Some of you might be interested in this Mastodon thread. It’s a bit of bashing PDFs for having poor accessibility, and some guidance on improving PDFs for accessibility.
Some people are saying they prefer MS Word over PDF for accessibility reasons. Of course the elephant in the room is that “accessibility” is an over-loaded word. It usually refers to usability by impaired people, but in the case of being generally usable to all people on a broad range of platforms, MS Word is obviously inaccessible due to being encumbered by proprietary tech by a protectionist corporation.
But that code you write at home is probably not accessible. You don’t need a screen reader personally, and no laws are forcing you to do it. That means the majority of open source developers don’t bother. Even if you, personally, want to bother, if your writing for Linux, the api you need to use to work with screen readers quite frankly sucks, because the people writing the open source tech stack didn’t give a damn. Linux won’t be viable for blind people unless major distros have full time accessibility folks, and refuse to accept inaccessible packages and patches.
Sure, but you need to read what I quoted. I purely addressed the flawed claim that better code comes from those paid to write it. The opposite is true. It’s unclear to what extent that bias has influenced @[email protected]’s thesis. Though I have no notable issues with anything else @[email protected] wrote (much of which is beyond my expertise w.r.t accessibility).
And to be clear, “better code” strictly refers to quality, not accessibility. Accessibility is a design factor.
That’s right. But then neither is the commercial code I worked on. That would be outside of my domain. I do backends for the most part. The rare UI work I did was for a tiny user base of internal developers within the org and accessibility was not part of the requirements. I worked on a UI for external users briefly but again no requirements for accessibility (which would be very unlikely for that particular product).
In any case, this sidetrack is irrelevant to what you replied to. It’s important to correct bogus claims that being paid to write code is conducive to quality. Some right-wingers I know never miss the opportunity to use the phrase “good enough for government work” because they want to push the mentality that capitalism promotes superior quality. It’s a widespread misconception that needs correction whenever it manifests.
Paying someone to write accessible code should theoretically work on both free software and non-free software. AFAICT the reason non-free software would accommodate blind users is that the market share is large enough to justify the profit-driven bottom line and those users are forced to pay for it (as all users are). In the FOSS domain, payments (“bounties”) are optional. Has this been tried? If not, then you’re relying on blind FOSS developers to suit their own needs in a way that benefits all blind users.
From the perspective of a blind person, your metric for code quality is all wrong and not useful. I can’t use inaccessible software. Open source refuses to embrace accessibility. It’s therefor worse in every way that matters to me and Noah. Commercial developers produce accessible software. Open source developers don’t. It’s as simple as that.