2021-01-20 - Accessibility and Cost

Accessibility and Cost

it is actually pretty expensive because it means you can’t develop a very linear product, and it requires specialized expertise

the labor issues surrounding this are really complex and they unfortunately hurt smaller studios much more than larger ones there are also long term reaching consequences for disabled people as a result

the economic angle is important but its not a good thing, it means that most accessibility design will be concentrated in a corporation for example, according to a 2017 survey from the AFB (pretty sure, i have a link to it on my website) 81% of blind people referenced used ioS. the problem with referencing just video games here is that video games have a much younger target demographic while phones might be used by many ages.

see its funny i’m very radical and aggressive with my approach so I actually don’t agree with a lot of the stuff presented in the articles shown here but i’m not going to push my shit on you until you are familiar with the argument and are aware of the context of whats going on

the problem with standards is they’re hard to predict, hard to implement, and lead to beurocratic rejection I prefer guidelines and even then they shouldn’t be enforced, but rather used as best practices accessibility should not be encouraged through moral pleas but rather extendability of a program.

software should be designed in ways that facilitate “open UI”. for example, markdown is a very simple example. markdown is a markup language that allows the generation of pages from certain macros and text. this can be easily parsed into other formats and expressions. However, the language has limitations of what can be expressed in it, and many times you have to use HTML.

HTML itself is a markup language that in earlier versions very much used open UI and were a big reason why the early internet was much more accessible than today.

really we should be thinking of end user edge cases, machines ect

i like machines cuz you never know what you’re going to get when you program for an interface you just make a bunch of assumptions blind user deaf user ect

but with a machine in engineering you cant rely on abstractions but rather have to focus on many aspects of the machine that could fail at any time for example, in safety research there is a theory called the “swiss cheese model” which expresses how a series of oversights work together on many different layer to lead to potential failures

machines encourage us to think about end users instead of thinking about programming which is an abstraction on top of a literal machine

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