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.
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 this team too.
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.
This is how accommodations work, and have always worked.
From what I've heard from people in the industry, apparently a significant portion of users consuming audio described movies and TV shows, originally aimed at blind people, are truck drivers who have to look at the road, not the screen.
Audiobooks and OCR technology, also originally developed with the blind in mind, are now used by many fully-abled people in their lives.
Closed captions, originally intended for the hearing-impaired, are now a staple of many bars, where the chatter is so loud that nobody can hear the TV.
Circa 2017 when IE8 compatibility was still a thing, I saw a metric that said more people use screen readers and/or have poor enough vision to need some sort of UI accomodation than there were IE8 users
Some very brief googling suggests about 3% of Americans are visually disabled. Having a team ensure your product is available to an extra 3% of people seems like a potentially reasonable investment.
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.
Because Twitter as-is is a finished product. There's no immediate need to review accessibility issues since there are no new product features/updates for the foreseeable future. Musk froze everything. So what were those people supposed to do? Nothing? Might as well let them move on to new jobs.
> There's no immediate need to review accessibility issues since there are no new product features/updates for the foreseeable future
Really? You were on the team then? I assume you found out that they had an entirely empty Jira backlog and no more accessibility updates to do on main, so they were let go?
I appreciate your insight, former Twitter employee. What else can you tell us about how your job went?
You don't need to be a Twitter employee to know this. Merely posting on this forum gives you enlightenment and insight that others would only dream to have. I stand proudly with VWWHFSfQ.
Yeah we all know big applications work like that and will get finished sometime. Like google search which definitely didn’t change since its first iteration, it does the same doesn’t it?
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".
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.
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.
No but many studies have shown that designs (in architecture as well as web and print design) that focus on accessibility are rated as having better UX by the general populace as well
Cutting a11y likely will also lead to a decline in UX in general
To day I learned it's called numeronyms they seems to be very infrequent out side of slang/tech, these are all words I think you should just know around here: I18n A11y l10n Y2K 420 a16z
If you are into making software for something more than just the naive "one market" your first introduction would be internationalization which should be the most widespread. When you make things for government in the EU/US you will most probably have laws demanding accessibility features. The problem isn't the numeronym but that so few people care about accessibility.
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.
It’s been terminology used since the 80s. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been around for a long time. It was coined by DEC.
It’s also the reason why Arabic text can be output on the screen, Ruby characters can be used and screen mirroring is usable for UIs that need RTL layouts. You really should look it up before criticising it.
It deals with things as small and as important as date formats, number seperators, punctuation marks, monetary formats, support for different calendar systems, capitalisation rules… you name it, it encompasses it.
It’s a genuine discipline. It’s used extensively in Windows, Mozilla and LibreOffice.
In that sense everything is a product design choice.
The point was that having a landing page that goes to a Sign Up option before showing all the content is not necessarily an accessibility issue, it's a decision made to drive sign ups and therefore revenue and it's not something the a11y team would've been in charge of. Blind people can still navigate the page provided the components are accessible in the same way sighted users can.
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
> 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.
You can still have accessibility without having a whole dedicated team for it
> 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
I meant it as having a dedicated accessibility the team not just going to Twitter and removing all accessibility settings.
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
Not the ADA specifically, but American courts have generally held that large commercial websites do need to be accessible in terms of the ADA.
That's aside from the cruelty of diminishing accessibility on a major social platform, slowly cutting off disabled users, despite its cost likely being a rounding error in the greater scheme of things.
"In the United States alone, approximately 50 million people are considered deaf or hard of hearing. The failure to provide appropriate accommodations to this community is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973."
If you read through the case history, you can see that the ADA does not have specific language saying something like "websites above size x must be accessible, and that means a, b, and c need to be followed." Much of that has been developed into case law and precedent by judges ruling in numerous lawsuits over the years, which is why it's still a somewhat grey area for edge cases.
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.
It's a sign of where it's going though. Will the accessibility info be kept up to date? Will the other teams pay attention to it as much if there's not an internal "force" keeping it on people's mind? Will it be considered at a similar level again in the future? The answer to all of these might be "yes," but getting rid of the employees who are most responsible for this doesn't exactly strike me as an act that views a11y favourably.
There's presumably a gap between the current level and what's legally required, and they can afford to let things slip a bit without getting in trouble.
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.
I've worked in security for years. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that (security is a nice-to-have), either directly or implied, I could retire. LOL
And firing the A11y team doesn't immediately remove all accessibility from Twitter, they are forced by US law to follow accessibility standards and they would, they just won't do higher than what's required.
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.
Immanuel Kant came up with the idea of a categorical imperative. It’s one of the foundation stones in the field of moral philosophy (or ethics). An example would be the moral requirement not to kill other people. The only way to successfully prove that there are no moral requirements is by arguing the point with people who don’t know any better.
There are many philosophers who disagree with Kant's categorical imperative though – even among those who agree that ethics is objective (in some sense). The categorical imperative gives morality a deontological flavour, to which many will object–such as consequentialists. And there are others who don't object to the deontological flavour per se, but who think there are better foundations for such a morality (e.g. natural law theorists).
