Stop trying to upgrade disabled people's body when the problem is your design!
@WeirdWriter argues that the tech industry needs to stop trying to sell useless expensive gadgets no disabled person wants, or can afford, and start fixing actual accessibility barriers, like bad code, and poorly designed infrastructures.
https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/disability-dongle/
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@stephaniewalter @WeirdWriter Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, because the limits to my physical ability are such I don't know if I actually qualify as "disabled." I have chronic pain and probably lingering effects from COVID that means until I was able to rebuild muscles, it got so bad I had to walk with a cane.
I think this shit would bother me less if it wasn't obvious they never spoke to a single disabled person through any of the R&D, or at least ignored all their feedback. The "wheelchair that walks up stairs" concept as described in the article feels like the perfect example of that.
We already had attachments you could add to stairs to literally drive people with mobility issues up the wall. If ramps and elevators are truly impossible for that particular building, I don't think they are, but if they were, why are we not just reinforcing the railing enough that we could do that, but have the whole wheelchair attach to it? Why are we not designing lighter wheelchairs so we could do that and just have it be light enough to sit in their lap? There are so many ways to accommodate this that don't involve making glorified low-budget SciFi props.
Personally, the only caveat I even have to the statement we can just add ramps and improve doors, but that they refuse to fund those because it's not sexy, is how awful some of the ramps I experienced were when my mobility was so limited they were a necessity for me. For some of those ramps, they were so poorly designed I just fought the pain to go up stairs because it literally would've been more painful to take the ramp for me.
Ideally, we'd have both. We'd have wider doors, more and less bullshit ramps, and also actually practical, SciFi concrpt ways to bypass physically walking up stairs if they *really* feel like they have to do it that way.
This hurts, because, it's true: "Silicon Valley will spend millions developing a glove that translates sign language into speech (badly), but they won't spend ten minutes adding Alt-Text to their images. They will build a headset that describes the room to me (poorly), but they won't use semantic HTML headings so I can actually navigate a webpage."
@stephaniewalter wait_its_all_divs_always_has_been_pew.png
@stephaniewalter they can sell the glove and the headset. Not much profit in alt-text or semantic html.
@stephaniewalter
I didn't think much about alt text until I got active on here. At first it does add a bit of friction to posting an image, but I quickly got used to it and I honestly enjoy the thought process of writing good description of images (to be fair, I mostly post pictures of my cat, and I love telling people about her)
@jbowen haa I do enjoy writing them too, choosing what I describe to fit the purpose of my post. For me it's part of the writing the post exercice.
I always worry that my alt texts are sometimes a little bit long though, so I hope I'm not overdoing it.
@stephaniewalter it’s PR. They aren’t developing anything for accessibility that isn’t going to be used for something else.
Also modern devs don’t understand basic HTML and all that is literally built in to accomplish the very same thing they need GB of storage and AI to do it the hard way. It’s all part of the “move fast and break things” mentality which is basically another way of saying “I don’t understand what is going on; so let me distract you”.
@stephaniewalter
Tech bros: "genAI improves accesibility! You're ableist if you don't love genAI!!"
genAI: creates inaccessible interfaces at scale.
@stragu I had techros go "but with agents you won't need to go on the website so it's fine agents will solve it we don't need accessibility". But my dudes let's just say this is true: you still need to make the agent accessible 🤷
@stephaniewalter (I assume you mean "maake the agents accessible"?)
Yeah.
"Why tag web content properly when you can layer on top of your browser an overengineered, proprietary, subscription-based tool that burns coal to generate a picture description that misses the point? Look at me, I'm your forward-thinking saviour!"
@stephaniewalter The classic Disability Dongle
@stephaniewalter @WeirdWriter yeah. Also, sometimes you even have to backtrack and say 'who designed this infrastructure that a ramp was needed in the first place?' If something is designed at the start to be easily-accessible, then it's easier for everyone.