alt Hacker NewsIt greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling. It says something about our industry that accessibility is often viewed as a “luxury” feature that can be dealt with once you’ve reached some level of success or revenue or whatever.
I’m hopeful AI tools can improve qol for those who require screen readers and similar tools but have a sinking feeling that it will only transfer even more of the burden for accessible access from operator to user.
> It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling.
This really depends on company size, and the company in question.
Everything Microsoft does in this space is excellent, VS Code almost feels like an app specifically designed for the blind at times. Other large companies aren't as good, but their products are usually somewhat usable.
Startups are a mixed bag, Zed is notoriously and completely inaccessible for example. Most SaaS tools wouldn't pass an audit but can be used with significant annoyances.
Open Source is usually pretty bad. GTK still doesn't do any accessibility on non-Linux platforms. QT used to be completely inaccessible, although they've significantly improved in the last couple years. Linux in general has major issues that makes it almost unusable unless you understand it at a very deep level, and maybe not even then.
Accessibility isn't a sexy thing to do, so unless you're practicing manager-driven development, nobody wants to work on it.