Comment by energywut 20 hours ago
If only we didn't need to resort to selfish reasons for accessibility. Even looking past the idea that most, if not all, of us will benefit from a more accessible world, it makes me so sad when I hear people say "it's just not worth it".
To me that's equivalent to saying, "we know our system has bugs, but we only want our blind users to experience them". It's just... such a downer of a way to look at the world.
Web sites hate the idea of a web ecosystem with dozens of (if not thousands of) User Agents, each of them presenting the site in a way the user wants it to be presented. We have strayed so far from the path of HTML being text markup that suggested formatting and semantics only. We have basically handed control over all the content, its presentation, and its interaction modes, to the web developer.
My ideal version of YouTube is a bare HTML page with a single <video> element that the User Agent decides how to interpret and render. And maybe some <li> links to navigate through the site to find other features. Maybe my User Agent is a browser, but maybe it's a video player, or some kind of assistive video display for the disabled. Or a powerpoint slide. Or a command line downloader. As a user, I should have control over how the web content is ultimately rendered, and the only job for the web site is to send me structured content that my renderer can pull apart, understand, and render in the way I see fit.
Similarly, my ideal version of Amazon is a bare HTML page with a search box and a structured list of products and their attributes, that my User Agent can ingest, understand and render in whatever way it sees fit.
Web sites have totally abandoned this path of giving the user control, and now when we GET from a web site, instead of structured, semantic data, we get a big opaque blob of JavaSludge that our browser is expected to faithfully execute as-written, so that the web company gets to make all the major presentation decisions. The user is just the passenger along for the ride.
Yup, precisely this.
To expand on:
> Similarly, my ideal version of Amazon is a bare HTML page with a search box and a structured list of products and their attributes, that my User Agent can ingest, understand and render in whatever way it sees fit.
My ideal version of Amazon is a MS Access file or equivalent, that my User Agent can treat as an SQL database I can query however the heck I like.
In fact, 90% of the websites and webapps fall into the following three categories:
- Is a poster or ad magazine in disguise;
- Would be much better if supplied as an Excel sheet
- Would be much better if supplied as a database file or connection
Alas.
I'd go as far as saying, the job of great many web startups is to slap an SPA on top of a database to restrict access and charge for usage, like someone finding a shortcut through dense forest, fencing it off and building a toll gate on the path.
And FWIW, it's not like people need things dumbed down into funnels and journeys. Sure, you probably can't expect much from a product aimed literally at everyone above age 2, but there's a host of products used by a narrower segment of population - white-collar workers, or even regular people with working mental faculties. These people can handle spreadsheets and even databases absolutely fine. In fact, there was a brief period of time, when this was taught in schools and as well as universities, particularly to people pursuing degrees in humanities / liberal arts. Databases in particular used to be part of journalist and librarian studies. People could easily learn all this stuff, if it were useful - but the trends on the web made sure it wasn't.
After all, you can't make FU money out of your startup backed by millions in VC dollars, that's just running basic SELECTs for users and charging for it, if users are allowed to run SELECTs themselves.
>> it makes me so sad when I hear people say "it's just not worth it".
Companies are going to find out the hard way then. I work for a large corporation and we've had a consistent stream of companies and individuals contacting us about accessibility with several of our apps and sites.
This means more time to fix or completely redo these because they built them with accessibility issues baked into them and now we're tasked with fixing them or else deal with the legal ramifications.
Now that several states have included anything online or digital in the ADA, that means we now have a handful of law firms in CA and NY that are filing accessibility lawsuits. Just in 2024 there were over 4,000 lawsuits filed, the majority of them at the state level. The old adage that companies were taking a risk by not having their online apps and sites being accessible is a very real threat now.
I feel like the trend is finally starting to turn and companies are taking accessibility a lot more seriously now.
This is a very artificial way to make the argument though; it's still not worth it from a revenue or user acquisition perspective, it's just a risk from a potentially fickle government body.
It's worse than not worth it, it's defeating some of the main ways they make money.
Misunderstanding this point leads to endless surprise in this topic. No, companies don't just "don't care" for some unfathomable reason. They don't want it in the first place; they begrudgingly make concessions to accessibility due to cultural and regulatory pressure.
The same things that let the disabled people participate, also help regular users escape the very traps and tricks businesses on-line use to make money. Now, supporting the former group may be a rounding error on the balance sheet, but enabling the latter to defeat monetization efforts, not so much.
