Posts
Comments
What is the relevance of the site guide quote? OP is a frontpage post.
someone who probably has better things to do with his time than tinker with DNS configuration
I find such excuses to be unconvincing pretty much 100% of the time. Almost everyone who “has better things to do than [whatever]” is in that situation because their time is very valuable, and their time is very valuable because they make, and thus have, a lot of money. (Like, say, a successful fiction author.) In which case, they can pay someone to solve the problem for them. (Heck, I don’t doubt that Egan could even find people to help him fix this for free!)
If someone has a problem like this, but neither takes the time to fix it himself, nor pays (or asks) someone to fix it for him, what this means isn’t that he’s too busy, but rather that he doesn’t care.
And that’s fine. He’s got the right to not care about this. But then nobody else has the slightest shred of obligation to care about it, either. Not lifting a finger to fix this problem, but expecting other people to spend their time and mental effort (even if it’s only a little of both) to compensate for the problem, is certainly not laudable behavior.
I’m confused by your response. It seems like you got the impression that I was questioning your claim to have ADHD, but of course I was doing no such thing; I have no reason to doubt your word on this. Nor am I “advising” you to do anything.
The purpose of my comment was neither to offer assistance, nor to “deflect blame”. The purpose, rather, was only and exactly to ask the question that I asked—which, again, is: what is causing the “treat the ADHD” solution to be insufficient? As I understand it, a successful treatment for ADHD would result in being able to do things like read Less Wrong posts without too much difficulty.[1]
Of course you’re under no obligation to respond. But if you don’t engage with questions like this, how can we solve these purported problems which you are describing? Understanding a problem is the first step toward solving it.
FWIW, I am perfectly familiar with the experience of being unable to perform various tasks while suffering from the effects of cognitive difficulties, and then, when those difficulties are treated, having no trouble doing those tasks. Of course I don’t assume that our situations are the same, or similar, but the point is that if there is some difficulty preventing a person from doing something, and it that difficulty is successfully treated, then that person should now be able to do that thing, otherwise the treatment was not successful by definition. ↩︎
It sounds like your ADHD is preventing you from doing a thing you want to do (e.g., read and understand posts on Less Wrong). Given this, it would seem that the solution here is to get treatment for said ADHD. Do you disagree? If you do, why? And if not, why is that solution insufficient?
Here’s a growing collection of links: https://wiki.obormot.net/Reference/MeditationConsideredHarmful
As far as I can tell, “the standard Dutch book arguments” aren’t even a reason why one’s preferences must conform to all the VNM axioms, much less a “pretty good” reason.
(We’ve had this discussion many times before, and it frustrates me that people seem to forget about this every time.)
I strongly disagree. In fact, Less Wrong is an excellent example of the effect of web design on impact/popularity/effectiveness (both for better and for worse; mostly better, lately).
Substitution recommendations for people with allergies to bananas and/or coconut oil?
Note that GreaterWrong has an anti-kibitzer mode.
With that, I could imagine another shape behind B’s reaction. Some betrayal in her past, where someone else had unilaterally changed an agreement because they thought the consequences were the same, when they were very much not the same to B, and then rejected B’s objections as invalid… that this situation was now reminding her of.
Why is it necessary (or even relevant) to imagine anything like this? It seems like this part is wholly superfluous (at best!); remove it from the reasoning you report, and… you still have your answer, right? You write:
B was insisting that what we had agreed upon before was important. A was saying that the previous agreement didn’t matter, because the consequences were the same. That was triggering to B; B perceived it as A saying that he could unilaterally change an agreement if he experienced the consequences to be the same (regardless of whether he had checked for B’s agreement first).
B was saying that it didn’t matter what move they ultimately played, that was all the same, but she needed A to acknowledge that he’d unilaterally changed an agreement, and she needed to be able to trust that A would not do that.
…
Viewed from that perspective, everything that B had said suddenly made sense. Indeed, what A actually played or didn’t play wasn’t the point. The point was that, as a matter of principle, A could not unilaterally declare a previous agreement to not matter without checking other people’s opinions first. Even if everyone did happen to agree in this case, sometimes they might not, with much more serious consequences. And if people always had nagging doubts about whether A’s commitments were trustworthy, that would be damaging.
This seems like a complete answer; no explanatory components are missing. As far as I can tell, the part about a “betrayal in [B’s] past … that this situation was now reminding her of” is, at best, a red herring—and at worst, a way to denigrate and dismiss a perspective which otherwise seems to be eminently reasonable, understandable, and (IMO) correct.
