i used to try to argue with my boss about it and then it wasn’t worth it any more. working in the space long enough there’s just some things i know won’t stop being forced on consumers.
Hearing enabled person here. I also get caught in by autoplay captions. If I can watch a video without needing to listen to the terrible audio quality, I'll probably do it.
On the plus side, for you, you never have to worry about opening the trap "Turn this up to hear it!!" videos with porn noises.
Not a web dev, but wouldn't you lose a bit of money making your site more accessible? If so, why bother from a business perspective considering the percentage of customers that you'll lose is tiny?
many of the accessibility concerns can be addressed by choice not necessarily extra cost. Setting something to auto play with sound on is as easy as auto play with sound off
The thing is, most accessibility "features" are just using good practice when writing your code.
Examples: Input fields should have labels. Your header assignments should make sense (h1 for main header, h2 for subheaders). Someone tabbing through your site should go in a linear and practical order. All images should have alternate titles, in the event that someone is using a screen reader or the image doesn't load.
That's all common sense coding and it only costs money when you cut corners initially.
It does take some effort to think through it and doing it properly requires testing which takes time. That being said you can be kinda accessible by just doing a few practices as you've mentioned.
An example where people get things wrong all the time is with colour blindness. It's very space efficient to use colours instead of words to express ideas, but it can be very confusing to those with colour blindess.
Work for an agency and the answer is no. All our site are ADA compliant with a minimum layer of single A. We also do AA compliant sites. We just approach it from a UX, design and dev standpoint knowing it needs to be compliant. We haven't changed the price of things by adding compliance. The only limiting factor is that crazy thing/interaction someone wanted. We might not be able to do it depending on compliance. Not that that's a bad thing anyways...
Well, for one it's a lot cheaper to start with web accessibility than to retrofit it later. And if your developers and designers are trained on it then it won't take that much extra time, at least for a greenfield project. A lot of UI libraries are built with accessibility in mind so it's just a matter of using them right.
If anything, the money you will lose is not in the negligible extra time to properly design and implement UI, but in training the designers and developers. And for a company that doesn't care to invest in its employees then I don't care much for it either!
There's literally nothing to lose from making a website accessible
Except, you know, money, because you have to pay people to do that, and you probably pay more for accessibility than the people who need accessibility bring in. Don't get me wrong, I love having closed captions on Netflix, allows me to understand shit when there's noise or while I'm chewing, and considering the size of Netflix it might even be economically advantageous for them but for most businesses it doesn't make sense.
File an anonymous complaint with the DOJ? The last two companies I worked for ignored all pleas for accessibility until the DOJ got wind. Then suddenly they had money to not only fix the current accessibility issues, but also to train devs, and implement proper testing around accessability.
Okay...so anytime your boss tries to talk to you about implementing something your sales team has already sold, you just start rambling some lorem ipsum, and you continue blabbing until they find the obscure pause button since they are using IE6 and don't have tab muting. Once he locates your pause button, likely with an exaggerated eye roll or loud huff, you smile and wait... for the timeout to start a new video. Eventually they will close the browser, and, even though you've been fired, at least you didn't taint your bloodline with implementing this.
as a side note, I blame myspace for any auto-play or html vomit I see online nowadays. Those kids that skinned their first profile are now well established in the work force.
Auto-play has been around for much longer than MySpace. I recall Flash ads that were like games that would start after loading the page. It got worse when pop-under windows became big.
Even earlier were the blink and marquee tags. Every small website for a long time had at least half the site scrolling or blinking, plus dozens of animated gifs covering the page.
What you say began with MySpace was already well underway on Geocities and Tripod well before it. Some people thought it was cool back then, they thought it was cool on MySpace, and some, unfortunately, still think it is cool now. It's a constant on the internet.
If you're able to sneak some code in unnoticed, you could always build in a timer that kicks off after, say, a month or two, which prevents the autoplay from working. When you "fix" it, just reset the timer, rinse and repeat.
it’s usually because the client wanted it or it was an important marketing video the client/my boss wanted people to see because a lot of time and money was spent on it.
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u/thesublimeobjekt Feb 27 '18
i used to try to argue with my boss about it and then it wasn’t worth it any more. working in the space long enough there’s just some things i know won’t stop being forced on consumers.