Many moons ago, I attended a demo of a new software product, and without disclosing my disability to the vendor, I inquired about its accessibility features. They said that they don't do anything for the disabled because it's such a small market, and it wasn't profitable to accommodate the needs of disabled users.
I found myself irrationally enraged and had to walk away from the conversation. I thought about it when I calmed down and I realized I was feeling, "Who the fuck are you to tell me how I can live in the world?"
Dissecting these thoughts further led me to the understanding that, without accessibility, you are telling a class of people that they don't deserve access to education, government services, or commercial products.
Telling disabled people that they don't deserve access to any benefits of a civilized society is a long-standing and persistent attitude. It's roughly analogous to denying poor people health care, food, and basic shelter because all they deserve is what scraps we are willing to bestow on them.
You seem to have the opposite perspective on the relationship between someone who makes a product and customers...
I am never looking at one specific person or group when planning what to invest time in, I'm looking for the best return.
Its not a fair start point to claim I'm thinking on the level of who deserves access. Usually I'm following my own plans to try to break even.
I completely agree, as someone who is disabled and needs to use assistive technology every day. Honestly, I feel like this is a bipartite problem:
1. Companies and individuals don't think about accessibility when designing software. It's from my experience always something that's bolted on after the fact (which only makes adding it in an order of magnitude more difficult). There are exceptions, but in my experience they're rare.
2. Our education system doesn't teach people about this, in practically any capacity, unless you, e.g., go into the education system specifically to work with individuals with disabilities. But if your just an ordinary student taking the usual course classes, it's never mentioned, not even in passing. Or at least, it wasn't mentioned at all in passing when I was in school, unless the teacher brought it up as more of an aside, and even then there wasn't a dedicated class on it.
Granted, the second part is more of a "developer" problem, but people not knowing about individuals with disabilities at all, or what they're capable of if you give them the tools/skills, etc., is also a massive problem. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy to educate when people get curious and ask, and I actively encourage it. But I shouldn't have to. This is something our school system should be teaching people about. An accessible world is better for everyone in pretty much every way.
To offer a bit of hope, both the quality and amount of information available nowadays regarding accessibility is at an all-time high.
I remember comments from people who would downplay the difficulty of getting accessibility right despite the changing landscape of web development. Part of it was that web standards hadn't fully caught up in capabilities. But another part of it was just that there wasn't that much conscious effort from the open source community to treat accessibility as a priority.
Right now you can find really high quality packages with any kind of widget without sacrificing accessibility.
> If only we didn't need to resort to selfish reasons for accessibility.
I agree, but I think that's tantamount to wishing humans were more kind and empathetic.
If that we're the case, I suspect the world would be souch better as to be unrecognizable.
I genuinely believe humans are kind and empathetic by nature. I believe that humans have invented systems that penalize kind and empathetic behavior and adhere to those systems because they are familiar.
Look at what happens after a disaster or when a neighbor falls ill -- people band together and feed one another. They care for one another. They pick up the slack. Not because anyone pays them, but because it's what they intrinsically want to do.
But it only occurs during disruptions from the norm.
I believed this, too, before COVID hit and I saw ~half my country try to throw everyone else under the bus so that they could continue to eat at their favorite restaurants, and buy their khakis, and hoard goods to price gouge their neighbors, and just making a belligerent scene any time they were unable to do something the way they want to. Many people will naturally pull together and act cooperatively and altruistically, but also many, many people just live to grief everyone else.
Now, imagine how the world feels from my perspective (100% blind). In my 20s, I was enthusiastic. Joined Debian to found the Debian Accessibility Project. Did a lot of packaging of obscure assistive technology software. Submitted a11y bugs (and actually got them fixed) to major products like Eclipse and Qt. Felt like I could really make at least a small difference. Then, time passed, and experience accumulated. I learnt that only an infinitesimal fraction of contributors is actually motivated/willing to help with niche areas like Accessibility. I learnt that the "scratch your own itch" attitude of FLOSS is a reason why Accessibility doesn't happen. Then, GNOME3 came about, and all my remaining motivation/naivety evaporated sudenly. IBM and Sun had already stopped their Accessibility efforts late 2008. And the CORBA->DBus move basically set accessibility efforts back a few years. I was devastated, and also learnt a lot of things. After that, web accessibility started to get worse and worse. These days, most of the modern web is inaccessible to people like me, only a handful of selected applications/sites do work, and the coridor is progressively getting more narrow. I know stories of 40+yo blind people loosing their jobs due to IT restructuring at their company, left and right. The digital divide is here, and nobody is really talking about it anymore, because, frankly, those "in the know" have basically given up. Its a sad story. Capitalism is simply not willing to care for small minorities. Its a fact... which took me over 20 years to fully accept.