I agree with your position that ethics is objective, but I don't think Kant's categorical imperative is a very good argument for its objectivity – a person can coherently accept ethics/morality as being objective, yet doubt or deny the categorical imperative. I think "ethics is objective" is one of those things where very many people can agree on a conclusion, yet disagree massively on what is the correct reasoning to reach that conclusion.
It was a somewhat rushed point, admittedly. I was reaching for enlightenment-era imagery to challenge the seeming disavowal of morality itself. I note that OP extended those remarks elsewhere to claim that the law is the preferred source of moral constraint. I'm not even sure of what to say to that.
But I very much appreciate the depth of your point. I've always found validation (?) in the deontological aspect of Kant's idealism because I think it neatly describes why people feel obligations to those they interact with most closely (i.e. I feed my child because I should, rather than to avoid his hunger). I certainly take your point that the categorical imperative isn't the best or only tool for interpreting moral dilemmas. Honestly, I was bringing it up in part because it's a recognisable phrase that might infer that there's more to the question of ethics than unexamined instinct.
> I've always found validation (?) in the deontological aspect of Kant's idealism because I think it neatly describes why people feel obligations to those they interact with most closely (i.e. I feed my child because I should, rather than to avoid his hunger).
It is interesting you bring up that example, because it connects with the moral universalism vs moral particularism debate: moral universalists argue that an essential component of a valid ethical principle is it must be universal in scope (equally applicable to everyone at all times), even though it may still produce quite different outcomes when applied to differing situations. Particularists claim
by contrast that one can have moral obligations which are non-universal in character - I owe special obligations to my children because they are mine, beyond those which I owe to children-in-general. Moral universalists have to either deny the existence of such particular obligations, or else insist that they are ultimately universal rather than particular in character. Anyway, the categorical imperative is a classic statement of moral universalism, yet you are invoking one of the favourite examples of moral particularists to support it.
Personally, I think the best way to defend the objectivity of morality is the “companions in the guilt” argument - for every argument that is put forward against the objectivity of morality, there is a closely parallel argument against the objectivity of (theoretical) rationality. If that’s true, then how is it not special pleading to grant objectivity to one yet deny it to the other?
And I agree, but that is not how I read your comment.
If you expanded it with "There are no moral requirements... for companies to provide accessibility features" it would have been entirely different story.
I don't think people downvote you because we "expect society to work out of goodwill and not through enforced regulations decided by the voters", but because your blanket statmenet denying the existince of moral requirements is interpreted negatively. I for one agree that relying just on morals is not enough and that regulations is needed, but your sentence is obviously not universally interpreted in that light.
AFAIK that’s a misconstrual. Having a “verified” blue checkmark will cost $8 a month, but using Twitter and saying whatever you want on it will still be free.
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 distinct from a strawman.
After thinking on it, maybe it is a form of unintentional straw man. People are attacking a hypothetical position and view that is a synthesis of many people and only is combined in their mind.
There is also a reverse no true Scotsman, I've seen referenced as dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid. Not as catchy as no true Scotsman but you're basically imagining a perfect Scotsman and then attacking them when they don't exist
"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)
> 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.
> 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.
Private companies explicitly shouldn’t do whatever they want at all. They don’t even get to decide totally whom to serve, as doing so against a protected class will quickly lead to a really bad outcome for the company.
And that’s a good thing. It is frankly ridiculous that private companies get to decide the public opinion by tweaking their algorithms, it should be managed in a similar way how we don’t allow food companies to put cocaine into their products.
In what delusional world could private companies ever 'do whatever they wanted'? We have huge legal tomes filled with laws to prevent this sort of sociopathic thinking from becoming reality for the sake of profit.
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.
saying a11y is a nice-to-have is like saying Unicode is a nice-to-have. if you cut Unicode support, the only thing you'll personally notice is lack of emojis, but Chinese/Hindi/Russian speakers won't be able to use it at all, without resorting to Pinyin or something.
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.
Twitter is headquartered in California, where you do in fact (mostly) get to do that. Whether you consider California to be a "civilized society" is subjective, I suppose.
yep. Literally with so many people reneging, working multiple jobs, doing what's required of them, a company has no loyalty to their engineers. The opposite is also true, an engineer shouldn't have too much loyalty to their company. Considering these dudes were making over 200k a year I'm sure they'll be fine and land their next job.
Life happens. And no being fired is not life and death scenario. If you want healthcare you need to find other work. If you can’t find other work then move to other places. If you can’t move to other places then you need to question what made you got into this hole of dependence to your employer from the first place.
If you are skillfull and bring value to your employer why would the fire you and why would other employer won’t want you?
Layoffs are great. They weed out the unproductive ones.
> Layoffs are great. They weed out the unproductive ones.
