So let's say some random person, Bob, builds an awesome website in his free time. Bob spends hundreds of hours just so others can use his awesome idea. Now you're telling him what to do. That's not morality, that's just entitlement.
Even if Bob was to put some ads on his webpage, because he wasn't so selfless after all, then what?
> It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up
If you have a problem, you complain. If you don't complain, then you'll have to wait until someone else does or just live with it. That goes for everybody; it's how life works.
> If you build for the web, you have a moral obligation to make sure it works right for everyone.
No. No I don't.
It wasn't my moral obligation to build that website to begin with. It wasn't my moral obligation to make it available to anyone in the first place. It's not my obligation to translate the web page to make it available to people who don't speak my language. And it isn't my obligation to make it available or accessible to any other group of people.
It's an interesting discussion. Governments often require buildings and businesses to have certain accommodations for certain types of people.
Are websites different to buildings of businesses?
Mr Bob Hypothetical makes his new burger joint, and spend hundreds of hours working making it so people can eat his awesome burgers. Should there be any building or health codes he should have to follow?
I realise the barrier of entry to a website is lower than a physical business. Presumably though at somewhere between ismyideafunnyyet.xyz and amazon.com/co.uk/ca/multi-national doom machine we have to start treating them with the same or similar expectations to the local chippy.
It's one thing to discuss how to best support people with disabilities.
It's another thing to sit on your own high horse, and preach from on high about how other developers should do "their fucking job". I'm so sick of this gluttonous moral posturing.
It goes deeper than that. At my enterprise company, our accessibility department explicitly does not gather any data on our users with accessibility needs. We don't know who they are, what problems they are facing, or if our solutions work for them or not. The reason? It would infringe on their "rights" (What rights are these? I didn't press further).
What they do is hire a few people with visible disabilities (wheelchair or missing limbs) and then parade them around to development teams to shame us into accessibility "compliance". It is a gross process involving lots of trial-and-error.
Maybe morality in general is not a benchmark but rather an endless continuum. Let's say Alice builds a similar website to Bob, but took extra time to add accessibility. You could argue Alice's site is morally superior to Bob's without saying Bob is immoral.
Hackernews readers put a huge amount of stock in building websites without JS, that work in lots of browsers, that deliver tiny bundles or no bundle at all, with old tech rather than new, and that "just work", because those are the things that impact the readers themselves.
As soon as someone suggests building a site that works as well for other people the comments fill up with reasons not to.
You might as well tell them, "Tough shit." Different markets and different languages, etc. don't deserve automatic accommodation, but if you fully believe in accommodating disabled people in order to give them the dignity and humanity they deserve, then you'd take on the moral imperative to make an effort at accessibility.
Maybe it shouldn't be a legal requirement for private-market web documents, but dismissing it altogether is not a morally defensible position.
Would the ADA have ever been passed under the principles you're espousing?
If you only look at market advantage, yes. But from a risk management perspective, non-English speakers are not a protected class so it's not legally discrimination if you don't translate it but it is if you fail to make it accessible to people with disabilities.
Presumably the 2.5% figure is reasonably similar in many other countries, as opposed to the % who speak spanish, which will be higher in spain but lower in kenya.
If those websites are life or business supporting or required to use (government, etc).
I don't think it's a "moral obligation" to make e.g. a gaming website accessible, any more than it is to "help the poor" or thousands of other ways we can directly do good.
In other words, if someone fails to make their hobby SaaS for passive income accessible, they haven't have some "moral failing". They just prioritized shipping basic functionality for the majority of users. It's not really that different that opening a website or business for business in one country (or part of the country) and not another.
This attitude is the same as every other business choosing to ignore the issue, scaled down to one person. This demonstrates why larger organisations don't do the work either.
> It's not really that different that opening a website or business for business in one country (or part of the country) and not another.
It is, because people can choose to move to a part of the country where your business operates. Maybe people don't do this as a rule, but the option is there. People can't just opt to not be disabled.
I would have no problem if this were only a moral obligation, but it seems like it's becoming more and more a legal obligation. Legal obligations that require a developer add something frustrate me, because they essentially crush people doing things for fun.
