Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
Lots of people who are designing websites and webapps are just out for the design. Usability went in the background for whatever reason.
But more and more people are getting more aware of user friendly UI and functions for people with disabilities. But yet it’s not the highest priority sadly.
Flashy sleek shit gets invested in.
Outside of business specifically oriented towards people with accessibility issues, the energy just doesn’t translate into VC.
Companies who do try to shoehorn it in when products are more mature usually have:
A codebase with a frustrating amount of refactoring in order to retroactively get things in line.
Development inertia where it’s seen as a low value activity among developers and product owners
Lack of clear guidance/tools/processes to QA new work
Lack of will to retroactively identify the breadth and scope of changes you even want to make
There is no mystery. It’s not going to get you sexy VC money at the beginning, and then it’s bizarrely more work than you’d think once your project is sufficiently large.
That doesn’t explain why already established products are ditching things like plainly visible scroll bars in products like Microsoft word and other content viewers.
That’s true. I can speak from experience how I’ve seen it go down in many products, but no idea what apple and Microsoft are thinking.
It’s bizarre, because usually at some point in size, companies will start to explicitly have accessibility UAT processes. Even directorship roles specifically with that responsibility
I used to be a programmer for a large cable company (rhymes with “bombast”) and at one point I was the only programmer there working on accessibility in all their mobile products. The executives there at all levels had a shocking contempt for accessibility as something to even be concerned about at all and it showed in the disastrous state of all their apps. The only reason they even began to address the problem was the threat of million-dollars-per-month fines from the FCC for all the accessibility audit failures. They even hired a blind guy as accessibility VP but he quit in despair over the corporate lack of concern after just a few months.
This. And it doesn’t only apply to companies. I have a personal blog with a couple accessibility issues that I haven’t bothered to fix because I’ve built a lot of my CSS around my bad HTML. Part of the issue is that I built my site as a school project for a web design class I was taking, so code quality wasn’t great. One day I might redesign it better, but I don’t have the energy for now.