There were two different clauses, one about malaria and the other about chickens. “Helping people is really important” clearly applies to the malaria clause, and there’s a modified version of the statement (“helping animals is really important”) that applies to the chickens clause. I think writing it that way was an acceptable compromise to simplify the language and it’s pretty obvious to me what it was supposed to mean.
A strange objection—since if you are correct and this is what was meant, then it strengthens my point. If thinking that helping people is really important AND that we should help more rather than less doesn’t suffice to conclude that we should give to chicken-related charities, then still less does merely one of those two premises suffice.
(And “helping animals is really important” is, of course, quite far from an uncontroversial claim.)
“We should help more rather than less, with no bounds/limitations” is not a necessary claim. It’s only necessary to claim “we should help more rather than less if we are currently helping at an extremely low level”.
No, this does not suffice. It would only suffice if giving to chicken-related charities were the first (or close to the first) charity that we’d wish to give to, if we were increasing our helping from an extremely low level to a higher one. Otherwise, if we believe, for instance, that helping a little is better than none, and helping a reasonable and moderate amount is better than helping a little, but helping a very large amount is worse (or even just no better) than the preceding, then this threshold may easily be reached long before we get anywhere near chickens (or any other specific cause). In order to guarantee the “we should give to chicken-related charities” conclusion, the “helping more is better than helping less” principle must be unbounded and unlimited.
Minor correction: missing the hyphen in Sam Bankman-Fried’s last name.
To think you should give to charities preventing kids from getting malaria, or making it so that chickens don’t have to languish for their whole life in a cage, you don’t have to think anything controversial about moral philosophy. You just have to think that helping people is really important, and we should help more rather than less! But that’s common sense.
This is not correct, for two reasons:
-
Thinking that helping people is really important, and that we should help more rather than less, does not suffice to conclude that we should give to charities aimed at doing anything to, with, or about chickens. (Because chickens are not people.)
-
Thinking that we should help more rather than less—as a general principle that is not bounded or limited by anything—is, actually, a controversial claim of moral philosophy.
Sure, the report isn’t perfect, but it’s better than alternatives.
As you well know, I have already responded to this claim as well.
The density of butter is reasonably close to 1 avoirdupois ounce per 1 fluid ounce, but is definitely not exactly equal:
https://kg-m3.com/material/butter gives the density as 0.95033293516 oz./fl. oz., or 0.911 kg/m^3.
(The link you provide doesn’t give a source; the data at the above link is sourced from the International Network of Food Data Systems (INFOODS).)
Further commentary:
The density of water (at refrigerator temperatures) is ~1 g/cm^3. 1 oz. = ~28.35 g; 1 fl. oz. = ~ 29.57 cm^3; thus the density of water is (1/28.35) / (1/29.57) = ~1.043 = oz./fl. oz. (This is, of course, equal to 0.95033293516 / 0.911, allowing for rounding and floating point errors.)
Note that the composition of butter varies. In particular, it varies by the ratio of butterfat to water (there are also butter solids, i.e. protein, but those are a very small part of the total mass). American supermarket butter has approx. 80% butterfat; Amish butter, European butters (e.g. Kerrygold), or premium American butters (e.g. Vital Farms brand) have more butterfat (up to 85%). Butterfat is less dense than water (thus the more butterfat is present, the lower the average density of the stick of butter as a whole—although this doesn’t make a very big difference, given the range of variation).
Given the numbers in the paper at the last link, we can calculate the average density (specific gravity) of butter (assuming butterfat content of a cheap American supermarket brand) as 0.8 * 0.9 + 0.2 * 1.0 = 0.92. This approximately matches our 0.911 kg/m^3 number above.
No, you’re misunderstanding. There is no 1/2 cup of butter anywhere in the above scenario. One stick of butter is 4 oz. of butter (weight), but not 1/2 cup of butter (volume).
Tablespoons of butter.
A tablespoon is a unit of volume. Namely, it is one-sixteenth of a cup.
Now, there are two distinct units called “ounces” that are commonly used in the United States. One is the avoirdupois ounce, also know as the United States customary ounce, which is a unit of weight; it is one-sixteenth of a pound. The other is the U.S. customary fluid ounce, which is a unit of volume; it is one-eighth of a cup.
