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Comment by jatone

5 years ago

I honestly think we need to rethink accessibility from the ground up. modern advances in OCR and machine learning should allow us to do accessibility entirely from the GPU output.

it'd take awhile to perfect but i think it'd ease the burden tremendously for software developers and those who need accessibility.

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jatone

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mwcampbell  5 years ago

> it'd take awhile to perfect

Some of us can't wait. That's why I, for one, continue to advocate for developers to make their applications accessible with the currently available tools. It's also why I'm trying, with my AccessKit [1] project (which admittedly is taking time to get off the ground), to make it easier for GUI toolkits to implement the current baroque platform accessibility APIs.

I'm also reluctant to concede that we're doomed to reconstruct UI content and semantics probabilistically from pixels, when that information is already there somewhere in the app. But it may be the best long-term solution to the social problem of trying to get everyone to implement accessibility.

[1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

blowski  5 years ago

You're onto something here. As long as accessibility is the job of the developer, software accessibility will reamin "on the roadmap" for many projects. There's simply too much to learn, too many battles to fight, and accessibility tends to offer to little obvious and immediate value compared to other priorities.

Legislation is not really the answer, or we'd already have great accessibility.

In other areas, we've automated and outsourced it - CI/CD, security, infrastructure. Think how hard it was to manage an RDBMS cluster or version control repository 20 years ago, and now even a junior developer is able to have both within minutes. We have frameworks like React.

In that time, accessibility has actually got harder, because of more devices, technologies, network connections, and more people with a wider range of accessibility needs.

I'm not sure what it would look like. Maybe a new way of rendering content, maybe a new framework that puts accessibility as a first-class concept.