What would a team of "accessibility engineers" occupy themselves with every day anyway? Did they build features that will fail unless someone is there to handhold?
"Day 2: still accessible? check. Day 3: still accessible? check."....
Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do. Likewise, Twitter remains fairly static, with only minor changes over the years.
> As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision...
So you could stomach the decision if you didn't have a blind father? That's not how shared values of accessibility should work - the care factor depending on who you know.
It most likely needs a smaller team than they used to have, but some dedicated employees are necessary.
Accessibility should be part of every design team. Any new features being developed need accessibility input. This includes all the different mobile apps and integrations with native accessible platforms and accessibility tools. It also needs full internationalisation and language support too, which increases complexity. It needs a few more people than just ticking boxes or building workarounds or ramps after a feature has been developed.
Additionally, Twitter also takes in external links from webpages and so can influence the meta markup of these via their API / open graph / social sharing. So it works on the wider web accessibility standards too.
I imagine bootstrap and all the other libraries twitter publishes are also part of the teams remit.
> "Accessibility should be part of every design team"
Yes but that doesn't mean dedicated people. Accessibility knowledge is already well understood by designers and developers, particularly at the big end of town.
The previous team would have presumably written plenty of documents and guidelines and generally fostered a culture of thinking about accessibility. No reason why that will disappear.
Patterns and best practice methodologies are common in tech, precisely for efficiency reasons. They belong in standards, and shared knowledge - which is better for the industry as a whole. If every small team needed dedicated accessibility staff, the system is BROKEN.
> Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do
Okay, now see how well that wheelchair user can use the elevators and bathrooms. Do you have braille signs everywhere someone goes? Does your building have ambient features which are difficult for people with sensory processing issues? Are there controls which are hard for people with limited motor skills or only one hand? Did the market change and now people are using motorized wheelchairs which are larger than you designed the ramp for?
Accessibility is like performance or cost optimization: there isn’t a point where you’re done and everything you do affects it. An accessibility team should be working with the developers closely to make sure that their changes don’t impact accessibility and working with users to identify where they could be doing better. Some of that requires fairly deep skills (e.g. screen reader proficiency) where it makes sense to have dedicated specialists to help everyone else understand challenges and evaluate trade offs.
The building analogy is no longer suitable if you're suggesting the ramp suddenly fails to accommodate new wheelchair designs. The wheelchair design should be your new focus of scrutiny. If the new wheelchair fails to conform to EXISTING ramps found everywhere, the wheelchair is the problem, not the ramp.
Ramps are built according to a strict building code. Your suggestion the ramp might need modifying in only the Twitter building by a dedicated team, doesn't add up when considering all ramps in all buildings.
> there isn’t a point where you’re done
My point is accessibility is inherently part of the design process anyway. Designers are not just making things pretty, clueless to accessibility. After all, Twitter is primarily text. You can always recruit outsiders from time to time, who will stress test and audit. That's a good way to keep on top of accessibility, by getting actual users who need accessibility features, to evaluate your service. But full time in-house? No.
> After all, Twitter is primarily text. You can always recruit outsiders from time to time, who will stress test and audit. That's a good way to keep on top of accessibility, by getting actual users who need accessibility features, to evaluate your service. But full time in-house?
This is like saying you don’t need ML specialists because it’s just math, or that we don’t need those expensive security people because Accenture told the CIO they could us experts any time we need them.
Accessibility is far more than just “can a screen reader produce text for this element” — starting from the fact that there are many accessibility concerns to which the issue of media forms is irrelevant but going much deeper into how you organize that information. Even if we ignore the prevalence of non-text content, Twitter isn’t a single chunk of prose but the much harder problem of a lot of complex elements which update frequently. You can’t treat this as some quarterly exercise where a consultant runs a scanner - there’s a lot of behavior which must be designed in and tested continuously.
When you talk about meeting outside users, yes, that’s good. Guess which team organizes that? Guess which team makes sure you get representative users? Guess who helps make sure developers and designers get the training and time they need?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think twitter still doesn't work at all without JavaScript functioning. That's not an easy fix after the event and sorting that alone could probably keep an accessibility team busy for the foreseeable future.
I'd imagine there's some amount of work, I doubt it was a huge team but they probably needed a few people to focus on the various platforms and regions their apps support
it seems easier to have a team focused on a features like that keeping things consistant and whatever dosen't seem that crazy.. fatter than what a startup would but twitter is a multinational worth tens of billions
"Day 2: still accessible? check. Day 3: still accessible? check."....
Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do. Likewise, Twitter remains fairly static, with only minor changes over the years.
> As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision...
So you could stomach the decision if you didn't have a blind father? That's not how shared values of accessibility should work - the care factor depending on who you know.