I'm not necessarily a fan of your tone, seems pretty shrill.
But at Apple we were well aware that accessibility features like closed captions were often used by people with no disabilities. We would add stuff knowing that all sorts of people would find uses for it.
I can easily imagine a language tag would also be useful for filtering out a German-language gemini for instance.
This was a double edged sword however. Like with closed captions/subtitles, we knew that many people using them that had hearing issues were older and also likely had out of date glasses prescriptions.
But this didn't stop the AppleTV designers from lowering the contrast of the font by displaying it over a transparent background, lowering the font size, using Helvetica instead of an accessible font, and removing the positional text feature that indicated who was speaking. And in typical Apple style, there was no option to make the text more legible.
All of these choices were made to appease people without disability who were using the feature for whatever reason. I didn't like it.
So I guess what I'm saying is, accessibility features are good for all sorts of reasons but don't lose sight of the much, much smaller group of users who require the feature in order to use the product at all.
> I'm not necessarily a fan of your tone, seems pretty shrill.
I think it is important to be honest and upfront when we talk about accessability in software because I've seen so many times when developers and product owners dismiss it entirely. I really want to stress the point that thinking about accessebility as a niche is exclusionary and unethical.
I think about my time working at Net a Porter - UK upmarket online fashion retailer - where I brought up some accessability concerns especially around their terrible in-house captcha and it was dismissed as "they arent our target market" which is so blanetly untrue, but all stems from this myth that accessability is only for a small group of users.
> don't lose sight of the much, much smaller group of users who require the feature in order to use the product at all.
The people who need to use captions/subtitles are not a "much smaller group". I think about foreign language media, where i need the subtitles (like when I watched Dark on Netflix), or even primarily English media but has some forign language (I watched Lost recently - there's a fair bit of Korean and Arabic in that). Or even when you're watching TV around someone who's sleeping.
Everyone needs "accessability", and if you don't now, you will eventually.
But at Apple we were well aware that accessibility features like closed captions were often used by people with no disabilities. We would add stuff knowing that all sorts of people would find uses for it.
I can easily imagine a language tag would also be useful for filtering out a German-language gemini for instance.
This was a double edged sword however. Like with closed captions/subtitles, we knew that many people using them that had hearing issues were older and also likely had out of date glasses prescriptions.
But this didn't stop the AppleTV designers from lowering the contrast of the font by displaying it over a transparent background, lowering the font size, using Helvetica instead of an accessible font, and removing the positional text feature that indicated who was speaking. And in typical Apple style, there was no option to make the text more legible.
All of these choices were made to appease people without disability who were using the feature for whatever reason. I didn't like it.
So I guess what I'm saying is, accessibility features are good for all sorts of reasons but don't lose sight of the much, much smaller group of users who require the feature in order to use the product at all.