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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

#81

Post by onion2k »

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…

When I added a similar feature to an app a few years ago I found about 5% of users selected the high contrast theme. Our UX person talked to users and found loads of people using crappy old corporate LCD monitors that should have gone in the bin years ago found it really useful.

The moral of the story is that users who don't need a feature will still use it.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#82

Post by V__ »

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…

The disconnect between what was actually written and what you think was being said is astonishing.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#83

Post by dragonwriter »

adam_arthur wrote: post #65
dragonwriter wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before it was that private companies could do whatever they wanted, No, it was that “free speech” means private actors are free to make decisions about what content to relay. Not that everything they choose on that (or any other) is equally good, nor that they shouldn’t be punished in the marketplace (not by the state) for their bad choices.

Yup That’s why in a free marketplace, Elon asserted his free speech to take over Twitter due to their perceived poor management. Maybe if they had managed more equitably, none of this would have happened. But the market giveth and the market taketh

> That’s why in a free marketplace, Elon asserted his free speech to take over Twitter due to their perceived poor management.

That’s not really accurate. Twitter’s management took Elon to court to force him to take over so the stockholders they worked for could reap thr windfall ofnthe premium price he regretted offering and tried to tun away from.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#84

Post by pasttense01 »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #44
superb-owl wrote: post #27

This is a real bummer. An app with as wide and diverse a user base as Twitter needs to take accessibility seriously. You can't be the public square if a significant fraction of people are excluded.

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.

But even if we were getting rid of that Team what most of here would have done would be to move the best software engineers in that Team to other groups rather than fire them.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#85

Post by awb »

bilsbie wrote: post #61

Don’t lots of companies do layoffs? Why don’t they all get this much attention? Surely messy layoffs aren’t uncommon.

Those layoffs do get attention, but I think Twitter’s gets more because:

a) Twitter was acquired only a few days before the layoffs

b) the previous CEO indicated no intention of laying off staff

c) the large percentage of the work force laid off (~50%?)

d) the new owner who ordered the layoffs is the richest person alive (at least in terms of publicly known wealth)

e) the layoffs were foretold in a novel way (via Tweet), prior to the acquisition

f) political tension underlying the layoffs, with some blaming Twitter’s moderation policies on the company’s employees, and some seeing the layoffs as a pivot point in Twitter’s cultural identity rather than the typical motivation for a layoff which is a financial decision

So it does feel different to me.

Similarly, the reaction to the layoffs seems different with many here on HN and elsewhere making various comments about the employees, their ideological bent, their work ethic, etc.

Whereas in other layoffs it seems like more focus in put on the management decisions or macro economic factors that put the company in a position where layoffs were necessary, and the employees are viewed more as getting caught up in the mix.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#86

Post by ryanschneider »

culi wrote: post #70
chris_wot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually is the commonly accepted industry term. Like i18n and l10n

Haven't heard l10n. If anyone else is wondering, that's localization. Tbh a11y is the main one that makes sense. I don't get what the point of i18n and l10n acronyms is besides saving us some typing and generally fitting into the vague category of "giving a crap about users often not considered in design"

My possibly apocryphal understanding is that i18n and l10n both arose due to differences in American and British spellings of both words (z or s in the suffix). Simplifying “localization/localisation” to l10n saves more than 8 characters it saves 19.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#87

Post by s1artibartfast »

kjeetgill wrote: post #46
adam_arthur wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

Perhaps a miss-atribution error

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#88

Post by Nullabillity »

coffeeblack wrote: post #63

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.

That's not how civilized societies work. You don't just get to fire whoever you want whenever you want.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#89

Post by eurasiantiger »

onion2k wrote: post #77
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

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 f…

>keyboard navigation

Doesn’t apply to accessibility except in the sense that widgets must be operable 1) by sighted persons using the keyboard, and by non-sighted persons 2) using screen reader shortcuts or 3) accessibility devices such as game controllers or sip-and-puff controls mapped to those shortcuts.

Re: Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

#90

Post by Lutger »

lmm wrote: post #71
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

If you think the bannable offenses on Twitter only gave enough room for the left, you are not just to the right of that, but more like far right extremism. Twitter did and does, in fact, tolerate right-wing and conservative views. It is full of them.

Don't mistake hate speech, disinfo, racism or whatever you think twitter was violating 'free speech' for as being the right wing. It is not.

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