One-sixteenth of a cup is a tablespoon. One-eighth of a cup is an ounce (fluid). One-eighth of one-half of a cup is a tablespoon. These are all measures of volume.
Butter, however, is sold by weight:
The 16-oz. package of butter in the photo above says that it contains four sticks. This is one stick:
The stick is divided into eight “tablespoons”.
But the “tablespoons” of butter depicted above are not one tablespoon each in volume. And there is no such thing as a unit of weight called the “tablespoon”.
So what is this? Well, one stick of butter is 4 ounces in weight. 8 ounces in volume is one cup. By analogy, if we think of 8 ounces in weight as a “cup” in weight (which is not actually a real weight unit!), then one-sixteenth of that weight is a “tablespoon” in weight (by analogy with one-sixteenth of a cup in volume being a tablespoon in volume). Neither cups nor tablespoons are real weight units! But if we call an 8-oz. weight a “cup”, then we can call a 1/2 oz. weight a “tablespoon”.
Sticks of butter are divided into metaphorical tablespoons of butter.
“A space Odyssey” is not watchable without discussing historical context
… why? I’ve watched this movie, and I… don’t think I’m aware of any special “historical context” that was relevant to it. (Or, at any rate, I don’t know what you mean by this.) It seemed to work out fine…
The main problem with your approach is not that it is counterintuitive (although it is, and more so than ours!), but that there is no way to return to “auto” mode via the site’s UI![1] Having clicked the mode selector, how do I go back to “no, just use my browser preference”? A two-state selector with a hidden, ephemeral third state, which cannot be retrieved once abandoned is, I’m afraid, the worst approach…
You can go into your browse’s dev tools and deleting the
localStorageitem, or clear all your saved data via the browser’s preferences. (Well, on desktop, anyway; on mobile—who knows? Not the former, at least, and how many mobile users even know about the latter? And the latter is anyhow an undesirable method!) ↩︎
Do you think a 3-state dark mode selector is better than a 1-state (where “auto” is the only state)? My website is 1-state, on the assumption that auto will work for almost everyone and it lets me skip the UI clutter of having a lighting toggle that most people won’t use.
Gwern discusses this on his “Design Graveyard” page:
Auto-dark mode: a good idea but “readers are why we can’t have nice things”.
OSes/browsers have defined a ‘global dark mode’ toggle the reader can set if they want dark mode everywhere, and this is available to a web page; if you are implementing a dark mode for your website, it then seems natural to just make it a feature and turn on iff the toggle is on. There is no need for complicated UI-cluttering widgets with complicated implementations. And yet—if you do do that, readers will regularly complain about the website acting bizarre or being dark in the daytime, having apparently forgotten that they enabled it (or never understood what that setting meant).
A widget is necessary to give readers control, although even there it can be screwed up: many websites settle for a simple negation switch of the global toggle, but if you do that, someone who sets dark mode at day will be exposed to blinding white at night… Our widget works better than that. Mostly.
Is it possible that someday dark-mode will become so widespread, and users so educated, that we could quietly drop the widget? Yes, even by 2023 dark-mode had become quite popular, and I suspect that an auto-dark-mode would cause much less confusion in 2024 or 2025. However, we are stuck with the widget—once we had a widget, the temptation to stick in more controls (for reader-mode and then disabling/enabling popups) was impossible to resist, and who knows, it may yet accrete more features (site-wide fulltext search?), rendering removal impossible.
(The site-wide fulltext search feature has since been added, of course.)
Not bad at all! Needs some work on the details and some bug fixes, but—really not bad! The dropcaps, in particular, are well done; and the overall theme is elegant.
I’m just going to link the comment I wrote the last time you mentioned that Rethink Priorities report. That report continues to be of very little use in supporting such arguments as you present here.
I in fact don’t use Google very much these days, and don’t particularly recommend that anyone else do so, either.
(If by “google” you meant “search engines in general”, then that’s a bit different, of course. But then, the analogy here would be to something like “carefully select which LLM products you use, try to minimize their use, avoid the popular ones, and otherwise take all possible steps to ensure that LLMs affect what you see and do as little as possible”.)
The most important thing is “There is a small number of individuals who are paying attention, who you can argue with, and if you don’t like what they’re doing, I encourage you to write blogposts or comments complaining about it. And if your arguments make sense to me/us, we might change our mind. If they don’t make sense, but there seems to be some consensus that the arguments are true, we might lose the Mandate of Heaven or something.”
