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Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go
- goldenchrome 4y ago
- theCrowing 4y agonow accessibility is woke? Despite your degenerate 4chan lingo this will scare everyone who is not a normie because like your vocabulary, Twitter will degenerate for less fortunate people which have real disabilities.
- hulitu 4y ago> Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go 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".
- koshergweilo 4y agoAccessibility mostly means that the intended experience is preserved if you need to use tools like screen readers. Accessibility != User Friendly
- culi 4y ago> Accessibility != User Friendly 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
- koshergweilo 4y agoI agree, but that doesn't extend to top level stuff like gating content behind logins. That's kinda what I was trying to say.
- onion2k 4y agoThis isn't really true. There are three common "accessibility tools" that most apps aim for; - 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.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago>keyboard navigation 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.
- _djo_ 4y agoNone of those are accessibility issues, they're product design choices.
- User23 4y agoAccessibility is a product design choice. Accessibility isn't just for the disabled, it affects everyone.
- _djo_ 4y agoIn that sense everything is a product design choice. 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chris_wot 4y agoThat actually is the commonly accepted industry term. Like i18n and l10n
- culi 4y agoHaven't heard l10n. If anyone else is wondering, that's localization. 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"
- ryanschneider 4y agoMy possibly apocryphal understanding is that i18n and l10n both arose due to differences in American and British spellings of both words (z or s in the suffix). Simplifying “localization/localisation” to l10n saves more than 8 characters it saves 19.
- chris_wot 4y agoIt’s been terminology used since the 80s. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been around for a long time. It was coined by DEC. 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_localization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...
- culi 4y ago> Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been around for a long time idk if you're responding to the wrong user, but I never made the claim that it hasn't been...
- spoils19 4y ago> Apparently "A11y" stands for accesibility This has been a common term since a few decades ago. No need to be snarky if you don't understand something.
- Jensson 4y agoA11y is not very accessible which is funny. It isn't even a long word, they could just spell it out for you to make the writing more accessible.
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoJust guessing, but I suppose it's following the lead of i18n?
- emj 4y agoTo day I learned it's called numeronyms they seems to be very infrequent out side of slang/tech, these are all words I think you should just know around here: I18n A11y l10n Y2K 420 a16z 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.
- jacooper 4y agoI mean if I need to lower costs ASAP, nice to haves like A11y would be the first to get cut.
- koshergweilo 4y agoIs A11y a nice to have? Doesn't the ADA mandate a certain level of accessibility on companies of a certain size.
- _djo_ 4y agoNot the ADA specifically, but American courts have generally held that large commercial websites do need to be accessible in terms of the ADA. 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.
- qubex 4y agoI’m very impressed by the use of ‘cruelty’.
- nathanaldensr 4y agoThe current website already supports accessibility. The team being fired or laid off doesn't mean that suddenly goes away.
- _djo_ 4y agoThat's why I said diminishing accessibility and slowly cutting off disabled users. This obviously isn't going to happen immediately, but every new feature will be less accessible and maybe even not provide accommodations entirely.
- decremental 4y agoPossibly true but I would imagine the team created an internal Bible of all accessibility requirements and that all of that information wasn't siloed in the heads of each employee in that department.
- bumblebritches5 4y ago
- fullsend 4y agoThe extreme and somehow flowery language in all these posts from Twitter engineers is so indicative to me of some kind of delusional rot. “My team worked SO hard every single day to Change The World, the smartest people on the planet Earth, the greatest engineers ever to touch a keyboard, no one has our scale, no one has our problems.” So caught up in their own bullshit that they are like fat, happy hens who don’t see the fox in their midst named Elon. It reminds me of Billy Bob Thornton in Fargo Season One. “The maps used to say ‘there be dragons here’. They don’t anymore, but the dragons are still there.” These people live in a bubble where they reinforce each other.
- exo-pla-net 4y agoYou have so much vitriol toward and schadenfreude over the pain of a person who... helped vision and motion impaired people use Twitter? Yikes.
- fullsend 4y agoIt’s a sense I get from the collection of posts not just this one in particular. Perhaps harsh and hyperbolic. What happened feels like a clash of two worlds - the soft sounding environment of Twitter and the sometimes brutal or cruel environment that Musk clearly encourages (though he would argue it’s just efficient and necessary I’m sure). 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.
