Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go(twitter.com) |
Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go(twitter.com) |
You can't be the public square if a significant fraction of people are excluded.
A8y "A11y" s4s f1r accesibility. (Apparently "A11y" stands for accesibility). "Twitter is better in the app" is not a sign of "accesibility". Sign in is not a sign of "accesibility".
- alt text on images which is helpful for blind people (but also helpful for search and ML image categorisation)
- keyboard navigation which is helpful for users with motor problems (also helpful for power users)
- responsive design, which is very helpful for screen readers because it controls information flow (also helpful for users on devices that don't have the specific viewport specs that the designer aimed for)
Literally every accessibility feature you can name is like this - they all improve accessibility for disabled users and make things better for everyone else. Throwing out accessibility doesn't just hurt a minority of users who needed those features. It hurts everyone.
No but many studies have shown that designs (in architecture as well as web and print design) that focus on accessibility are rated as having better UX by the general populace as well
Cutting a11y likely will also lead to a decline in UX in general
This has been a common term since a few decades ago. No need to be snarky if you don't understand something.
Tbh a11y is the main one that makes sense. I don't get what the point of i18n and l10n acronyms is besides saving us some typing and generally fitting into the vague category of "giving a crap about users often not considered in design"
Maybe the team was just sh*t and expensive. They get rid of them, so they can hire better people at a better price. Which make a lot of sense now that many tech companies have big layoffs.
I think every headline about layoffs and restructurings and companies shutting down are proof that some people do in fact get to fire whoever they want whenever they want.
Teams generally don't have expertise in all areas, which is why cross-functional teams with deep experience in a specific area can be a great way to organize resources. This is why design teams, performance teams, security teams, etc. exist.
The same arguments are valid for performance and security. They shouldn't be added after product development.
Cutting an entire team is a pretty good way to say "not at all important".
For some things there are very low hanging fruit. Having at least one expert review a new feature in a screen reader can be the difference of not at all usable to mostly usable with just a few minor tweaks. Not having this at all, sends a message about priorities and the new shape of twitter and what the company values
a) Twitter was acquired only a few days before the layoffs
b) the previous CEO indicated no intention of laying off staff
c) the large percentage of the work force laid off (~50%?)
d) the new owner who ordered the layoffs is the richest person alive (at least in terms of publicly known wealth)
e) the layoffs were foretold in a novel way (via Tweet), prior to the acquisition
f) political tension underlying the layoffs, with some blaming Twitter’s moderation policies on the company’s employees, and some seeing the layoffs as a pivot point in Twitter’s cultural identity rather than the typical motivation for a layoff which is a financial decision
So it does feel different to me.
Similarly, the reaction to the layoffs seems different with many here on HN and elsewhere making various comments about the employees, their ideological bent, their work ethic, etc.
Whereas in other layoffs it seems like more focus in put on the management decisions or macro economic factors that put the company in a position where layoffs were necessary, and the employees are viewed more as getting caught up in the mix.
See also: i18n.
People get upset about government regulation forcing companies to take accessibility seriously but then people like you come around to prove exactly why that kind of regulation is necessary.
I'd like to live in a world where it wasn't but comments like these make it abundantly clear that we're nowhere close to that world
> People get upset about government regulation forcing companies to take accessibility seriously but then people like you come around to prove exactly why that kind of regulation is necessary.
You can still have accessibility without having a whole dedicated team for it
> I'd like to live in a world where it wasn't but comments like these make it abundantly clear that we're nowhere close to that world
I meant it as having a dedicated accessibility the team not just going to Twitter and removing all accessibility settings.
obviously not true but theres a few ways to slice this news.
That's aside from the cruelty of diminishing accessibility on a major social platform, slowly cutting off disabled users, despite its cost likely being a rounding error in the greater scheme of things.
This is like saying security is "nice to have"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497445
And firing the A11y team doesn't immediately remove all accessibility from Twitter, they are forced by US law to follow accessibility standards and they would, they just won't do higher than what's required.
For all its pretense of wanting to be the Town Square, somehow I don't expect it to be a very inclusive one. Getting rid of a11y team is exactly what I would expect, crisis or not.
Probably not Twitter though.
Let's be honest, Twitter has underperformed for a long time. It has been openly known as the rest and vest place. This type of flowery nonsense would be difficult to believe about the better half of their engineers, much less the bottom half that was let go
I saw one thread where people who were one day posting #lovewhereyouwork got fired the next day after working over the weekend for a project Musk announced by email on a Saturday. It’s like they couldn’t imagine that a flippant billionaire was working them and slaughtering them like sheep. So used to a corporation that coddled them, that they walked into it smiling. I don’t use terms like bullshit hatefully…I think it is bullshit. Smart and well intentioned people, but sort of delusional nonetheless. Talking about missing time with family because, “I get to solve problems at scale no one else does.” Companies are not families, what you are doing is not always important. I think calling each other “Tweeps” is an example of this. You forgot that when the easy money party stops they will treat you like what you are to them, a line item.
