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
Keri Svendsen@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