accessibility work isn't just about making things possible for folks with disabilities, it's about making things better for everyone.
Which like, we're all eventually gonna be odd folk! That's what age does to us. But we should understand these accommodations as being a net positive, not a cost, to society.
- accessibility is just usability. all it is is making sure your product is as usable by as many people as possible.
- it's a myth that "people with disabilities" are some other that excludes you, and 'accessibility' or assistive technologies only benefits other people. Everyone is only temporarily 'abled'. You need to use prescription glasses to comfortable read a computer screen? You're a parent trying to watch some TV while getting your child to sleep? All benefit from assistive technologies.
Not always. There are things that increase usability for fully abled people but decrease it for disabled people. Color-coding is a common one. Another is using smaller font size to make more info visible at once, or advanced touch gestures that can be accidentally triggered by shaky hands.
Then there are accessibility features that actively harm fully abled users, like sticky keys or screen readers that automatically follow focused UI elements.
I'm someone who enjoys this kind of work, especially when the target is a stylized drop down - I got to spend a week with the MDN page for the ARIA combobox open, trudging through all of the ins and outs of keyboard accessibility and I know I'm still missing a couple things (typing when the control is focused but not open, for example), and having clearly defined specs is something we don't seem to get a lot in webdev
The idea that it must be more accessible because it’s confined to a mono space typeface and communicates state mostly by changing the foreground and background color of the text it renders makes no sense to me.
That's not why. It's because TUI apps have to be designed around the strong possibility that a mouse isn't even available.
Also in a TUI you never ever have that issue that some text isn't copy/pastable like some dialogue boxes, in which case the screen reader might have issues picking it up too.
And in a TUI you don't have to deal with that window management crap. Moving stuff around because something else is on top. Everything happens within that little square.
It is a business opportunity as well. I worked at a company that paid for an audit before LLMs. There is tremendous cost savings possible here.
I also wonder if WebMCP will be the ultimate final incarnation of this.
Do you know one of the most underemployed groups are disabled people? And do you know where a number of disabled people get employment? Disability audits (unsurprisingly they're extremely good at this).
Congratulations on recommending further marginalising an extremely marginalised group.
But I'm not really a consequentialist and think of things in virtue ethics terms. And using technology to scale benefits to a wider group of people doesn't conflict for me. YMMV.
The law is a forcing function here. Lawsuits can and do happen when sites of a certain size fail to implement government-mandated laws. This is a good thing, IMO, but it only comes into force in the largest cases.
If there is a credible path to 1/10th the cost (while still providing liability insurance which is a critical piece) then that will likely encourage more enterprise to do it proactively, and will open the door for startups and mid-sized companies.
I have no idea why anyone would choose to see this as bad.
Sorry if that assertion stands opposed to your value prop.
No need to apologize, neither of us can predict the future. I am optimistic Fable-level models can succeed where the old not-actually-AI models failed. No shame in being pessimistic about the same.
There is so much to learn in this space.
There are small things, like dropping a 'jump to main content anchor' before the navigation so you don't have to tab through the top navigation everytime.
But there are also certain pages en layouts which require a lot of thought on a good keyboard navigation flow. Combine that with the need for responsive layouts, our inexperience with accessibility tools, etc; and the required effort quickly adds up.
I ended up stuck on my back, bed-bound in 2005, with a keyboard on my thighs. Using OSX (probably Tiger) and mostly native apps it was possible to get by with just the keyboard. It was the only platform that I could use without a pointer and I was hardly pushing boundaries.
These days just doing simple things like setting up a computer for the first time, I often can't be arsed with a mouse, or I am in places where there isn't room to use a mouse. I have to resort sometimes to a trackball out of necessity, but it's always a hassle and I frequently hit brick walls. Simple file managers can be nightmare enough. I remember just trying to navigate to a taskbar on some desktops being impossible. I couldn't get to something like the network manager applet. Thankfully there's a CLI for that now.
On the flip side, I also love the idea that you can do most things with a simple pointer.
I was trying Batocera linux recently on a laptop, the touchpad wasn't recognised, it's a gamepad driven OS (I think a layer on retro-arch), and navigating with a gamepad (once you RTM and figure it out) is actually quite nice. Kodi, has always been a bit of a faff on the keyboard, and that works well with the gamepad. Kodi was born on the Xbox so this of course should be a given. The UI for me with a keyboard has always been a bit clumsy.
For accessibility (the topic of this subthread), TUIs are not like GUIs.
I was fired because I did too much once
Can you explain what you mean by this phrase?
A common way this can fail is if the Tab key traverses through the UI elements in an unexpected order.
So just echoing that this is not just an accessibility thing, but just a good user interface design thing. If your UX designer isn't taking keyboards into account (jettison mobile first development into the sun please) then they have no business building business applications.
