One of the great things about accessibility is that it often doesn't just benefit people with disabilities.
My wife and I have watched a lot of TV in the past year with the volume down and captioning on, while we enjoy some down time while our baby is sleeping.
A ramped entrance to a building allows wheelchair-bound folks access, but it also helps able-bodied people using delivery dollies.
Making simple, lightweight web pages makes them accessible to those with older browsers and devices, but it also saves power consumption, time, and frustration for folks on M1 MacBook Pros.
> One of the great things about accessibility is that it often doesn't just benefit people with disabilities.
I really love how Microsoft's design team has pushed this with their “Inclusive Design” concept[1] and highlighting how any sort of disability can be situational (holding a baby), temporary (broken arm), or permanent (missing arm) but we often only think of those in the last context despite there being orders of magnitude more people in the first two categories. Parenting is really good for showing this out since you get the need to be quiet, be able to do something using only one hand (or none), navigate sidewalks with a stroller, trying to do anything while sleep deprived, etc.
There's a great chart on page 42 (“Persona Spectrum”) of this PDF which I try to get every team I work on to go through which really gets people to think about what this means:
1. With due respect to various useful elements of design in Microsoft's work - this booklet reads like "We design for black people! We design for LGBT people! We design for disabled people! Look at us, we're so morally and politically superior!"
2. Microsoft makes software which costs a lot of money (for most people in the world); often a lot of money. One of the main problems people with disabilities have is low income and lots of expenses.
3. Microsoft makes software which hogs resources and thus runs poorly, or not at all, on older or simpler, low-power devices. This also not very accessible. So it might have a perfect UI experience - on the computer people don't have. Admittedly, though, this is not as bad of a problem in the past few years.
4. I wonder how actually accessible MS apps and Windows actually are. Considering how they've botched a lot of their designs in recent years even for normies (Metro; Ribbons).
It's disturbing that you find trying to be inclusive offensive because you perceive them as political opponents. I mean, who cares what people's political leanings are if they are making things better for people who haven't been well-served historically?
Similarly, while Microsoft software isn't free nothing in computing is and it seems like an odd angle to criticize an effort to help make their products better based on decisions made by other people in different parts of a huge company, or to criticize them for things in the past which they've since corrected.
Haha, that lazy troll takes me right back to Slashdot before the turn of the century. On the off chance that you actually believe what you're doing is useful, here's why this form of advocacy has singularly failed to attract converts (speaking as someone who's been using and contributing to open source software since the early 1990s): open source software is only free if your time and expertise are free.
That free software has to run on non-free hardware (even if the oft-heralded RISC-V revolution happens, someone has to manufacture the device) and most people do not have the skills or time to assemble the hardware or maintain an OS. That means that we're all making tradeoffs of what things we buy and what we do ourselves, and for the vast majority of computer users, even open source developers, that involves outsourcing that work to a handful of companies (or, maybe, a hardware company and Debian). Most computer users consider that a good deal: they spend time on things they like and pay a rather small amount of money relative to the utility they get from a transformative device like a general purpose computer. This means that for most people the decisions which matter the most are made by Microsoft, Apple, or Google — and that anyone who cares should applaud them improving accessibility because it will affect daily life for billions of people.
This is especially true for accessibility, where people develop deep habits around things like screen readers and quality matters a great deal. I happen to work with a number of visually impaired users and have not heard good things about the Linux screen readers compared to their Windows or iOS counterparts, and that means that in the context of this thread it's really not useful to snark about the moral superiority of free software.
> open source software is only free if your time and expertise are free
but since you seem to actually be trying to discuss this in a thoughtful way, please note that we're not given a choice between free software that takes time and expertise to use and maintain vs closed software that takes no time or expertise to maintain. To mimic your original phrase, Windows 10 Pro is only $199 if your time and expertise is free. Going further, in my experience it's often been the case that the free software takes less time and less expertise to use and maintain.
Also, it's worth mentioning that you are conflating two different things, open source software and free software, a distinction that often doesn't matter but is central when the point at hand is the ethics of free-as-in-freedom software vs non-free software, a distinction the term open source was deliberately created to elide. You are also conflating free-as-in-freedom with free-as-in-beer by opposing the "software is only freedom-free" with "your time and expertise are free-as-in-beer free".
Finally it's not clear to me why you went on to address the pragmatics of non-free hardware or the fact that human effort is necessary to build computers, maintain distros, write kernels etc. Is there a claim that it's unethical to try to run free software on the hardware that you have, or that free(dom) software must always be provide without cost on hardware that is both free(dom) and without cost? If not, then computer users can still spend a small amount of money, relative to utility, to buy a computer that runs free(dom) software.
I'm not disputing your claims that accessibility software on Windows or iOS is better than that on Linux, because I don't know the space. It's an unrelated argument, afaict. To illustrate this, simply imagine that some government or corporation had decided to make high-quality accessibility software available under a free license. (I am reminded of Intel's work supporting Dr. Hawking.) You wouldn't conclude from this that all your previous thoughts about free and open source software vs closed/commerical software were wrong, I assume.
I just wanted to point out the irony that the manual and other documentation for this "inclusive design" toolkit come as PDFs – the worst choice you can make if you strive for accessibility.
PDF/A is a small family of sub-formats to PDFs which amount to the accessible subset of PDF + some requirements.
PDF/A and PDF/UA are mandated by a variety of governments for PDF distribution. They're very suitable to archival and are accessible (screenreaders can work with them, their text can be cleanly copied, etc).
