alt Hacker NewsIt's because adding new shiny features is fun and adding accessibility is boring, and most people in the free software world are there to have fun. That's also why bugs are always forgotten while people keep piling new features.
Replies
serial_dev • today at 1:58 PM
It’s not a free and open source issue, it’s a general issue in product development.
Whereas in free software, people develop apps to have fun, in business product development, teams always try to ship a feature that is the highest leverage, and making the app work well with screen readers is usually not the highest leverage item, unfortunately.
> adding accessibility is boring
I also think it's partly because adding accessibile interfaces is hard.
If you are not visually impaired then designing then when designing a visual interface for an application you are more-or-less designing for yourself. You know how to use visual interfaces, so it is relatively easy for you to evaluate whether you've done a good job.
Most people do not know how to use a screenreader, so if you're designing for a screenreader then it's going to be much harder for you to test the interface and evaluate whether it's actually usable by it's target audience.
I'd also love to see more educational resources on this topic. Not just "use this attribute/role for this use case", but "this is how using a screenreader works. This is an example of a good workflow . this is an example of bad workflow". There's tons of material out there for visual design, but I haven't come accross nearly so much for other interfaces.