Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Much of the discussion here is about commercially viable sites. Some budget and staffing exists to make progress, and some chunk of that will be redirected to a11y.

I deal also with science research and education outreach content. There's often no budget. No staff. Crufty pages put up by graduate students. Or zombie sites left up long after their funding is gone. It's severely bottlenecked on overworked people finding a bit of time to volunteer on something that helps the world and largely doesn't help them. Even having a working web server is a challenge. It's profoundly marginal, and every tweak of barrier energy directly throttles how much of it occurs.

High-stakes a11y could be a disaster for this area. The liability exposure, associated administrative hassle, and simple bare technical cost, might have severe impact.

When Berkeley took down years of youtube lectures in response to DoJ ADA concerns, they had already stopped making new ones pubic. So while dramatic negative impact on the scale of large projects is a thing, I'm more worried about the smaller-scale but systemic stuff.

For marginal efforts, an "if it's public, there are requirements and risks" has a straightforward impact - it won't be public, it won't exist. At least not there.*

And if a11y requirements aren't grandfathered, then as standards rise, the long tail of pages that persist long after their authors have moved on, retired, or died, that persist until a host name changes or a disk dies, will likely be intentionally cut off. Like corporate email retention minimization, but for human knowledge on the web.

Having watched copyright compliance dramatically slow open education content creation at a range of scales, and HIPAA kill off promising work on patient-created orientation content, and now hearing of "high-stakes" a11y... I worry that we don't fully appreciate just how large a price in retarded progress we're choosing to pay, since it's hard-to-see "that which might now exist... doesn't; those we might have helped... weren't".

*Or... maybe small-scale content will simply be shifted off university sites, onto personal ones? And google and archive.org can fill in the gaps? There's already a trend of research groups having two sites; an institutional one, and a second more extensive one under the personal control of the professor who might move elsewhere. And graduate students having their own, describing their own work. So perhaps "high-stakes" a11y will merely accelerate this?



Small scale educational and research sites tend to already be accessible.

The default behaviours of HTML and default CSS are accessible to a reasonable degree. PDFs that aren't scans are accessible.

It tends to be when one overrides behaviour that you start to become inaccessible.

JS is awful for breaking a site for a screen reader as the purpose and contents can change after or during it being read.

Scientists and researchers, in my experience, don't tend to futz with the markup, because it's just the delivery tool, not their purpose.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: