sad… developers have more empathy for the machine (network, main thread, perf metrics, loading times, etc etc etc)…
than they do for humans.
imagine if all of that brain power was spent on empathizing for users.
- accessibility wouldn't be an after thought
- UI wouldn't be annoying
- and more
but no;
more time is spent giving the machine what it wants and what keeps it happy
i already know folks are going to reply and say "but perf fixes ARE for users and their experience"
yes, but it's like someone saying "i keep my body healthy", yet they only work out their biceps. it's lopsided effort, it's not evently distributed.
@argyleink in my experience it's the biz people and moddle management that don't want us to work on a11ly from day one.
I was in an project where the UX designer and Dev team wanted to conduct direct user research but wasn't allowed to by higher ups (the ux guy quit in frustration).
That being said: yes there are those people probably considering themselves hardcore devs that only want to be bothered with machines and not humans. But i didzn't think that's the major issue.
@brettpeary Nah, that's seems reasonable and probably effective. There are government pressures too, that people even ignore those until they get a big fine.. money, money is very influential
But! The most effective thing I've seen, is to have someone in house that can use the experience and report efficacy. A leader watching a user struggle is very powerful.
@argyleink The comfort of apparent tech objectivity is hard core engineering while human stuff is soft per prevailing tech bro ethos. The 70s book The Psychology of Computer Programming introduces this & it 10x worse today.
Sound like you also made it to the place where computers are really about people & tech is the easier part and like you allude sadly not enough make it to this state. As far as I can tell many don’t ever want to because here lurk scary unvanquishable subjectivity dragons.
@argyleink I agree that it would be great if accessibility wasn’t an afterthought, like articles with autoplaying, looping videos, for example. Hypothetically.
*cough* https://developer.chrome.com/blog/scroll-snap-events
@yatil I wish autoplay was handled by the browser and used your motion preference.. same with gifs.
There's a big split between people wanting autoplay.
But I hear you. Maybe a web extension could help users with this in the interim 🤔
@argyleink It’s literally a basic WCAG failure. There aren’t even controls available. It doesn’t annoy me as my browser supports not autoplaying videos – but I’m far from an average web user.
And your “maybe an extension can do it” seems to show more empathy for the machine than for the needs of humans, as you have outlined in your initial post.
Just don’t have the animations autoplay and have a play/pause buttons for the humans. You can do it!
@yatil There's no controls‽ I'm very surprised. Will investigate.
Agree this is like a 101 consideration, but also unsure if you read the article or just scrolled it and for upset? Throwing the baby out with the bath water, as the post shares plenty of good considerations; there's room to celebrate and improve.
@argyleink No controls.
And you talked about the motivation of making things accessible from the outset, that was what I was commenting on. Not having controls is accessibility as an afterthought. It happens a lot, and even to those with good intentions, and it’s difficult to deduct a motivation from the result.
Adam Argyle
Sophie
r-hold
Brett Peary
ThomasAPowell
Eric Eggert
Shino