As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision to eliminate the accessibility team. I am myself moving to Mastodon. I was amazed in doing this that the UI/UX of Mastodon is much better than Twitter. I feel better.
This. Even before Musk arrived there was a lot of debate about Twitter being overstaffed and departments are not producing any value at all. I don't know more or the details, but this is what sometimes I was reading years back.
That's the baffling thing to me. For the better part of a decade people have talked about Twitter being an overstaffed pack of idiots whose day to day largely consists of presiding over the fall of Western civilization. Now that they've been purchased by a jackass, however, they're suddenly a bunch of saints who've only been doing their best to hold back the tides of barbarism. I get the feeling that someone less of an asshole and more ideologically-aligned to the commentators could do the exact same housecleaning Musk is doing and they'd be cheering him on.
By your reasoning hating on Kevin Spacey is also in vogue. It's probably not in vogue. It's more likely that his own words and actions are resulting in lots of people not liking him. Imagine that. A world where your own words and actions have consequences.
Based on talking to those who dislike him they're mostly pretty hating him for things he hasnt done, views he doesnt hold and traits he doesnt have (no, he isnt a success because he had an uber wealthy father who owned an emerald mine, it was a tiny share in a mine and his father contributed little to Musks business ventures).
Musk is a driven, childish, stubborn, fairly intelligent, 90s era libertarian who really likes first principles reasoning and this leads to both success (SpaceX) and failure (Boring company).
> they're mostly pretty hating him for things he hasnt done, views he doesnt hold and traits he doesnt have
So they have actual reasons to hate him. Superficial reasons, but you didn't once mention anything having to do with it being in vogue. Evidence of it being in vogue would be people who don't know why they hate Elon, but they do know their friends hate Elon.
> no, he isnt a success because he had an uber wealthy father who owned an emerald mine, it was a tiny share in a mine and his father contributed little to Musks business ventures
This is debatable by reasonable people.
> Musk is a driven, childish, stubborn
These sound like real reasons he could be disliked rather than it being your claim that it's simply in vogue or "traits he doesnt have" in your words.
> who really likes first principles reasoning
That's part of his PR and the image he tries to convey. He fails at it quite often because of his childishness and impulsive knee jerk reactions that he falls victim to on a regular basis. He is far more driven by emotion than by reason. I mean it's highly probable he owns Twitter now by being legally held to a poorly written contract he had no real intention of following through on. It ironically seems like neither he nor many of his customers want to be at this party he ended up at.
Musk is eminently hatable. He's also a competent businessman. The odds of him turning Twitter into Stormfront are very low, yet many are acting like it's already happened. What is the point of calling for a boycott of a company that hasn't yet done the thing you don't like?
Not at all, but that's not what they say they care about. "Fuck Elon Musk, boycott twitter" is an entirely valid position. "Elon Musk has turned twitter into 8chan" is an absurd falsehood.
No one is moving from Twitter to Mastodon because the latter is more accessible to people with disabilities. It's not, definitely not the main Mastodon UI (vs. 3rd party UIs).
I think the article mentioned the dismissal of Twitter's whole accessibility team as a sign that Musk has no respect or understanding of what the fired people did or why it was important. Ditto for other dismissed teams, like those researching machine learning ethics.
> An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team
I used to think that, I used to think that understanding accessibility was a part of doing a good job on front-end so people who care about doing a good job will address it. Now I think formal and informal education about is so bad about not including accessibility concerns as a part of creating interfaces that there's too much for people to unlearn. Everyone has some responsibility for the accessibility of the final product but few will give it enough time or consideration.
Additionally, if an application is big enough to have a team working on it, that means there are some specialists in a variety of areas. With sufficient team size, that should include accessibility specialists who know what the right thing to do is or conduct research to make a decision about what the right thing to do is.
Not really: the implication there is that people who need additional accessibility work are not users. The UX of a system is the sum totality of the experience of all users of the system, regardless of their needs.
If UX is the sum totality of the experience of all users of the system, it can be significantly better for most users but worse for a small number. I’ve never used the app so I have no idea, I’m just saying UX is more than accessibility, so you can have a great UX for most people while being useless for others.
The purge is of the specific individuals of that team not the concept of accessibility itself. Same goes with all these changes, it is a reboot.
If anything, you may end up with a higher quality of accessibility (and moderation, spam filtering, whatever) down the line. Or not. Who knows. The current iteration of the company has ossified - not making changes is arguably against the long term interests of your blind father.
I wouldn't go that far. I agree that there's a lot of that visible right now, but Elon demanded round-the-clock hours from employees as his first "executive order", as well as locking down offices. He just doesn't seem that good of a boss, and more like a traditional capitalist in a sense. Is it ideological to want decent working hours?
That's a gross mismanagement of sweeping changes. Which is in itself an indication. Anyone could have predicted people leaving the platform if they were told ahead of time how the layoffs and extra hours would be so poorly communicated.
In terms of web accessibility, it had improved the alt text / meta descriptions, etc of external websites through the "cards" when you share a page on twitter, over the years, encouraging web developers to put them in their own websites. (same with faceboook etc)
Twitter just followed what everyone else was doing, and not even correctly, they had to have their own way.
FB was among the first social sites crawling the links and creating a thumbnail with crucial info. When OG tags were introduced (by them nonetheless!), FB started honoring them. Twitter some year later finally decided to do the card thing and thought that skipping OG and having their own syntax under meta would be best way.
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
