Comment by notpushkin
3 months ago
Ohhhhh. Wow! Did you have to push this through, or was everybody on board from the start?
> For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.
I guess it’s either “formatted version is slightly better and typesetting is hard to get right” or “well we’ll have plausible deniability in case publishers ask us where’s our DRM”. Probably both. Still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me though.
Thanks for sharing!
Ya, your reasoning about why the text-only version was ok is what I heard as well.
As far as people being on board with this--I did not have to push it through, it was a task that management wanted done that I happily did, because I could see the value of it.
Amazon actually does a really good job with accessibility across all their products. When I was there, they had at least 2 full time employees (1 Product manager and 1 Quality assurance engineer) whose full time job was just accessibility, across all Kindle platforms and I heard the intention was to grow that team as I was leaving. They had an entire team working on accessibility for the retail website, from what I heard (though I only met one or two of those people).
However, there still was a sentiment among certain engineers that worrying about accessibility was a waste of time because it only helps a small section of the population. Thankfully Web accessibility (both in standards and in culture) has come a long way in the last 8-10 years, and I think a lot more people believe in its importance now that they did back in 2017 when I started working on this.