For example, if someone were cut from a sports team and the coach went and talked about how good that person was, and how hard they worked. Well it raises the obvious question, if they were so good and did work so hard, why did they get cut? And why does everyone get so upset when people ask the obvious question?
If you are into making software for something more than just the naive "one market" your first introduction would be internationalization which should be the most widespread. When you make things for government in the EU/US you will most probably have laws demanding accessibility features. The problem isn't the numeronym but that so few people care about accessibility.
Doesn’t apply to accessibility except in the sense that widgets must be operable 1) by sighted persons using the keyboard, and by non-sighted persons 2) using screen reader shortcuts or 3) accessibility devices such as game controllers or sip-and-puff controls mapped to those shortcuts.
The point was that having a landing page that goes to a Sign Up option before showing all the content is not necessarily an accessibility issue, it's a decision made to drive sign ups and therefore revenue and it's not something the a11y team would've been in charge of. Blind people can still navigate the page provided the components are accessible in the same way sighted users can.
If you get to the point of having a performance or security team, you realize your org is big enough you need a couple people focusing on it full time (and their role is often helping other developers implement best practices.) By ditching them, you’re acknowledging literally that you’d like to focus less on that area in the future. As a result, product teams will do their best, but it’s impossible for every dev to be up to date on every best practice for every topic in web development. So you won’t do as well.
Maybe that’s ok as a small startup, but when your audience is incredibly large and you operate at scale, it’s not reasonable to have subpar security, performance, accessibility, etc. If you are subpar in these areas, you loose money because your audience is large enough that many are impacted.
Also performance is too large an area to make it a single team. It is better to have a database expert guild (or team) that other teams can consult for performance and other engineering quality issues and similarly for other performance sensitive areas. I can't speak for security but I imagine that each area should have experts that cover security for that area.
Perhaps others like working cleaning up poorly written non-performant designs and code but I prefer starting earlier in the process and building it into the engineering culture.
Edit: I think it's actually easier to have a performance/security team at a medium scale of growth. At small scale they would be in the product dev teams or known by name by all teams. At large scale I don't think they can't cover the surface area/volume produced by all the teams. So it should be more effective to develop mechanisms/processes and culture.
Civilized companies either don’t exist or don’t follow that social contract because it has been replaced with a different contract: an at will employment agreement.
I work at $LARGE_CORPORATION and our product a11y team's most recent major ship was a new palette of colors with improved contrast ratios. A UI change that makes the site easier to read for < 1% of users does not contribute meaningfully to incremental revenue. If I were Musk I would have cut this team too.
The moral of the story is that users who don't need a feature will still use it.
From what I've heard from people in the industry, apparently a significant portion of users consuming audio described movies and TV shows, originally aimed at blind people, are truck drivers who have to look at the road, not the screen.
Audiobooks and OCR technology, also originally developed with the blind in mind, are now used by many fully-abled people in their lives.
Closed captions, originally intended for the hearing-impaired, are now a staple of many bars, where the chatter is so loud that nobody can hear the TV.
There are many more examples.
I’m not visually impaired, but the UI is just so much better now. It’s made me stop and fiddle with the accessibility settings in other things too.
Some very brief googling suggests about 3% of Americans are visually disabled. Having a team ensure your product is available to an extra 3% of people seems like a potentially reasonable investment.
It's ok to just make the platform inaccessible for a large number of people?
It’s also the reason why Arabic text can be output on the screen, Ruby characters can be used and screen mirroring is usable for UIs that need RTL layouts. You really should look it up before criticising it.
It deals with things as small and as important as date formats, number seperators, punctuation marks, monetary formats, support for different calendar systems, capitalisation rules… you name it, it encompasses it.
It’s a genuine discipline. It’s used extensively in Windows, Mozilla and LibreOffice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...
Accessibility on Quantbase is abysmal. Maybe bring that up before telling others how to handle it on their stuff?
Score of 53 out of 100 with 4 critical issues, knocking it out of compliance.
https://www.accessibilitychecker.org/audit/?website=https%3A...
Really? You were on the team then? I assume you found out that they had an entirely empty Jira backlog and no more accessibility updates to do on main, so they were let go?
I appreciate your insight, former Twitter employee. What else can you tell us about how your job went?
he didn't freeze shit.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahkim/2019/11/29/harvard-uni...
"In the United States alone, approximately 50 million people are considered deaf or hard of hearing. The failure to provide appropriate accommodations to this community is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856
The spirit of the law is good, but sometimes it just means that we lose "good enough" in pursuit of "perfect".
If people are safe whether employed or not then by all means fire at will. It's rude but not morally bankrupt in that case.
If you are skillfull and bring value to your employer why would the fire you and why would other employer won’t want you?
