No that's not right, nor even correct. You can't just disregard their feelings, and put someone else above them no matter the issue. There's no justification for this.

Disabled people have a valuable contribution to make and their voice should be heard. They should have access. But this good cause is often misused by people using it as a fake pretext for abusing others under the delusion they are absolutely right, and persecuting anyone who disagrees as absolutely wrong. This it is correct to prioritize feelings over bullshit is part of this. It's ape brain shit of trying to dominate others with criticism and control, and pretend they're holy warriors. That attitude is a contributor to why I'm so scared to engage with people about this topic. It's also sad for disabled people because these abusive crusaders give the cause a bad name, and generate counter productive resistance all for the sake of their own compensatory ego gyrations.

But separating out how the topic is misused by some looking to criticize or control others...there is a real issue here and and it's an important and good cause. But the solutions posited, often by the same folks, are not I think the best technical solutions, they're not scalable or efficient. Asking every website to provide hints might be OK at a small scale, but at internet scale it doesn't work. I think the right solution is to direct AI at the problem and have these accessibility directives generated automatically. Intelligent accessibility is a feature that should be present in browsers (or screen readers) by way of AI. People who care about the topic and want change should get to work on that.

Original author here. I am taking your comments to heart. I'm not yet prepared to concede that we should give up on accessibility standards for platform and application developers and expect AI to solve the whole thing; I need to discuss this with others in the blind community. I appreciate that expecting every application and website to implement accessibility standards doesn't scale, but it's the best we have so far.

You said the tone of my article was strident and demanding. Please note that it was addressed to the leader of a growing public company, calling on the company to live up to their own PR about their mission. I wouldn't take that tone with a solo developer like you. Even so, I don't believe I was abusive or persecuting. Still, it's likely that writing and promoting this article did make some part of my ape brain feel good about fighting for a righteous cause. So thanks for making me stop and think.

Man you're so welcome I mean it takes so much courage and self-awareness and insighy to even like... like admit that reflection to oneself in private little lone on a public forum. Thanks for inspiring me today and for directing some of that goodwill my way.

I don't think we can give up on accessibility standards but I'm really no expert. I think there's a good analogy between how you know commercial buildings need to have accessibility affordances like wheelchair ramps. And I think in that space it really works for number of reasons. Again I'm no expert in how this comes about but when you have a critical mass of standards in the construction industry and like a permitting process and an approval process where buildings are constructed only if they conform with you know standards which include accessibility then I think you can ensure, and there's sort of an expectation, that you get these affordances and then I think the marginal cost of adding this stuff when everybody in the supply chain, architects and so on, already conforms to this cost is very small for buildings... so I think that's the right allocation of cost in this case because it's efficient. Like I'm not even sure if accessibility ramps are such a great solution for disabled people but they seem to be addressing the opportunity to enhance access and they are pretty prevalent at least in developed countries. I think it's a better solution than asking every disabled person to have some special sort of wheelchair that can climb up stairs or some kind of intelligent wheelchair. Because I think in that case the cost of providing such technology to all these people right now with the technological landscape we have with consumers, it doesn't make sense, it's too expensive. It's more efficient and scalable to have building people include this stuff.

But I think accessibility doesn't have that critical mass across the supply chain of software and it is more expensive to include but on the other hand right now there's not really a good alternative on the sort of disabled consumer technology side there is no AI solution that can do this. I think a hybrid approach might work but I do think we need to look at like the AI side of having some sort of intelligent user agent that can provide the successibility information and at least have a discussion with that context that there are other options worth exploring. I think that shifts the discussion at least in appearance away from ideology and towards a solutions focus. and then maybe the sense will be cultivated that some of the resistance to including accessibility is not an ideological thing and not because people are uncaring about disabled people, it might become seen to be partly because there's a sense that this is not like a technical solution that smells good in some ways.

Anyway I'm not an expert but thanks for engaging and I'm humbled and grateful for your response here.