FlorianI think the one thing a lot of people might be missing about #accessibility is that it really isn't a homogenous mass of changes and standards you can see as such. Accessibility is literally different for every single person out there and doing it right for absolutely everyone is incredibly difficult to do, particularly given people's tendency to dig in their heels and decide the supplier needs to do 100% of the work.
Some screen reader users, for example, will outright refuse to use a product or service if no specific screenreader-user-specific documentation exists. This can reach from appliances all the way to programming languages. To what degree products need this is a personal choice; I personally don't think this is necessary in the majority of cases, and there may be all sorts of reasons why companies don't do this, i.e. "management doesn't allow us to hire the people who'd actually know what to even put in such docs"all the way to "devs change stuff so often that it'd be a non-starter" and all sorts of other reasons in between.
Others swear by heading levels, which gets them places quickly. Except some people hate heading levels because they don't use them, and putting heading levels in actually slows down people who just use the singular next heading key.
Some people will burn a company to the ground for having bad email newsletters even though newsletters are actually incredibly finicky to make, often based on a template the creators have no control over, etc.
you from working with them.
Some people will burn a company to the ground for having bad email newsletters even though newsletters are actually incredibly finicky to make, often based on a template the creators have no control over, etc.
you from working with them.
Yet others hate PDFs, citing all sorts of reasons to hate them, many of which are correct but also, and this is a hot take, it is probably pretty doable to get what you need from them if you throw 2 minutes at the problem provided using a screen reader is the only thing that is limiting your interaction with them.
And amusingly, because #accessibility is so incredibly diverse, we see a really interesting sociological thing happen where the folks who need fewer adaptations grumble at the ones needing more of them for being difficult and misrepresenting accessibility needs, which in turn gets them grumbled at for being elitist and bad for hating on people needing accessibilitt accommodations precisely because they should know better.
And amusingly, because #accessibility is so incredibly diverse, we see a really interesting sociological thing happen where the folks who need fewer adaptations grumble at the ones needing more of them for being difficult and misrepresenting accessibility needs, which in turn gets them grumbled at for being elitist and bad for hating on people needing accessibilitt accommodations precisely because they should know better.
except that is not a new problem, is it? We see that all the time with technology and people getting older essentially refusing to just "get with the times/program" and slowing everything down. So really... #accessibility as the new #technocracy?
I'm not innocent in this, I will admit to sighing when I see someone go ham on a company for DARING to use a PDF for something. I don't have the answers, other than offer configuration options, user choice and different formats for things, advice people have been giving for decades. But I do want to be an agent of bringing this kind of stuff to the forefront and pointing it out.
I'm not innocent in this, I will admit to sighing when I see someone go ham on a company for DARING to use a PDF for something. I don't have the answers, other than offer configuration options, user choice and different formats for things, advice people have been giving for decades. But I do want to be an agent of bringing this kind of stuff to the forefront and pointing it out.
I, myself, have no problem exploring a UI to see what I can do with it, and how I can work with it. I'm noticing that certain users are hesitant to do this, needing that roadmap I eluded to earlier. This may be a difference in training, more or less willingness to just go out and tinker with stuff, or an outright fear of breaking things, I don't know, but it's a fantastic example of how we might honestly need new words for what we now call #accessibility. Is there really such a thing? #foodForThought
Mikołaj Hołysz@zersiax Then there's also internationalization, and I honestly don't understand why we don't consider it part of accessibility.
"I don't understand this UI because I don't speak English" is probably the most common accessibility complaint there is, and yet, most accessibility-loving people do it focus on screen readers and aria labels instead, which objectively help a lot fewer people.
@miki yup. No speaking English or, to a somewhat lesser degree but still valid, not speaking the English you're meant to be speaking, e.g. not throwing needlessly jargon-filled, tech-flexy articles at people when it can be avoided
@zersiax Also unnecessary legalese, which, admittedly, is a much larger problem for us EU citizens than for anybody else.
I've encountered quite a few people who were stumped by a particularly well-designed cookie pop-up.
The "agree to all" / "necessary cookies only" pattern, while great and recommended from a legal standpoint as far as I understand, seems to be a stumbling block for some.
Sukil Etxenike
James Scholes@miki People do consider it to be a part of accessibility, when accessibility is being used as a broader term.
The primary problem isn't that people don't care about i18n (although many of them don't). It's that the A word has been silently, implicitly redefined in the industry to relate to people with disabilities, and an single-language interface doesn't objectively have a disproportionate impact on that audience (unless the content is disability-related and not duplicated elsewhere).
I could get into a discussion of machine translation improving all the time, and being more readily available than automated tools that can legitimately improve access. But that would only serve to set two sets of accessibility needs against each other, which never goes well. @zersiax
Darrell Hilliker 👨🦯♾️📡@zersiax Yes. #Accessibility means deliberately designing and developing in ways that include people and follow internationally accepted standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and other vendor-specific best practices and guidelines as appropriate. Other things are also important and those fall in to categories like #useability
❄️Faerie❄️@zersiax I honestly really love this thread! So much gets really fiddly with language and everyone's definition of the word really is, and should be, unique. But then how, of course, to work with as many people as possible? I personally am more than willing to dive into things that have no screen reader documentation, but if almost every button is unlabeled, I will likely turn to something else unless I need it for a particular use case.
@FrostPoem right, fair enough I'd say. For me it honestly depends on how badly I need the tool. I can desire global change until I'm blue in the face, and I'll work towards that when I have the time and energy, but also... life is a thing that happens and shit needs to get done soooo ... :)
@zersiax Oh yeah. If you need it, you need it, and you figure something out. But more often there's another tool out there that'll also do the job. But it so depends on the person and what they have the spoons for.
@zersiax You know it's not just disabled people willing to play with things. I have coworkers who won't click on menus to find an option they forget about.
@sapphireangel very true. there's an interesting bit of interplay there; it isn't just screen reader users that do this, but when screen readers do do this, it is considered an accessibility barrier, whereas when random colleagues do it, it is a colleague being dumb/silly/inefficient, OR it is a colleague doing what everybody else is doing because it is part of the baseline, e.g. right-clicking and choosing COpy instead of just hitting ctrl+c. its quite a fascinating thing