I'd say, when people build stuff for free, or in a way that it just barely covers the costs, it's even morally wrong to expect them to make their stuff more accessible. They're already doing others a favor and asking for even more is just a sign of entitlement.
It's also a business obligation, in my opinion, because 1) an increasing percentage of the population has some form of disability, and 2) not accommodating them has a bottom-line business impact.
There's a moral, legal, and business obligation to serve your product in an inclusive manner. We're working to get select developers IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals) certified on my team.
Building an unsafe house exposes people to active harm. When you invite someone into a house you make the implied warranty that the roof will not collapse and kill them do to your negligence.
> You’re a web professional
If you're making a new product for Google or Microsoft, I completely agree with this article. However, developing web apps is not the same as building bridges. If you are a bridge builder, you're a licensed civil engineer with a sizeable government budget. If you build web apps, you might be a 30-year senior dev, or you might be a student trying to launch a startup with a hundred dollars and no employees. Or, you might just be making a personal web page for yourself or family.
> The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it.
As with any term, "the web" can have multiple meanings. This statement is true of the original web implementation, "[an] HTML file with no CSS and no JavaScript." That's not the web anyone knows today. Modern definitions of the web might include PWAs,
> It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up
If you're Google and you "forget" to alt-tag images, again I agree by all means. But this is only true if we're talking about common knowledge stuff (which is relative to size and resources of the developer) or things that are deliberately ignored.
> It should be easier
Why is it the job of a side-project, non-profit, startup, or personal developer to conform to obscure, complex standards--why isn't it the job of the for-profit screen reader companies to make decent standards in the first place?
> you have a moral obligation to make sure it works right for everyone.
Building anything is a game of tradeoffs. If you can afford and have the expertise to do so, you absolutely should invest in a11y. Your moral obligation is to not intentionally harm users, not to spend endless amounts of time complying with every standard and best practice.
I agree to a point, but I think it goes too far at times, mostly when it comes to making _all_ images/video accessible. I can't imagine YouTube would exist if it had to have captioning for every single video to begin with, for example. (Now they auto-generate, but I don't think even today your average independent web dev could make their own videos do that, pretty sure YouTube needed a huge corpus of content to start with to develop it. And even with auto generated subs, any video that's mostly things happening without words is "dark" to a blind person.)
> I can't imagine YouTube would exist if it had to have captioning for every single video to begin with
In many instances, the rise of YouTube has been deleterious to the web. So much content that would have once been presented in text is now video, with the result that what might have been a fast skim now forces readers to move at the slower pace of the video, and it is much more difficult to parse for those with disabilities or to find in a search engine. (Too much content today has moved to images, too – it is remarkable how people who would have once written a blog consisting of longform text, are now trying to shoehorn their content into the more limited space that Instagram provides for them.)
Yea. But for the work most developers do, making their content accessible is largely just learning how to do it. UI toolkits will generally do the right thing out box. Using the semantically correct elements for your content, once you learn how to do so, is no extra development cost. For me, I belive it is the morally correct thing thing to do, for the 1 of me to spend a few hours learning in order to make N people's lives that little bit easier in the future.
The main accessibility cost is when it comes to building new UI patterns. But that's a relatively rare case, most sites will be served fine by piecing together elements from existing toolkits and modules.
Perhaps a more general state is that it's a moral obligation to think and care about inclusivity relevant to your platform, instead of just "works for me"ing it.
The application I work on is not specifically inclusive of blind people. However, it is inclusive of people who have very basic levels of general and technical education (e.g. not understanding what a percentage is), because those are the people we know use it.
I think it's understandable if your videogame doesn't work with blind people, but lots of people have simple visual imparements you could work around (colour blind modes, scalable UI for old people etc).
Similarly, giving a shit about having good contrast on your website doesn't seem like a big ask, as well as not breaking everything when someone wants to scale fonts.
I don't think you have to support every possible use case under the sun, but at least thinking about and considering some of them is a big positive step.
You could turn anything into a moral obligation, eg. I have a moral obligation not to eat pasta because there is less environmentally damaging food available and it's also probably doing some non-zero amount of harm to my body compared to something healthier so since I may feel a tiny bit worse therefore I'll have less potential energy to help someone in need or have a lower probability of assisting a disabled person when I next encounter one. So let's not play that game.
