Another way to think of this is that everybody occasionally needs to do something unusual. But some people, due to their life circumstances, always need to do something unusual. And making things better for the always-odd folk is also a positive to the occasionally-odd folk.

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.

What are the advantage of “scroll to content/top” buttons over <main> for screen readers? I think that the use of those buttons is for when the CSS fails to load.

Send fair to me: someone’s got to test Mouse Keys! :)

I suppose it is a question of balance between: the entire web being better for all those that require accessibility vs. a subsection of that community holding their jobs. And it raises the possibility that the increased accessibility could lead to more job opportunities.

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.

Wait what? We should withhold accessibility features to not marginalize disabled people?

I think people outside of enterprise have no idea the cost to audit and fix a massive website.

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.

I think they were suggesting using AI to audit for accessibility, which is probably a better approach, and probably more effective than a lot of the basic accessibility checkers out there that work on a list of fairly simple rules and don't understand the context of what they're doing, so tend to give either very limited advice, or sometimes even offer bad advice.

Well isn’t it like asking the AI to pave roads?

I see, modern "GUI" programs aren't just GUI, whereas a TUI is just a GUI.

It's been a while since I've done actual development, but determining tabindex ordering was a very big deal in the early 2000s when clerks/admins were moving from legacy systems to the web. They did most of their jobs with a keyboard, and if you set up tabindexing so that they can use a keyboard for 90% of their job then they would fly through tasks. If you didn't then you'd have some very angry clients at the end of the project ;)

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.

> Democracy is not about mob rule, it's about a dialog.

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.