- hoten 4y agoGiven this is just a series of positive testimonials of the skills of a manager's direct reports, all recently fired and looking for new work, your take comes off as extremely uncharitable.
- karmakaze 4y agoAccessibility shouldn't be a separate team. It should be a consideration for all product development. And as far as experiences go, Twitter has a pretty small surface area.
- CharlesW 4y ago> Accessibility shouldn't be a separate team. It should be a consideration for all product development. 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.
- karmakaze 4y agoThis may also have been the case with localization and translations. At a certain scale the problem is solved and tooling is put in place. Now on the project I work on, we have a process for creating translation templates that get populated for other languages. But it's everyone's responsibility for using the template mechanisms put in place. The same arguments are valid for performance and security. They shouldn't be added after product development.
- noahtallen 4y agoSure, developers should be mindful of all of these things. But if one person or team spends a lot of effort creating solid internal tools, and then they all get fired, you’ve lost a very significant amount of internal knowledge. Then who maintains the tools and updates them as the product changes? Or as industry best practices improve, as is often the case with security? 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.
- superb-owl 4y agoThis is a real bummer. An app with as wide and diverse a user base as Twitter needs to take accessibility seriously. You can't be the public square if a significant fraction of people are excluded.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoWe all hate to see people losing their jobs, but it's been known for a very long time that Twitter had an extremely bloated headcount. I'm not at all surprised that something called the "Accessibility Experience Team" was one of the first groups to get cut.
- culi 4y agoUhhh I don't consider making an app accessible to be contributing to the problem of a "bloated headcount". Maybe the team itself had too many people on it, but to axe the entire team is pretty disgusting and shows a complete disregard for an entire class of people's needs
- lopkeny12ko 4y agoAccessibility is not a critical business function the same way running Twitter's datacenters is a critical business function. 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.
- onion2k 4y agoWhen I added a similar feature to an app a few years ago I found about 5% of users selected the high contrast theme. Our UX person talked to users and found loads of people using crappy old corporate LCD monitors that should have gone in the bin years ago found it really useful. The moral of the story is that users who don't need a feature will still use it.
- bilsbie 4y agoDon’t lots of companies do layoffs? Why don’t they all get this much attention? Surely messy layoffs aren’t uncommon.
- baal80spam 4y agoBecause it's Elon, the devil incarnate (apparently)!
- ricardonunez 4y agoTheir new owner creates this type of media attention. Second, layoff because of economic conditions is different than radical business moves by their new owner. I an looking forward to see the outcome.
- awb 4y agoThose layoffs do get attention, but I think Twitter’s gets more because: 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.
- ilaksh 4y agoBecause Musk is a politically polarizing figure. Like pretty much everyone and everything these days.
- seadan83 4y ago
- coffeeblack 4y agoWould be great if everybody could be a little less hysterical. 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.
- Nullabillity 4y agoThat's not how civilized societies work. You don't just get to fire whoever you want whenever you want.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y agoIs this part of that social contract I never get to read? 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.
- Nullabillity 4y ago> civilized societies
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y agoVery Hobbesian. 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.
- whoIsYou 4y agoIf people are being overpaid and underperforming why wouldn't the business owner be within their right to fire them?
- thexumaker 4y agoyep. Literally with so many people reneging, working multiple jobs, doing what's required of them, a company has no loyalty to their engineers. The opposite is also true, an engineer shouldn't have too much loyalty to their company. Considering these dudes were making over 200k a year I'm sure they'll be fine and land their next job.
- postalrat 4y agoShouldn't accessibility in a site or app like twitter already be a solved problem?
- theCrowing 4y agoWhen you update your app with new features you are mostly touching a lot of stuff behind the scenes and are mostly altering some part of your accessibility features. Elon announced rapid changes and new features...
- qualudeheart 4y agoWhy is it called A11y?
- cbsks 4y agoAccessibility = ‘A’ + 11 characters + ‘y’
- majou 4y agoAccessibility, but the middle 11 letters are skipped. See also: i18n.
- mikequinlan 4y agoAccessibility is the letter 'A' followed by 11 other letters ending in 'y'. Same reason as Internationalization is I18n.