As a contract developer who provides estimates on my work I always include a section for ADA compliance, WCAG compliance, Accessibility, and a few others. I provide time estimates and explain to my clients that I consider these extremely important things to do. My company has the ability, knowledge, and experience making websites that are accessible.
Our clients often don't want to spend the money required for this task.
This seems to assume that the developer is at fault for making the choice to not make websites accessible and not management or clients who don't want people to spend time on "useless" things like aria attributes.
I preach about accessibility to every manager and client I meet. Most don't care because it "costs them money for such a small percentage of users".
I'd say the moral obligation of the developer is to be aware of the issue and be capable of delivering an accessible website if the client wants it. Asking for anything beyond that is unrealistic.
Adherence to laws or special guidelines may take time and cost money, but isn't a professional working to spec what a client should be able to expect? Should a baseline of accessibility not always be provided and thus figured into the base price? Does adhering to HTML Spec for example cost a premium price?
Perhaps you might have more success if you abandon the practice of separating Accessibility into its own line item, and simply include it as a given in your estimate. It could be worth a try.
We have vision algorithms that are able to tell that a picture is a picture of a horse, why do we still need the alt attribute ?
We have the level of knowledge to build a tool that make website accessible, so my opinion is you need that tool. It is easier to build one accessible tool than to ask all developers of the world to put an alt attribute and respect the h1, h2 naming
Yes. And in some cases you can actually be fined and or sued for ignoring accessibility requirements for handicapped and senior users. So you could argue the government will enforce morality if you do not.
Side note, in interviews I always gauge seniority by asking about accessibility. I find it an obvious characteristic of more junior engineers to not have had to consider accessibility APIs. It is a must, and rightfully so.
>Would you say the builder has a moral obligation to not build a house that’s going to collapse on people?
This is nothing to do with moral obligation. At least for me, much more to with the cost vs return on building a house that’s going to collapse on people.
Unless I'm forced to build website that is accessible, I won't do it.
TFA gets a few things wrong - the analogy to house building is off, and I don't think the moral argument is even necessary - but ultimately if, as I infer, he's talking about web professionals, not hobbyists, those people should care and be educated about how to do this.
The house analogy bothers me because a house is not a public space the way a shop or museum is. And a lot of accessibility concerns like contrast ratios are simple and can be minor CSS changes - analogous to curb cuts in sidewalks. But if you're acting as architect for a public-facing website for a business then it absolutely makes sense without invoking any moral obligation to engineer at least a minimum amount of accessibility.
I look at this very simply. If you are a business that is marketing the app to external consumers, adding internationalization and accessibility protects you from possible legal and regulatory trouble, while also increasing the size of your potential user base.
But for side projects? No, when it comes to my side project, I'm the master, in the dictator, what I say goes. Users don't like it? Tough, go build your own app.
You should build for your market. Unless you're specifically targeting a market segment that has accessibility requirements, then you should do the least amount of work possible to provide value, then iterate. When creating a product in an early stage market, most development time is better suited to discovering an MVP than adding accessibility features. Think of it as premature optimization.
Yes, it's a good thing for sites and apps to be accessible.
No, it's not an obligation of any kind (nor should it be).
For companies that have grown enough to be providing services to (and profiting off of) a large enough part of the population, it would make sense to expect them to put resources into this. For someone working for free, trying to get an idea off the ground, or servicing a very niche subset of the population (i.e. a very restricted market) this blanket statement makes no sense and the costs it would add to make it an obligation would likely only cause a decrease in quantity of what is available (which, if deemed valuable, can be made more accessible later on) rather than an increase in quality of what's available.
[+] [-] DarkWiiPlayer|7 years ago|reply
Even if Bob was to put some ads on his webpage, because he wasn't so selfless after all, then what?
> It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up
If you have a problem, you complain. If you don't complain, then you'll have to wait until someone else does or just live with it. That goes for everybody; it's how life works.
> If you build for the web, you have a moral obligation to make sure it works right for everyone.
No. No I don't.
It wasn't my moral obligation to build that website to begin with. It wasn't my moral obligation to make it available to anyone in the first place. It's not my obligation to translate the web page to make it available to people who don't speak my language. And it isn't my obligation to make it available or accessible to any other group of people.