There’s not, like, anything necessarily wrong with this, on its own terms, but… this is definitely not what “being held accountable” is.
It happening at all already constitutes “going wrong”.
This particular sort of comment doesn’t particularly move me.
All this really means is that you’ll just do with this whatever you feel like doing. Which, again, is not necessarily “wrong”, and really it’s the default scenario for, like… websites, in general… I just really would like to emphasize that “being held accountable” has approximately nothing to do with anything that you’re describing.
As far as the specifics go… well, the bad effect here is that instead of the site being a way for me to read the ideas and commentary of people whose thoughts and writings I find interesting, it becomes just another purveyor of AI “extruded writing product”. I really don’t know why I’d want more of that than there already is, all over the internet. I mean… it’s a bad thing. Pretty straightforwardly. If you don’t think so then I don’t know what to tell you.
All I can say is that this sort of thing drastically reduces my interest in participating here. But then, my participation level has already been fairly low for a while, so… maybe that doesn’t matter very much, either. On the other hand, I don’t think that I’m the only one who has this opinion of LLM outputs.
Do you not use LLMs daily?
Not even once.
In general, I think Gwern’s suggested LLM policy seems roughly right to me.
First of all, even taking what Gwern says there at face value, how many of the posts here that are written “with AI involvement” would you say actually are checked, edited, etc., in the rigorous way which Gwern describes? Realistically?
Secondly, when Gwern says that he is “fine with use of AI in general to make us better writers and thinkers” and that he is “still excited about this”, you should understand that he is talking about stuff like this and this, and not about stuff like “instead of thinking about things, refining my ideas, and writing them down, I just asked a LLM to write a post for me”.
Approximately zero percent of the people who read Gwern’s comment will think of the former sort of idea (it takes a Gwern to think of such things, and those are in very limited supply), rather than the latter.
The policy of “encourage the use of AI for writing posts/comments here, and provide tools to easily generate more AI-written crap” doesn’t lead to more of the sort of thing that Gwern describes at the above links. It leads to a deluge of un-checked crap.
I welcome being held accountable for this going wrong in various ways.
It happening at all already constitutes “going wrong”.
Also: by what means can you be “held accountable”?
If this is true, then it’s a damning indictment of Less Wrong and the authors who post here, and is an excellent reason not to read anything written here.
Well, let’s see. Calibri is a humanist sans; Gill Sans is technically also humanist, but more more geometric in design. Geometric sans fonts tend to be less readable when used for body text.
Gill Sans has a lower x-height than Calibri. That (obviously) is the cause of all the “the new font looks smaller” comments.
(A side-by-side comparison of the fonts, for anyone curious, although note that this is Gill Sans MT Pro, not Gill Sans Nova, so the weight [i.e., stroke thickness] will be a bit different than the version that LW now uses.)
Now, as far as font rendering goes… I just looked at the site on my Windows box (adjusting the font stack CSS value to see Gill Sans Nova again, since I see you guys tweaked it to give Calibri priority)… yikes. Yeah, that’s not rendering well at all. Definitely more blurry than Calibri. Maybe something to do with the hinting, I don’t know. (Not really surprising, since Calibri was designed from the beginning to look good on Windows.) And I’ve got a hi-DPI monitor on my Windows machine…
Interestingly, the older version of Gill Sans (seen in the demo on my wiki, linked above) doesn’t have this problem; it renders crisply on Windows. (Note that this is not the flawed, broken-kerning version of the font that comes with Macs!)
I also notice that the comment font size is set to… 15.08px. Seems weird? Bumping it up to 16px improves things a bit, although it’s still not amazing.
If you can switch to the older (but not broken) version of Gill Sans, that’d be my recommendation.
If you can’t… then one option might be to check out one of the many similar fonts to see if perhaps one of them renders better on Windows while still having matching metrics.
I am confident the average user experience would become worse if you just replaced the comment font with the body font)
Yeah, I agree with that, but that’s because of a post body font that wasn’t chosen for suitability for comments also. If you pick, to begin with, a font that works for both, then it’ll work for both.
… of course, if you don’t think that any of the GW themes’ fonts work for both, then never mind, I guess. (But, uh, frankly I find that to be a strange view. But no accounting for taste, etc., so I certainly can’t say it’s wrong, exactly.)
You definitely would not want the comment font be the same as the post font.