We would have been murdered by at least the point of sale people otherwise :)
Power users would complain within hours
No, not really. I know what you are trying to say, and I fully agree. We need to stop using "democracy" or "democratizing".
Democracy, in it's purest form, is about mob rule --majority rule, if you want to say it in a softer/kinder way. "Democratizing" means giving a mob control of the thing, it does not mean making it accessible to all at all.
"Democratization" in a sense is about making things accessible for discussions. "Dictatorship" is the opposing term - things get "dictated" by a single entity - person, political force or a corporation.
No my friend, Democracy is majority rule, which easily turns into a ruling mob. It has nothing whatsoever to do with dialog.
Also, your quote of Lincoln's address is taken completely out of context. He was talking about his opposition of the ideas of a faction of Democrats who were in favor of slavery and his support of the majority of Republicans who believed slavery was a moral, social, and political evil.
In other words, take the time to at least do some research before you try to use quotes in support of a failed conclusion.
Did you read the Greeks in school? Probably not. I recommend Plato's Republic. Both he and Socrates talked about the flaws of direct/pure democracy that would usually make it degenerate into mob rule.
In Republic Plato developed a hierarchy:
Aristocracy: Rule by the wise (my comment: a fantasy)
Timocracy: Rule by the honorable (my comment: another fantasy)
Oligarchy: Rule by the rich (my comment: a reality in many societies)
Democracy: Rule by the masses (my comment: glad we don't have this)
Tyranny: Rule by a despot (my comment: plenty of examples of this in history)
So, "democratizing" means letting the masses have their way. It does not mean making things accessible to everyone, which is the hilariously or tragically ignorant way in which Silicon Valley tries to use the term. You see startups all the time say "we are democratizing <X>". Just how stupid are these people? They are saying we are going to let the mob have access and benefit from <X> not making it available to everyone.
In the context of Plato’s political philosophy the modern, casual use of the word "democratizing" completely ignores the historical and philosophical baggage of the root word democracy.
The irony is that modern society uses "democratize" as an undisputed positive term (meaning liberation and fairness), while the very philosophers who birthed western political thought used "democracy" as a warning label for instability and lawlessness.
A better term for what startups want to say would be "commoditizing": turning a specialized, elite resource into a public good or a widely available commodity; not "democratizing", which is an ignorant use of a term that means almost exactly the opposite.
I guess classical education has not been a part of schooling for quite some time. As a kid I did not necessarily enjoy reading the Great Books. As an adult, I can see how much damage has been caused by the abandonment of such valuable teachings.
As much as i do agree, overtime language does eventually change but it can happen over our dead bodies
Exactly, words do not carry their root's connotations as a permanent tax. 'idiot' used to mean "a layman, someone not holding office or lacking skill', or "a person not interested in politics"; 'nice' comes from Latin 'nescius', which meant "ignorant"; 'cretin' meant "Christian".
Democracy is not mob rule, and the Greeks agreed. They had a separate word for mob rule: 'ochlocracy'. Having two words means the Greeks did not treat them as identical. Plato and Aristotle argued democracy tends toward it, but they still have not treated it for a definition.
Bringing Plato here is kind of weird: The Republic is an anti-democratic aristocrat's argument, written by a man whose teacher was executed by an Athenian jury. Plato was born into the Athenian elite. His mother's family gave Athens tyrants whose regime killed something like 2000 citizens in less than a year. Plato initially was invited to join, he considered it, and pulled back when he saw what they did. He was part of anti-democratic coup. Citing him here for the word definition, is like citing Marx for the only definition of 'capitalism' - not exactly inaccurate, and might be even exactly correct, yet the context and connotation still matters - Plato took neutral-to-positive word and gave it a hostile reading, while Marx haven't even talked about 'capitalism' (he had "kapitalistische produktionsweise"), the actual term as we know it was popularized later.
'democracy' aside, "make accessible to all" is a long-established dictionary sense of 'democratize', it was never a Silicon Valley invention. And you're right - "representative democracy" only took hold in the late 1700s. The term's meaning moved after Plato. If democracy could shift from Plato's warning label to a thing Hamilton endorsed, 'democratize' could shift too.
I implore you, good sire (@robomartin), to unsaddle your high horse and let the language take its course - if people and times decide to give words different meaning, it most likely will happen anyway.
... And then your app turns into a canvas made in Electron.
It is an absolute train-wreck trying to get everything to work and for the overwhelming majority of products it isnt work the effort. It isnt like you put a wheelchair ramp up and are done. It is a constant battle with every change.
It is just another one of those things where the minuet minority suffers. Now if a company got some tax write off for it, that would change things.