The only viable approach I can think of is to completely rewrite everything from scratch. It's a huge undertaking, but I honestly think it's less work than getting the existing software infrastructure to work accessibly. Even heroic efforts like AccessKit just aren't heroic enough.
We've got a few decent speech synths, but information about how things should be read out isn't passed through to them. That's handled by a screen reader program… except screen readers can't represent half the semantics they should, so people regularly bypass them, which leads to (a) UI inconsistency; and (b) the systems being useless if you need something other than a screen reader. AI scraper bots are the straw that broke the camel's back, so virtually no (current) website is accessible via a basic web browser any longer. UI customisability was low in the Windows 95 days, but we've managed to go backwards from there.
We might as well go the whole way, and design something that's actually usable, then put together case-by-case compatibility layers. Here's how we translate Home Office Design System HTML, here's how we translate Stacks Design System HTML, here's how we translate MediaWiki HTML, here's how we translate Wordpress Gutenberg HTML, here's how we translate Moodle HTML… here's how we represent the OpenDocument content model for reading and writing, here's how we represent the SVG content model for reading and writing, here's how we represent a login flow…
"Ghetto systems" as the saying goes aren't a solution either. Those have been tried decades ago. Remember "IBM Homepage reader"? No? Probably before your time. Its a nice idea, in isolation. However, the translation layers you talk about are never going to be sufficient. You're just moving the problem. Now, if you want to use a system which doesn't have a translation layer for your ghetto system, you're out of luck again.
One of the translation layers can be to-spec WAI-ARIA: then anyone who can be bothered to implement their websites correctly will. (There are currently no correct implementations of WAI-ARIA: only vague approximations of partial implementations.) I don't think there's a way to salvage untagged PDF forms, except taking them case-by-case.
You're right to point out issues with "ghetto systems" – but we don't have a single computer system that actually works, and everything that does exist has fundamental design flaws that make accessibility prohibitively difficult. (Wayland somehow managed to be a downgrade from X11, which is quite a feat.)
I think a basic ghetto system with a full development environment and easily-accessible documentation would rapidly become not a ghetto system.
As a completely ignorant infra engineer, is AI not also a potential solution that avoids rewriting entirely? Like, it feels like translating between visuals and audio signals would be one of the few things it’s really great at.
Perhaps a bit wasteful, but feels more likely than getting the entire software industry (including companies with inverse financial incentives) to get on board.
M-X professor-hubert-j-farnsworth-mode
Good news, everybody! Rewriting everything from scratch has recently become a lot, lot easier, and much more fun!
Leela AI (not to be confused with Turanga Leela) learns to speak in LLOOOOMM / Cursor:
https://youtu.be/Sn057QrCUm8?t=5367
https://leela.ai/how-leelas-ai-is-different/
PS: Does anyone know how to make the Mac "say" command use a new fangled "Personal Voice" that you can record of your own?
I agree 100% and welcome any improvement for any reason.
When most or all of us benefit from "accessibility", then it isn't really accessibility. It is fixing a broken UI, period. Designers need to be shamed for not even providing a good enough UI for the average person, let alone disabled people.
These are great and humanistic sentiments, until you have to talk price. When price comes into the equation, the approach of specialized accessibility software seems to work much better in a lot of cases.
Consider a rosy hypothetical: A SaaS under truly great, enlightened leadership. The team lead knows that it would take only one two week sprint, for one focused developer, to go the last mile and make it truly accessible for all. The fully loaded cost of those developer-hours, in a very optimistic scenario, is $1000, and optically closer to $4-8000 for a US based team.
First, do those extra steps towards accessibility even break even? Second, if so, are they truly the revenue maximizing move for what that dev can do with that 2-week sprint? Sometimes, rarely, they are. In practice I suspect market research would show the opposite. This is before we add in all of the usual fog of war around how long things really take to build, whether the leadership is really as enlightened as they seem, etc.
Consider an alternative model where one company specializes in creating high quality accessibility-enhancing software. This software aims to work as a compatibility layer across most to all of the other programs a user is likely to use; perhaps they use frequent in-memory screenshots and detailed image analysis to help blind users understand what's going on. Or perhaps it's as simple as a FOSS dev focusing on making sure every terminal program they can run works well with their screen reader.
There are a plethora of benefits to this model, not least that you aren't imposing a heavy tax on everyone else for a really small customer base. This is also very specialized, customer-facing work. If there is anywhere in software you would want dedicated frontend or UI/UX expertise it would probably be the guy designing the screen reader compatibility layer.