[+] [-] SCdF|7 years ago|reply
Are websites different to buildings of businesses?
Mr Bob Hypothetical makes his new burger joint, and spend hundreds of hours working making it so people can eat his awesome burgers. Should there be any building or health codes he should have to follow?
I realise the barrier of entry to a website is lower than a physical business. Presumably though at somewhere between ismyideafunnyyet.xyz and amazon.com/co.uk/ca/multi-national doom machine we have to start treating them with the same or similar expectations to the local chippy.
[+] [-] danielvaughn|7 years ago|reply
It's another thing to sit on your own high horse, and preach from on high about how other developers should do "their fucking job". I'm so sick of this gluttonous moral posturing.
[+] [-] jbob2000|7 years ago|reply
What they do is hire a few people with visible disabilities (wheelchair or missing limbs) and then parade them around to development teams to shame us into accessibility "compliance". It is a gross process involving lots of trial-and-error.
[+] [-] francisofascii|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|7 years ago|reply
As soon as someone suggests building a site that works as well for other people the comments fill up with reasons not to.
This strikes me as selfish.
[+] [-] aklemm|7 years ago|reply
Maybe it shouldn't be a legal requirement for private-market web documents, but dismissing it altogether is not a morally defensible position.
Would the ADA have ever been passed under the principles you're espousing?
[+] [-] csande17|7 years ago|reply
People who do not speak English natively make up about 20% of the US population, and around 8% of the US cannot speak English fluently. (Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_Stat... , http://blog.languageline.com/limited-english-proficient-cens...)
So if you're aiming for maximum inclusivity, you should consider translating your app into Spanish a higher priority than adding ARIA tags.
[+] [-] zeveb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] extra88|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SCdF|7 years ago|reply
Presumably the 2.5% figure is reasonably similar in many other countries, as opposed to the % who speak spanish, which will be higher in spain but lower in kenya.
[+] [-] bluthru|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
I don't think it's a "moral obligation" to make e.g. a gaming website accessible, any more than it is to "help the poor" or thousands of other ways we can directly do good.
In other words, if someone fails to make their hobby SaaS for passive income accessible, they haven't have some "moral failing". They just prioritized shipping basic functionality for the majority of users. It's not really that different that opening a website or business for business in one country (or part of the country) and not another.
[+] [-] the_other|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jscholes|7 years ago|reply
It is, because people can choose to move to a part of the country where your business operates. Maybe people don't do this as a rule, but the option is there. People can't just opt to not be disabled.
[+] [-] Mirioron|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DarkWiiPlayer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanadium|7 years ago|reply
There's a moral, legal, and business obligation to serve your product in an inclusive manner. We're working to get select developers IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals) certified on my team.
On the legal front, see also Gomez v. GNC: https://www.levelaccess.com/federal-court-decision-gomez-v-g...
[+] [-] morpheuskafka|7 years ago|reply
> Morality is not always relative (house example)
Building an unsafe house exposes people to active harm. When you invite someone into a house you make the implied warranty that the roof will not collapse and kill them do to your negligence.
> You’re a web professional
If you're making a new product for Google or Microsoft, I completely agree with this article. However, developing web apps is not the same as building bridges. If you are a bridge builder, you're a licensed civil engineer with a sizeable government budget. If you build web apps, you might be a 30-year senior dev, or you might be a student trying to launch a startup with a hundred dollars and no employees. Or, you might just be making a personal web page for yourself or family.
> The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it.
As with any term, "the web" can have multiple meanings. This statement is true of the original web implementation, "[an] HTML file with no CSS and no JavaScript." That's not the web anyone knows today. Modern definitions of the web might include PWAs,
> It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up
If you're Google and you "forget" to alt-tag images, again I agree by all means. But this is only true if we're talking about common knowledge stuff (which is relative to size and resources of the developer) or things that are deliberately ignored.
> It should be easier
Why is it the job of a side-project, non-profit, startup, or personal developer to conform to obscure, complex standards--why isn't it the job of the for-profit screen reader companies to make decent standards in the first place?
> you have a moral obligation to make sure it works right for everyone.
