
- keyboard navigation which is helpful for users with motor problems (also helpful for power users)
- responsive design, which is very helpful for screen readers because it controls information flow (also helpful for users on devices that don't have the specific viewport specs that the designer aimed for)
Literally every accessibility feature you can name is like this - they all improve accessibility for disabled users and make things better for everyone else. Throwing out accessibility doesn't just hurt a minority of users who needed those features. It hurts everyone.
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#78I mean if I need to lower costs ASAP, nice to haves like A11y would be the first to get cut.
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"
So you're saying it's a nice to have? /s
For all its pretense of wanting to be the Town Square, somehow I don't expect it to be a very inclusive one. Getting rid of a11y team is exactly what I would expect, crisis or not.
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#79Earlier 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.
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.
Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
#80Don’t lots of companies do layoffs? Why don’t they all get this much attention? Surely messy layoffs aren’t uncommon.
Their new owner creates this type of media attention. Second, layoff because of economic conditions is different than radical business moves by their new owner. I an looking forward to see the outcome.