During one of the recent discussions with reddit (I’ve no idea which one, it may be linked in /r/bestof but I try not to give them traffic), the mods asked reddit a whole series of questions about their plans for accessibility, things like: does anyone at reddit have accessibility certifications and what are they? has anyone there ever done accessibility programming? is anyone involved in the accessibility support disabled in any way? have they talked with any disabled people to see what kind of support or devices they need? what kinds of devices is reddit planning to support, and are they specifically covering this set? do they plan to program to certain standards? etc, etc, etc.
If reddit was actually committed to providing decent accessibility support, they’d have answers for most of the questions. Instead, they had absolutely no idea what any of those things meant. Absolutely none of the points that got raised were things that reddit had even considered as something that needed to be addressed. And that’s why everyone expects reddit’s “accessibility tools” to fail miserably. It’s not that they don’t have home field advantage, or they’re losing the game, or even that they’re just making their way into the field; reddit doesn’t even know what game they’re fucking playing, much less have they even left their home city to eventually get to the field.
It was interesting to me that when Reddit announced that RedReader was exempt because it was “accessibility focused” a bunch of disabled users were like “wut?”
There’s no such thing as an “accessibility focused” app, it either has the appropriate accessibility or it doesn’t. A shitload of disabled users were using something other than RedReader and are being deprived of their preferred tool.
The fact that Reddit sees themselves as the arbiters of what “accessibility” even means indicates to me that they aren’t remotely serious about accessibility.
During one of the recent discussions with reddit (I’ve no idea which one, it may be linked in /r/bestof but I try not to give them traffic), the mods asked reddit a whole series of questions about their plans for accessibility, things like: does anyone at reddit have accessibility certifications and what are they? has anyone there ever done accessibility programming? is anyone involved in the accessibility support disabled in any way? have they talked with any disabled people to see what kind of support or devices they need? what kinds of devices is reddit planning to support, and are they specifically covering this set? do they plan to program to certain standards? etc, etc, etc.
If reddit was actually committed to providing decent accessibility support, they’d have answers for most of the questions. Instead, they had absolutely no idea what any of those things meant. Absolutely none of the points that got raised were things that reddit had even considered as something that needed to be addressed. And that’s why everyone expects reddit’s “accessibility tools” to fail miserably. It’s not that they don’t have home field advantage, or they’re losing the game, or even that they’re just making their way into the field; reddit doesn’t even know what game they’re fucking playing, much less have they even left their home city to eventually get to the field.
It was interesting to me that when Reddit announced that RedReader was exempt because it was “accessibility focused” a bunch of disabled users were like “wut?”
There’s no such thing as an “accessibility focused” app, it either has the appropriate accessibility or it doesn’t. A shitload of disabled users were using something other than RedReader and are being deprived of their preferred tool.
The fact that Reddit sees themselves as the arbiters of what “accessibility” even means indicates to me that they aren’t remotely serious about accessibility.