Re: Telegram Messenger is now accessible for the blind
Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a large effort from the community to get the attention of a company. Is it sad? Absolutely. But often after the point is made, and the company makes the changes it's being asked to, with or without help, the changes persist and said company changes for better. As another example of this, look at Netflix. Their apps used to be horrible to use with a screen reader and they didn't offer any audio description. The cries got even louder when Daredevil came out... It took a few years, but when Netflix added description to it, they also did a complete 180. Now their apps are mostly very easy to use with Screen Readers and they offer the largest, nearly globally available catalog of described content and are very much in the lead with describing any new releases.
Telegram open-sourced their apps. Anyone could fork the client and make changes to it. If the accessibility changes were out there in the public I think there's nothing wrong with the telegram devs taking a shortcut and using them to get a headstart, saving precious developer time in the process. The real test will be seeing if they are commited to keeping the accessibility in the good state it's in now, which considering they released on both iOS and Android might be the case. Now if all the developers of the alternative clients do is loudly complain that Telegram took a shortcut and used their code, they should seriously stop because they're sending the wrong message about the blind community and I wouldn't blame the Telegram devs for deciding maintaining accessibility isn't worth it if all these people do is b****. If the issue is that these alternative apps were making money off of the fact the official client was inaccessible, nothing is stopping them from adding additional features making their apps stand out so people have an incentive to keep using and buying them.
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