With July being Disability Pride Month, GNOME’s Sophie Herold published a blog post taking stock of where GNOME stands on this front, progress that’s been made, as well as areas where the project comes short. One particular paragraph from her introduction really hits the nail on the head about accessibility discussions in tech circles:
The reality of tech communities is that they are often ableist and elitist. Probably more so than the average population. If a user or contributor struggles with a tool, blame is shifted to a “skill issue,” if an interface is simplified to make it accessible to more people, it’s “dumbed down”. Assistive technologies are often developed by abled people, without involving and paying disabled people. This also leads to an attitude where contributors expect gratefulness from disabled people for providing them with the most basic needs. All these issues are also not absent from the GNOME community.
↫ Sophie Herold
Even as someone who isn’t disabled and doesn’t use any tools classically shelved under the “accessibility” moniker, I encounter the attitudes she mentions in the quoted paragraph basically every day. While we can have normal, productive discussions and differences of opinion about accessibility – for instance, I strongly believe robust theming support is absolutely crucial to accessibility, while the wider GNOME community does not – the dismissive attitudes towards people with accessibility needs in the software world is shameful.
Even if you don’t have accessibility needs today, you will definitely be needing them at some point in your life. If accessibility isn’t one of the first words you jot down on your mood board or whatever when you start a new software project, you’ve already done millions of people a massive disservice. Get educated, learn what you can about accessibility, listen to people with accessibility needs, and make your software better for everyone.
You’ll thank yourself one day.
I am sorry for being the obnoxious advocatus diaboli here again: When I publish software for free, then I don’t owe anyone anything. I wrote that software for myself and share it, because I am actually a nice person (just proven in too many battles). Take it or leave it, I did nothing to “disservice” you and only paying customers can make demands.
That said, I do acknowledge that some eternal usability concepts just make sense and indeed contribute to writing better software, which in the end can help to serve my own initial goal.
Honestly some of the attitude of “i made a tool for nyself that i publish for free” is why these issues exist. At a simple level its fine, you did make a tool to scratch a need and threw it out there, but at a point you as its creator do need to step back and consider the softwares place in the world. The magical line between fully personal project and something you acknowledge others will use is something that you have to find on a per project basis but once youve crossed it the onus is honestly on you to address various short comings. You dont need to hire a designer or a11y expert but you should put in the effort to think critically about the usage and usability of the program. Often this will actually lead to a better program for your usage too, I have yet to see many cases where usability improvements make a piece of software worse beyond someone whos using the xkcd “spacebar heats my room” excuse
I respectfully disagree with you. Of course, the day you become my hero and my role model I may be nudged into copying and mimicking your methods and styles (which is called learning). Until then you are at the end of a long list of people having told me what I should or needed or must do.
True story: When I complained about a chaotic, almost dysfunctional privately owned bank (which really made my life miserable), a senior good friend of mine asked me about my chances “telling a successful man how to run his business”. Humbling and eye-opening at the same time.
Programmer burn-out is a real thing. To be honest, my hobby projects are functionally abandoned aside from quick bug fixes and emergency security fixes and have been for a while as I try to get myself back in order.
It very much is a case of “Would you prefer to get what you’re getting or would you prefer that I delete the GitHub repo and continue using my self-itch-scratch in private? It’d certainly be less work for me to not try to at least extend common courtesy to people who land on my bug tracker”.
Shugo,
Instead of another post echoing what other’s have already said, I’ll just share a story.
http://nerdvittles.com/some-asterisk-resolutions-for-the-new-year/
Everyone wants/needs this and that, which would be fair enough except that all too often they don’t contribute and want things done on someone else’s dime. Sometimes maintainers are accommodating and the requests may be sensible, but even so IMHO it’s not reasonable to expect entitlements of other people’s free labor.
I agree with all what you say, but this one baffles me: Thom just raised more than 5k EUR for using Windows 11 (your are such a cheap wh… Thom 😀 ). There IS actually money on the street, just not for every exotic niche and hobby.
Sometimes, it also may be necessary to accept that you have been riding the wrong horse and orientate afresh.
Also, I don’t think OS means to work for free for anyone. It started as a “I solved a problem for myself and share the solution approach”.
2008?! You got me there, well played.
To be honest, basic due diligence on things like accessibility is one of the reasons why, even when I’m too burned out to do more than quick little things I do while acting on impulse to fix my own problems, I try to rely as heavily as possible on ready-made Qt QWidget functionality for GUIs and on JavaScript-less HTML primitives for websites. Likewise for things like understanding the DOs and DON’Ts of the alt=”” attribute on img tags.
I’m responsible enough to recognize that they’re full of solutions for problems that don’t even come to my attention.
When I do have the energy, I pull out things like Firefox’s Accessiblity Inspector and make sure the node tree that’s being exposed makes sense. (Granted, that’s an extension of my tendency to do things like fine-tuning the CSS media queries for varying display dimensions and print output and using span tags with inline-block display to fine-tune where line-breaks appear first as the display width changes.)