Building anything is a game of tradeoffs. If you can afford and have the expertise to do so, you absolutely should invest in a11y. Your moral obligation is to not intentionally harm users, not to spend endless amounts of time complying with every standard and best practice.
[+] [-] Glyptodon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mediterraneo10|7 years ago|reply
In many instances, the rise of YouTube has been deleterious to the web. So much content that would have once been presented in text is now video, with the result that what might have been a fast skim now forces readers to move at the slower pace of the video, and it is much more difficult to parse for those with disabilities or to find in a search engine. (Too much content today has moved to images, too – it is remarkable how people who would have once written a blog consisting of longform text, are now trying to shoehorn their content into the more limited space that Instagram provides for them.)
[+] [-] connor4312|7 years ago|reply
The main accessibility cost is when it comes to building new UI patterns. But that's a relatively rare case, most sites will be served fine by piecing together elements from existing toolkits and modules.
[+] [-] SCdF|7 years ago|reply
The application I work on is not specifically inclusive of blind people. However, it is inclusive of people who have very basic levels of general and technical education (e.g. not understanding what a percentage is), because those are the people we know use it.
I think it's understandable if your videogame doesn't work with blind people, but lots of people have simple visual imparements you could work around (colour blind modes, scalable UI for old people etc).
Similarly, giving a shit about having good contrast on your website doesn't seem like a big ask, as well as not breaking everything when someone wants to scale fonts.
I don't think you have to support every possible use case under the sun, but at least thinking about and considering some of them is a big positive step.
[+] [-] soheil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overshard|7 years ago|reply
Our clients often don't want to spend the money required for this task.
This seems to assume that the developer is at fault for making the choice to not make websites accessible and not management or clients who don't want people to spend time on "useless" things like aria attributes.
I preach about accessibility to every manager and client I meet. Most don't care because it "costs them money for such a small percentage of users".
[+] [-] DarkWiiPlayer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grumbledour|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DamnInteresting|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janpot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|7 years ago|reply
This is not true. What about color contrast? What about alt text for images? These problems (and many others) can occur in plain html pages.
[+] [-] vanadium|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mediterraneo10|7 years ago|reply
Another example: one must use <span lang="XX"> tags on foreign words and phrases sprinkled in a text, otherwise screenreaders can choke on them.
[+] [-] queercode|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polote|7 years ago|reply
We have the level of knowledge to build a tool that make website accessible, so my opinion is you need that tool. It is easier to build one accessible tool than to ask all developers of the world to put an alt attribute and respect the h1, h2 naming
[+] [-] elpakal|7 years ago|reply
Side note, in interviews I always gauge seniority by asking about accessibility. I find it an obvious characteristic of more junior engineers to not have had to consider accessibility APIs. It is a must, and rightfully so.
[+] [-] matz1|7 years ago|reply
This is nothing to do with moral obligation. At least for me, much more to with the cost vs return on building a house that’s going to collapse on people.
Unless I'm forced to build website that is accessible, I won't do it.
[+] [-] selfsimilar|7 years ago|reply
The house analogy bothers me because a house is not a public space the way a shop or museum is. And a lot of accessibility concerns like contrast ratios are simple and can be minor CSS changes - analogous to curb cuts in sidewalks. But if you're acting as architect for a public-facing website for a business then it absolutely makes sense without invoking any moral obligation to engineer at least a minimum amount of accessibility.
[+] [-] glvn|7 years ago|reply
But for side projects? No, when it comes to my side project, I'm the master, in the dictator, what I say goes. Users don't like it? Tough, go build your own app.
[+] [-] aklemm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malvosenior|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luiscleto|7 years ago|reply
No, it's not an obligation of any kind (nor should it be).
For companies that have grown enough to be providing services to (and profiting off of) a large enough part of the population, it would make sense to expect them to put resources into this. For someone working for free, trying to get an idea off the ground, or servicing a very niche subset of the population (i.e. a very restricted market) this blanket statement makes no sense and the costs it would add to make it an obligation would likely only cause a decrease in quantity of what is available (which, if deemed valuable, can be made more accessible later on) rather than an increase in quality of what's available.
[+] [-] jimmaswell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigcostooge2|7 years ago|reply
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