I appreciate that you're taking a stand for accessibility, but IMO, that kind of statement just adds to the shrillness of so much of our online discourse. We can discuss the pros and cons of various approaches to UI, and what it takes to make accessibility practical, without venturing into the topic of whether a developer cares about accessibility, which is likely to just make them defensive.
I'm pretty okay with this as a stance, to be honest, because folks have been asking those of us who are fully abled, very nicely for a very long time, to stop making things harder for them. Blithe dismissal deserves to be received a certain way.
> folks have been asking those of us who are fully abled, very nicely for a very long time, to stop making things harder for them. Blithe dismissal deserves to be received a certain way.
I'm one of those folks (see my profile). I still ask nicely, and try to be nice even when responding to what seems to be a blithe dismissal, because I want to focus on solving the problem, without making developers feel unnecessarily uncomfortable about honestly discussing a sensitive topic. I still struggle with this, and might not have gotten it right in my own response to bob1029 yesterday, since that response got downvoted.
Also I'm not sure bob1029's original response is a blithe dismissal; he may just be honestly stating the decision-making process that makes sense in a business world where disabled people are a tiny minority. That sucks for us, but maybe I just have to have the serenity to accept what we can't change, and focus on what is feasible, such as reconstructing UI content and semantics using OCR and other machine learning techniques (like Apple is doing as an option on iOS), rather than trying to convince every UI framework and application developer to put extra work into accessibility. I've been resisting that conclusion, but I'm getting closer to accepting it.
I know you are, and I follow your stuff. :) My post was off-the-cuff a little sharper (to you, not to him) than I wanted it, because "shrill" is coded usually on this forum in a way you didn't mean it. Sorry for that.
I respect where you're coming from, and at the same time I don't think pointing out that putting something as the fourth-most-important priority means it will stay the fourth-most-important priority forever is "shrill". Because if you shove something baseline like a11y down the ladder like that, it's never coming up, and if characterizing that as "I don't care" makes somebody upset then it's probably a "look inward" moment, yeah? I think it's reasonable to demand that we as a profession not act to be noninclusive by default. Not, at this point, ask. Demand is OK. I think more must be expected of us as people, not just as technologists. The business world might indeed say "oh, small minority, screw them"--we must be ethically loaded as humane craftspeople to fight back against that.
It's kind of a money-where-my-mouth-is thing for me, and I'm very happy that my employer cares a lot about this. It's a video company, so there definitely are limits to what we are able to do for folks with sight impairment, but right now we're in the middle of an initiative for the conference we run to better enable hearing-impaired folks to enjoy and participate. It's not why I came to work here, but I'm glad we're doing it.
I appreciate that you're taking a stand for accessibility, but IMO, that kind of statement just adds to the shrillness of so much of our online discourse. We can discuss the pros and cons of various approaches to UI, and what it takes to make accessibility practical, without venturing into the topic of whether a developer cares about accessibility, which is likely to just make them defensive.