This… seems straightforwardly false? Every one of GreaterWrong’s eight themes uses a single font for both posts and comments, and it doesn’t cause any problems. (And it’s a different font for each theme!)
What is a “deontic mesh”? I am not familiar with this term; do you have a link that explains it?
The bullet-biting here is just “‘real numbers’ are fake”. That makes most of the questions you cite moot.
“Real numbers don’t exist” seems like a good solution to me.
So it’s like… the negation of the diagonal supposedly is there, but… not at any specific place?
Why should this be a problem? On this view, there is no “the diagonal”; there are only diagonals of particular tables for particular values of n, which each have their own negations.
history clearly teaches us that civilizations and states collapse (on timescales of centuries) and the way to bet is that ours will as well, but it’s kind of insane hubris to think that this can be prevented;
It seems like it makes some difference whether our civilization collapses the way that the Roman Empire collapsed, the way that the British Empire collapsed, or the way that the Soviet Union collapsed. “We must prevent our civilization from ever collapsing” is clearly an implausible goal, but “we should ensure that a successor structure exists and is not much worse than what we have now” seems rather more reasonable, no?
I concur with @johnswentworth’s comment; I read approximately as far as he did, and came to the same conclusion. I would also like to see the “~1.5 good and important points” listed!
Doesn’t rule consequentialism (as opposed to act consequentialism) solve all of these problems (and also all[1] other problems that people sometimes bring up as alleged “arguments against consequentialism”)?
Approximately all. ↩︎
Would you mind posting that information here? I am also interested (as, I’m sure, are others).
Meta: OP and some replies occasionally misspell the example billionaire’s surname as “Arnalt”; it’s actually “Arnault”, with a ‘u’.
Uh-huh, and what about the people who aren’t front-end developers, either, but only “advocates”, “experts” (but not the kind that write code), etc.?
To help with projects like “an open-source screen reader”, it is not necessary to be able to write C++ (or whatever) code. You can also:
- file well-written and well-documented bug reports, including testing with various setups, detailed replication steps, etc.
- survey alternate software options, cataloguing which of them correctly handle the relevant test cases, and how
- find people who do have the relevant expertise and may be willing to contribute code, and connect them with the maintainers
- contribute funding to the project and/or help to convince other people to contribute funding
- other (i.e., “reach out to the maintainer(s) to ask them what would help get the bug fixed, then do that”)
If even one out of every ten accessibility advocates/experts/etc. did these things, then all these bugs would’ve been fixed years ago.
I agree that allocation is hard and in particular that if regulations overboard with trying to ensure that there will always be more handicapped spots than there are people who need them, there’s a point at which adding spots becomes net negative.
Indeed. The difficult question, of course, is: what exactly constitutes “going overboard”, here? How often is it acceptable for a handicapped person to need a reserved parking spot, but not be able to get one (because they’re all full)? Whatever answer we come up with, I sure don’t envy the politician who has to defend that answer to the public!
But also, how would we come up with an answer? (Would we have to go all the way to fully general utilitarianism, where we calculate how many utils are lost by the average disabled person who has to park in a regular spot, and how many utils are lost by the average non-disabled person who has to park slightly further away due to the presence of empty reserved spots? How would we account for the effect of the presence and number of reserved spots on people’s behavior?)
How do these decisions actually get made? Like, in real life—how is it determined that there shall be this many handicapped spots in a shopping center parking lot?
In other words—you write:
Third, because if you’re a decision-maker of any kind, recognizing a handicapped parking situation means you have the opportunity to be conscious about allocation choices, or look for ways to make allocation smarter and more flexible.
Do you know of any resources that go into detail on this? Are there such?
Am I missing someplace where my post dismisses the issues you’re talking about?
Not explicitly, no.
I would characterize the difference in our views (as I understand your views) as having primarily to do with expectations about the distribution of outcomes w.r.t. whether any given accommodation will be positive-sum, zero-sum, or negative-sum (and the details of how the benefits and harms will be distributed).
If one believes that the distribution is skewed heavily toward positive-sum outcomes, and zero-sum or negative-sum outcomes are rare or even essentially of negligible incidence, then the emphasis and focus of your post basically makes sense; in such a case, overlooking opportunities to provide accommodations is the primary way in which we end up with less value than we might have done.
If one believes that the distribution contains a substantial component of zero-sum or negative-sum outcomes (and, especially, if one believes that there are common categories of situations wherein a negative-sum outcome may be the default), then the emphasis and focus of your post is essentially mis-aimed, and the lack of discussion of costs, of harms, etc., is a substantial oversight in any treatment of the topic.
