Accessibility#
It’s shocking how little people know about accessibility. Most people who know seem to know someone with a disability or have one themselves. I learned a lot about this in Human-Computer Interaction, which is a great introduction to overall design thinking but also had emphasis on accessible design.
You should want to accommodate for accessibility without any external motivators, but a lot of these things are required by law now anyways.
For instance, have you heard of the following things?
..if you said no, you probably wouldn’t consider them when building up your website either [1]. And you definitely should consider those things.
The argument here, if any, is that there’s never enough time or money to do it. Especially in a startup, you’re working on getting a product out of the door and in consumers’ hands as soon as possible. I won’t tell you how to run your startup or company, but I will encourage you to think eventually (and hopefully sooner rather than later) about how accessible your products are. Designing for a wider audience of people should be appealing.
I’m not pretending to be some expert on accessibility and I hope to learn much more and share and teach much more as I advance in my career. I just hope I’ve convinced you to care (or even learn just a bit) about accessibility too. I hope not, but some day you or I may be affected by something, and I would hope that the software and hardware we use can support our needs.