The vast majority of most layoffs I've seen are either hastily thrown together hail marys or just done looking at how much money they need to cut and then look more or less 100% at compensation or something even more stupid. For companies of any considerable size, rare is the strategic layoff. What Elon did at Twitter is a perfect example of slashing for a number. Elon has not been around long enough to understand what's up or down at Twitter. He has a number in mind he wants to get down to and he just slashes until he gets there. Assuming there are substantial cuts that need to be made, Elon has no clue where he is slashing fat vs. bone, he hasn't been there long enough to know.
Obviously you've never lived paycheck to paycheck. If you don't have a job you can't afford to move - hell, if you have a minimum wage job you can't just afford to move.
Most places at least require a hefty sum of rent up front to even get in somewhere else.
Then if you don't have a job, at least in the US, they recommend you get COBRA, so you don't have any gaps in your health insurance record. Because they decided that was bad. And COBRA is _expensive_. Again, not something you can afford if you are living paycheck to paycheck.
Is this part of that social contract I never get to read?
I think every headline about layoffs and restructurings and companies shutting down are proof that some people do in fact get to fire whoever they want whenever they want.
Civilized companies either don’t exist or don’t follow that social contract because it has been replaced with a different contract: an at will employment agreement.
Accessibility shouldn't be a separate team. It should be a consideration for all product development. And as far as experiences go, Twitter has a pretty small surface area.
> 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 be added after product development.
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.
I wasn't recommending that they all be fired. Ideally some number of them would be redistributed across other teams. What is often inefficient is keeping a large team around that has largely fulfilled their goals.
Also performance is too large an area to make it a single team. It is better to have a database expert guild (or team) that other teams can consult for performance and other engineering quality issues and similarly for other performance sensitive areas. I can't speak for security but I imagine that each area should have experts that cover security for that area.
Perhaps others like working cleaning up poorly written non-performant designs and code but I prefer starting earlier in the process and building it into the engineering culture.
Edit: I think it's actually easier to have a performance/security team at a medium scale of growth. At small scale they would be in the product dev teams or known by name by all teams. At large scale I don't think they can't cover the surface area/volume produced by all the teams. So it should be more effective to develop mechanisms/processes and culture.
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 see the fox in their midst named Elon. It reminds me of Billy Bob Thornton in Fargo Season One. “The maps used to say ‘there be dragons here’. They don’t anymore, but the dragons are still there.” These people live in a bubble where they reinforce each other.
Given this is just a series of positive testimonials of the skills of a manager's direct reports, all recently fired and looking for new work, your take comes off as extremely uncharitable.
If these people were so incredible and intelligent and hard working and were changing the world for the better. If they truly were the paragons they are made out to be, then why were they the ones fired?
Let's be honest, Twitter has underperformed for a long time. It has been openly known as the rest and vest place. This type of flowery nonsense would be difficult to believe about the better half of their engineers, much less the bottom half that was let go
It’s a sense I get from the collection of posts not just this one in particular. Perhaps harsh and hyperbolic. What happened feels like a clash of two worlds - the soft sounding environment of Twitter and the sometimes brutal or cruel environment that Musk clearly encourages (though he would argue it’s just efficient and necessary I’m sure).
I saw one thread where people who were one day posting #lovewhereyouwork got fired the next day after working over the weekend for a project Musk announced by email on a Saturday. It’s like they couldn’t imagine that a flippant billionaire was working them and slaughtering them like sheep. So used to a corporation that coddled them, that they walked into it smiling. I don’t use terms like bullshit hatefully…I think it is bullshit. Smart and well intentioned people, but sort of delusional nonetheless. Talking about missing time with family because, “I get to solve problems at scale no one else does.” Companies are not families, what you are doing is not always important. I think calling each other “Tweeps” is an example of this. You forgot that when the easy money party stops they will treat you like what you are to them, a line item.
This is ridiculous. This is clearly a manager trying his best to soften the blow to his team after they were just fired by talking up their work and impact.
I think OP's point was that clearly there is a disconnect between what people at Twitter are/were saying/thinking, and reality. Unfortunately, when your words or ideas come into conflict with reality, it is rarely reality that is wrong
For example, if someone were cut from a sports team and the coach went and talked about how good that person was, and how hard they worked. Well it raises the obvious question, if they were so good and did work so hard, why did they get cut? And why does everyone get so upset when people ask the obvious question?
The layoffs are a signal of where twitter will go and what values it will have.
Cutting an entire team is a pretty good way to say "not at all important".
For some things there are very low hanging fruit. Having at least one expert review a new feature in a screen reader can be the difference of not at all usable to mostly usable with just a few minor tweaks. Not having this at all, sends a message about priorities and the new shape of twitter and what the company values
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.
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.
When you update your app with new features you are mostly touching a lot of stuff behind the scenes and are mostly altering some part of your accessibility features. Elon announced rapid changes and new features...
now accessibility is woke? Despite your degenerate 4chan lingo this will scare everyone who is not a normie because like your vocabulary, Twitter will degenerate for less fortunate people which have real disabilities.
You can't be the public square if a significant fraction of people are excluded.