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For those who don’t know, most websites these days are made of some sort of a cluster of third-party libraries, frameworks, modules, and systems patched together with a bit of custom code. (This site’s made from Discourse for instance.) If those systems aren’t accessible, who’s at fault from a legal standpoint? The people who made the systems, contributing their time to open-source software for everyone for free? Probably not, they’re not the ones using it to provide the end-services and profiting from that. The companies using them? They have a tough time auditing all that stuff, resolving it, and getting patches pushed upstream. They don’t want to be responsible for it since it wasn’t code that they wrote. So it’s kind of a mess that the community hasn’t really figured out yet. No one wants to put up the money to fix it and everyone can conveniently shift blame.
It’s one of the sad bits about web development where we’ve literally been talking about how this needs to be better for decades, how we could make it better. Pretty much every con has at least one presentation about it, and it just still isn’t happening because no one is spending the money and taking charge of it. They can’t justify it if it only affects a small fraction of their customer base when everything is about quarterly profits. It should be the baseline default but until someone will actually put up the money to go fix things in those underlying libraries and frameworks etc. (which coincidentally would also help all their competitors), we have this.
I think we’re tackling it from the wrong direction. If I make a syntax error, the compiler will catch it and my code’s not even going to compile and run, I have to fix it. In statically typed languages, if you mix up data types, it’ll catch you on that and force you to fix it. Some languages like F# even have unit-typed data, so if you try to add 5 meters to 3 feet without an explicit conversion it will choke and force you to fix it. We need that sort of low-level checks and pushes (code won’t even run if you don’t fix this) for accessibility if we’re ever going to fix it properly.
So instead of saying the service providers need to push fixes upstream, we really need to just make everything break at the lowest level if it isn’t right and let that propagate out. Then everyone would have to fix it or their software just wouldn’t work. Why aren’t we doing this?
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Whoever chose to add them to the technology stack in the first place. Accessibility is not a new thing; it’s just gaining traction now.
I can remember reading articles even back in the early 2000s about the importance of img tag alt attributes to accessibility. It’s always been a thing, and certainly for a large commercial site it should always be on the radar.
If you’re running an art site, then it’s an art piece and you may not be able to accommodate. Everyone else should have been designing and testing for accessibility ages ago.
Again: accessibility is not just for disabled people.
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I see 4 problems:
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Current accessibility standards are crap. Most standards are compromises between accessibility and standard web design.
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When coding-level changes address accessibility problems, new solutions are found to recreate the problems. For example, when most browsers deprecated the blink tag, some sites started posting about other ways to infl… create blinking text.
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Accessibility has traditionally been deferred to after web design, when it’s harder to fix things. It may not be impossible-- The WCAG site used to have awful autoscrolling issues, and fixed them after I reported them.
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As a consequence of #1, there tend to be grades of each accessibility standard, from not accessible to somewhat accessible.
Coding solutions would address #3 but would need to work with #4. I think government sites and certain others like health-care sites should serve as models of accessibility. Right now health-care sites often serve as models of #2. I don’t know if legal enforcement can make that happen, or at least clamp down on #2 in official sites.
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So instead of saying the service providers need to push fixes upstream, we really need to just make everything break at the lowest level if it isn’t right and let that propagate out. Then everyone would have to fix it or their software just wouldn’t work. Why aren’t we doing this?
It is cheaper to more quickly put a novel product on the market if you don’t care about quality. This is true in every industry so long as they are de facto monopolies and near-monopolies due to patent protections.
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I should say that this has destroyed the possibility of creatively-designed products that provide great style and longevity and value in practically all industries. No market allows an end run around the established scheme of stasis, waste, privilege, and genocide. The best way is with priggish/bigoted-anti-free-speech laws combined with the ownership, by the tiniest of our minds, of the limited pool of thoughts that are allowed.
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Well, I’ll be damned…
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And Chase is probably saving a bundle by doing that. I saw in the second half of the article someone speculated why they didn’t sell the debt to a collection agency. But there’s still costs in negotiating and executing that. I’m sure the people at Chase have a very tidy spreadsheet showing this was the most cost-effective thing to do.
Edit: autocorrect fix
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Or, at least, the number was small enough to elicit a shrug.
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Or (insert dramatic conspiracy-theory music), the board member(s) who pushed it through is/are also part of a group running another company planning a buyout/takeover and saw that as a great way to tilt the balance and get the leverage that their other company needs. Flipside - the insiders were the ones who did it as a defensive measure to avoid a takeover; not exactly a classic poison pill defense, but could work.
Might sound crazy, but the diagram of bank takeovers/mergers/consolidations is also pretty insane. And that’s years since the big 80s corporate raiders whose stories are pretty wild.
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Trump’s insider trading scheme continues…
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the one box is so promising!
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Honestly, this was my impression of the movement back in '91 as well. I went so far as to read all her horrible shit, too. And even as incoherent as I was at the time I knew that the “promise” of her ideas only resulted in people being stupid, greedy, insect-hive assholes. Just like any other cult, but with even more lawyers.
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A conversation with Amazon PR Tweeters:
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It’s interesting that her concept of individualism mostly appeals to people who are still being shepherded through life by their parents and for whom nearly unlimited do-overs are still available.
ADOLESCENT: “The hero of this book is a special person. Maybe I’m a special person too! Maybe I am better than everyone else, just like John Galt!”
ADULT: “Oops. Guess not.”
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This is kinda how I view it. If you’ve never needed to ask someone else for help, then it’s easy to convince you that you don’t owe help to others and they’re inferior for having to ask for it. Taxation is theft because, well, the streets are already here and have been for your entire life, if someone else wants a new street, let them pay for it, etc.
That should all fall apart when you do need to ask others for help, or need community services. But some people are really sheltered, so they might not reach that spot and even if they do, it takes awhile for an internalized ideology to be reversed.
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