Layoffs are great. They weed out the unproductive ones.
The vast majority of most layoffs I've seen are either hastily thrown together hail marys or just done looking at how much money they need to cut and then look more or less 100% at compensation or something even more stupid. For companies of any considerable size, rare is the strategic layoff. What Elon did at Twitter is a perfect example of slashing for a number. Elon has not been around long enough to understand what's up or down at Twitter. He has a number in mind he wants to get down to and he just slashes until he gets there. Assuming there are substantial cuts that need to be made, Elon has no clue where he is slashing fat vs. bone, he hasn't been there long enough to know.
Most places at least require a hefty sum of rent up front to even get in somewhere else.
Then if you don't have a job, at least in the US, they recommend you get COBRA, so you don't have any gaps in your health insurance record. Because they decided that was bad. And COBRA is _expensive_. Again, not something you can afford if you are living paycheck to paycheck.
I agree with your position that ethics is objective, but I don't think Kant's categorical imperative is a very good argument for its objectivity – a person can coherently accept ethics/morality as being objective, yet doubt or deny the categorical imperative. I think "ethics is objective" is one of those things where very many people can agree on a conclusion, yet disagree massively on what is the correct reasoning to reach that conclusion.
But I very much appreciate the depth of your point. I've always found validation (?) in the deontological aspect of Kant's idealism because I think it neatly describes why people feel obligations to those they interact with most closely (i.e. I feed my child because I should, rather than to avoid his hunger). I certainly take your point that the categorical imperative isn't the best or only tool for interpreting moral dilemmas. Honestly, I was bringing it up in part because it's a recognisable phrase that might infer that there's more to the question of ethics than unexamined instinct.
Relying on companies to self police morality is an idealistic view that results in failure. That’s where the democracy and government part comes in.
Twitter is required by law to be compliant with accessibility standards, and so they will be. Whether or not this team is laid off doesn’t change that
If you expanded it with "There are no moral requirements... for companies to provide accessibility features" it would have been entirely different story.
I'd expect it does implicitly at least because people must interact with those users differently.
Huh
Before you let that cynicism build up too much, for the record, not all of us Elon+Twitter skeptics have a problem with the $8 thing. You're just not going to hear from any one who didn't have an issue with it.
Related: Is there a quippy term or a fallacy for the (very natural!) habit of treating a random sample of a million voices and expecting a coherent message from them? I feel like it's related but distinct from a strawman.
No, it was that “free speech” means private actors are free to make decisions about what content to relay.
Not that everything they choose on that (or any other) is equally good, nor that they shouldn’t be punished in the marketplace (not by the state) for their bad choices.
And that’s a good thing. It is frankly ridiculous that private companies get to decide the public opinion by tweaking their algorithms, it should be managed in a similar way how we don’t allow food companies to put cocaine into their products.
Don't mistake hate speech, disinfo, racism or whatever you think twitter was violating 'free speech' for as being the right wing. It is not.
It is interesting you bring up that example, because it connects with the moral universalism vs moral particularism debate: moral universalists argue that an essential component of a valid ethical principle is it must be universal in scope (equally applicable to everyone at all times), even though it may still produce quite different outcomes when applied to differing situations. Particularists claim by contrast that one can have moral obligations which are non-universal in character - I owe special obligations to my children because they are mine, beyond those which I owe to children-in-general. Moral universalists have to either deny the existence of such particular obligations, or else insist that they are ultimately universal rather than particular in character. Anyway, the categorical imperative is a classic statement of moral universalism, yet you are invoking one of the favourite examples of moral particularists to support it.
Personally, I think the best way to defend the objectivity of morality is the “companions in the guilt” argument - for every argument that is put forward against the objectivity of morality, there is a closely parallel argument against the objectivity of (theoretical) rationality. If that’s true, then how is it not special pleading to grant objectivity to one yet deny it to the other?
Or when they banned people for stating that the vaccine doesn’t eliminate transmission.
Both largely consensus views now.
Very hospitable to alternative viewpoints indeed. Maybe in a bubble
Now it’s all about rules and regulations.
Huh
Personally I’m perturbed that so many people expect society to work out of goodwill and not through enforced regulations decided by the voters.
Certainly that world would be nice, but it’s naive and ineffective
That’s why in a free marketplace, Elon asserted his free speech to take over Twitter due to their perceived poor management.
Maybe if they had managed more equitably, none of this would have happened. But the market giveth and the market taketh
That’s not really accurate. Twitter’s management took Elon to court to force him to take over so the stockholders they worked for could reap thr windfall ofnthe premium price he regretted offering and tried to tun away from.
There is also a reverse no true Scotsman, I've seen referenced as dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid. Not as catchy as no true Scotsman but you're basically imagining a perfect Scotsman and then attacking them when they don't exist
Conflation might work as well but Im not good at debating