I point to the popular extension Dark Reader as an example of this paradigm; it does a wonderful job on most websites, is easy to disable on websites where it doesn't, and doesn't cost the website runner anything to use.
Some might take issue with this for aesthetic reasons. It feels kludgy to suggest someone run a whole third interface layer just to use the same software you and I use right out of the box. I think this aesthetic violation is misplaced in this case - the factors at play suggest to me that this work would benefit heavily from specialization. Indeed, that seems to be what has happened in practice; making the web accessible in 2025 is much easier than it was in 2000, because third parties have stepped up and improved the situation dramatically enough that hooking into accessibility layers "merely" requires things like writing semantically correct HTML.
Now imagine if a Dark Reader existed, that could reliably insert all the finer details into the page which are obvious from a screen grab of the page, but non-obvious to the web designer - that would clearly be a much better approach for the majority of businesses.
In my experience, developing the habit of writing accessible software, substantially reduces the friction (and cost) involved in adding it.
Definitely, the most expensive way to add accessibility, is to retrofit it.
My hypothetical assumes that the team was writing 95% accessible software already. The last 2 weeks are for the final push.
Of course, if this is a truly all-or-nothing thing where you need to do it 100% perfectly to incur no extra cost, then that strengthens my argument for the compatibility layer, it doesn't diminish it. Very few non-specialists can get something 100% right on the first shot.
Fair enough.
> Very few non-specialists can get something 100% right on the first shot.
But that certainly doesn’t stop managers from assuming 100%, first shot.
In my experience, a realistic plan can save huge amounts of cost; in far more areas than just accessibility.
Also in my experience: realistic plans are unicorns.
Is that extra development cheaper than the risk of a lawsuit or loss of reputation? Not forgetting the ~20% of potential customers you might be missing out on…
> not least that you aren't imposing a heavy tax on everyone else for a really small customer base.
Ah. Seeing your disabled customers as a burden. One day you might encounter barriers when it comes to computing.
>Is that extra development cheaper than the risk of a lawsuit
It probably isn't cheaper, no. The base risk of a lawsuit in this domain seems very low for all but the largest of websites; the largest of websites generally have large enough user pools that investing in out of the box accessibility makes sense anyway. In fact I would wager Facebook makes more advertising money off of its median blind user than its median fully-sighted user, simply because that's a very easy demographic to target ads to.
I'm willing to change my mind on this if you can provide evidence if even, say, 1% of all inaccessible websites on the Internet have been sued on these grounds.
>Seeing your disabled customers as a burden
Disabled potential customers, for one. Disabled people aren't dumb, and they don't pay for things they can't actually use. I'm surprised you assume they would.
But, and and this may come as a surprise, I genuinely think the compatibility layer approach is the much better option here. There are plenty of reasons to think so, which I outlined in the original post. Your slander is not welcome or acceptable just because you disagree with me.
Yeah, it's like RSS: a solution that requires every single operator to implement something you need is quite a bad solution. For you who needs it and for every operator who has to implement it.
Instead, it's superior if you didn't need RSS at all to generate and consume feeds of website because your software did it for you.
Same for screen readers and accessibility. The superior solution is for software to derive the UX just like a sighted person can.
It will be nice when we get the tech for this so that accessibility convos don't just get stuck in these weird shaming rituals where you're supposed to feel guilty that you never tried your website with macOS VoiceOver when you're not even sure if your business will exist in a year.
It's worse than that. Accessibility is actually opposite to what the business wants, and the combined cultural and (occasionally) legal backing it has is our last line of defense of user autonomy.
Assistive software is just a different user agent. A non-standard browser interpreting the page in ways different than the vendor intended. The very same feature that enables a screen reader to help a blind person navigate, enables everyone else to identify and snip off ads and upsells, escape the thick sewage that's called "web design", and get straight to the actual thing one came for in the first place. Accessibility is the only thing that prevents the web from becoming Flash again, entirely unparseable through automated means[0].
Again, were it not for cultural and legal insistence to cater for the disabled, we'd all already be completely without agency on the web, dumb riders in a theme park paying for something at every turn. Cutting curbs and such? Why, so the users complete their "journey" faster and leave less money behind?
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[0] - LLMs changed the equation here recently, mostly in our favor, for now. In the immediate term, they can make any website machine-interpretable no matter what the vendor does. But that's just the beginning, we don't yet know how vendors will abuse GenAI to thwart the users.