Jody, I'd like to address just one point in particular:
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 10:53 AM, Jody McKinniss <jlove42...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2) You have to think that it's worth doing (most developers don't.) > Hmm. This is puzzling to me, since as a developer I would want to reach as > many people as possible. It's important to remember that developers want to reach as many people as possible, given the limited resources they have to reach those people. The key here is 'limited resources'. Adding proper accessibility to a system usually takes up a pretty big percentage of your development resources on a project. The blind community is small, and if you're going to focus on it, you have to be really sure it'll pay off. Otherwise, the time a developer spends supporting the blind could have brought in ten or a hundred times as many sighted people. In other words, it's a risky business decision as a developer to add accessibility. Sure, being accessible gets you more users, but it usually gets you less users than improving the non-accessible parts of the system. Big companies and products, like microsoft windows, support accessibility for a bunch of different reasons: 1) They've already got nearly all the sighted people, so adding sighted features isn't going to bring in more users. Adding accessibility might though. 2) They can allocate just a few developers, far less than one percent, to work on the hardest problems and get a minimum amount of support and still have it be useful. 3) There are special contracts you can get that are worth obscene amounts of money if you can sell accessibility in the right places at the right time. 4) They might get sued if they don't offer at least some support. Keep in mind, most of these reasons really only apply to big companies and big projects. For small developers, it's almost never worth the effort. As a small developer: 1) Your biggest audience by far is going to be the sighted crowd, unless you specifically pick a VI project from the start. 2) You've only got yourself, and if you only allocate an hour a week to accessibility, you're just not going to get anything useful done. As an example, it's been years of occasional research, and I -still- don't know how to make the main window in the Alter Aeon custom client reader capable. 3) You're too small to get those lucrative contracts and special deals that might make a profit. 4) Nobody's going to sue you to force you to add accessibility, both because small developers don't really have enough money to make it worthwhile, and because accessibility laws only apply to big companies. There's always exceptions, such as Alter Aeon. We initially added accessibility because I made friends with several people, and they asked for simple things that were easy to implement. I gradually put more and more work into accessibility over the years because there were more and more blind people playing, and I decided to go all out with it when I realized that I'd rather work with the blind than most of the mainstream sighted gaming crowd. However, that's the exception, rather than the rule. In summary: most developers don't support accessibility because it's not the best use of their time. This is almost entirely because the market is small. There's nobody to blame for this, nobody to sue, and no way to legislate the problem out of existence; it's just the way things are. Dennis Towne Alter Aeon MUD http://www.alteraeon.com --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