That might be true, but these ones are not. I can't efficiently read them on my smartphone and have to scroll around a lot. They also show two pages on one, probably to be better printable for some marketing material, but I would never want to print a PDF that's mostly black, because that would overwhelm my printer. I'm also not near a printer right now. This is clearly inaccessible to me.
HTML, on the other side, can be easily made readable on any device. Even if the author didn't care, through readable mode in my browser.
PDFs are often the BEST way to read something. I prefer PDF text books over any other format, because (not very good) computer algorithms laying out text is inferior to proper professional layout.
PDF/A isn't necessarily accessible. First, PDF is very hard to impossible to scale for people who need big writing, due to reflowing being unavailable or not working properly. Text in PDF/A can still be a big image, e.g. in a scan for archival purposes, if you are "lucky" there is an OCR overlay, but then your screenreader reads OCR'd text which is hit-or-miss. And text ordering is supposed to be "reading order" in PDF/A, but many tools, especially DTP tools make a mess of it and jumble up the (screenreader-visible) order of text in textboxes, columns and sometimes even paragraphs.
IME PDF/A is better than nothing, but far worse than plain HTML for accessibility..
Scanned images are totally PDF/A-compliant. The standard is just about reproducible archiving, nothing else. Bitmaps are perfectly reproducible and pass every compliance check. That PDF/A is more accessible than any old PDF is just a side-effect.
This is their strength: You know a PDF will not shift its presentation due to device changes. PDFs from when the PDF was created still work right today. And they still look the same.
I may be missing something obvious, but why is pdf such a bad choice?
As long as it has actual text and is reasonably typeset (selecting text in this pdf seems to work properly), I don't see what's wrong. I'd take it any day over webpages with random floating content that you have to click through and use a modern browser with javascript without blockers/filters for the content to even render, in small text on 20% of the page, with low contrast and somehow broken zoom.
Where it breaks down is some badly designed OCR systems which place the letters independently rather than in lines/blocks. But that's starting from a document which was not accessible in the first place, so not a huge issue.
As PDF is essentially saying, “put this thing here”, you’d think it wouldn’t. But it does. You can embed the source text for screen readers. It’s also how copying text from PDFs works.
The whole topic of this thread is reading web pages on a PSP. There's a whole universe of devices that perfectly render good old server-side HTML with CSS styling, but can't display a PDF for reasons. Or if they can, it will be annoying because it won't fit on the screen and be readable at the same time. That's its unique selling point as well as its biggest drawback.
I have to admit that many modern SPAs also won't rendet on many devices, though.
To add to this, a perspective I've heard working in the disability sphere is 'everybody is disabled eventually' - be that through injury, illness, or even just old age.
This really challenges the view that thinking about disabled users is catering to the needs of a small group of the population. Whereas in fact it is bringing benefits to the majority of the population (at some point in their lives).
Ever used your phone in the blazing sun, or rain? Had a partly shattered screen or tried to do something on the stone-age library computer? Searched for something with really slow or shaky connection? Tried to explain where to click via phone?
Suddenly all those accessibility features and "fail gracefully" come in really handy.
> watched a lot of TV in the past year with the volume down and captioning onf
I like how Apple TV now lets you pair two bluetooth headsets. My wife and I can watch shows without waking the baby. Combine that with the visual sound indicator on the baby monitor, and headphones with transparency mode, we can see when the baby is making noise and hear other environmental noises too. It's a nice combination of accessibility features that make a clever setup for hearing the TV. I can't wait until Apple TV supports spatial audio... then we'll have "surround sound" in our headphones too!
I use closed caption when possible because often I don't quite hear things right and can't make out words. I could turn up the TV, but this means I can enjoy it at the same volume as everyone.
I also use captions (even when the TV isn't muted). If someone else in the room is speaking so something on the TV is missed, it will be shown on the captions. Sometimes there might be some word or name I don't know and will want to look it up, and the caption will have the spelling (if the caption writer has spelled it correctly, which sometimes they don't, unfortunately). It could also be used for transcripts and caption scrollback, if those features were implemented, although unfortunately it isn't.
Another great example of this is effective keyboard navigation is both an accessibility feature and something you can sell as a feature for power users who like to get things done as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
I use a tool called Vimium so I don't need my mouse to navigate websites, and it really quickly highlights websites that have accessibility problems. Even before this though, my preference was websites that use standard elements, as so frequently people can't write robust code and boutique buttons, drop downs or other widgets break.
Indeed, I'm a double bassist, and accessible buildings are a huge blessing, especially when loading out at 2 AM after playing for 4 hours straight. Not to mention, they've probably saved me thousands of dollars in repairs.
The troublesome grey area is the part where people do it for control.
There is also sort of "exclusive design" that is practiced. You know - where you can't get comfortable on a park bench because you might sleep on it, or a ramp or stairs are built to exclude skateboards.
Same thing happens with websites, to "control" adblockers or "reader mode" and other nonsense.
The M1 MacBook Pro is at the other end of the spectrum from the outdated/underpowered device that requires a lightweight web page. But the user of such a fast machine still benefits from lightweight web pages (faster loading times, less CPU usage, etc).
My wife and I have watched a lot of TV in the past year with the volume down and captioning on, while we enjoy some down time while our baby is sleeping.
A ramped entrance to a building allows wheelchair-bound folks access, but it also helps able-bodied people using delivery dollies.
Making simple, lightweight web pages makes them accessible to those with older browsers and devices, but it also saves power consumption, time, and frustration for folks on M1 MacBook Pros.