That said, I of course agree with the basic thesis which you express in the post’s title, and which you develop in the post, i.e. that not everything is a curb cut effect and that there are different dynamics that arise from different sorts of accommodations. You can think of my top-level comment in this thread as additive, so to speak—addressing a lacuna, rather than directly challenging any specific claim in your post. (My other top-level comment does directly challenge some of your claims, of course. But that’s a different subtopic.)
If I understand you correctly, you are describing the same sort of thing as I mentioned in the footnote to this comment, yes?
Yes, that may be part of it. I suspect, however, that in this case it is a slightly different (though somewhat related) dynamic that’s mostly responsible.
“Accessibility advocate” is qualification which leads naturally to “accessibility expert”; and there is a certain amount of demand for such people (e.g., as consultants on projects which are required by regulations to be “accessible”, or which otherwise benefit from being able to claim to be “accessible”). Such people have an incentive to establish their credentials and their credibility by talking about what web developers must do in order to make their websites accessible, to frequently mention accessibility in Hacker News discussions, to write blog posts about accessibility best practices, etc.
They do not have any incentive whatever to help to fix bugs in screen reader programs. What would that do for them? The better such programs work, the less work there is for these people to do, the less there is to talk about on the subject of how to make your website accessible (“do nothing special, because screen readers work very well and will simply handle your website properly without you having to do anything or think about the problem at all” hardly constitutes special expertise…), the less demand there is for them on the job market…
None of this helps actual vision-impaired users, of course. It’s a classic principal-agent problem.
I think you have misunderstood my claims and my point.
The links I have posted were to demonstrate the fact that screen readers having a problem with soft hyphens is a real thing that really happens. (You seemed to be skeptical of this.)
That developers are sometimes told to not use soft hyphens, on account of this issue, is something for which I have and need no links, because, as I said initially, this is something which I, personally, have been told, by self-described accessibility advocates and/or disabled users, in discussions of actual websites which I have worked on. (You could disbelieve me on this, I suppose…)
And whether this specific advice/request/demand happens often is inconsequential. It is one example of a class of such things, which collectively one ends up hearing quite a bit, if one does serious web development work these days. The title attribute example was another. I could also have mentioned the deeply confusing and bizarre ARIA attributes.
Again: any specific such issue comes up only occasionally. But if I were to try to build a website such that screen readers have no problems with it, I would have to deal with many such issues—most of which could be fixed much more easily by the developers of the screen reader software… but aren’t. And the attitude of most accessibility advocates I’ve encountered has been that I should indeed take that (“build a website such that screen readers have no problems with it”) as my goal.
Come now; you can do better than that.
A search for screen reader "soft hyphen" easily finds this:
https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/9343
A search for "screen reader" "soft hyphen" easily finds these:
https://www.reddit.com/r/accessibility/comments/lku7kq/comment/go5kkwy/
https://lists.apache.org/thread/8bjr2lxhy3jj4vqrqzdp98hlndbt3sol
No, the lack of screen reader support for soft hyphens is a real thing, with actual user complaints behind it. Besides, that guidelines page doesn’t mention title attributes either; those are only very general guidelines, lacking details.
As far as ignoring some advice—sure. I ignore all of it, personally.
If an accommodation makes life worse for non-users then it’s at best what I’d call a handicapped parking effect, meaning that designers have to make a hard tradeoff.
Right. The thing is (and this is what I was getting at), it seems to me that disability accommodations are often argued for on the basis of the “curb cut effect” concept, but in fact such accommodations turn out to be handicapped parking effects—at best! It seems to me, in fact, that disability accommodations quite often make life tangibly worse for many more people than those whose lives they improve.
(By the way, here’s something which I find to be… interesting, let’s say. It’s often claimed that curb cut effects are ubiquitous. Yet if you ask for three examples of such things, people tend to have trouble producing them. One’s a freebie: actual curb cuts. Two, also easy, there’s the standard-issue second example: closed captions (although I am not entirely convinced that they’re strictly positive-or-neutral either, but never mind that). But what’s the third? After some straining, you might get something lame like “high contrast on websites” (what websites…?) or “accessibility features in games” (what features…?). At that point the well of examples runs dry.)
It’s also possible that the people working on your bridge just didn’t think about it or didn’t try very hard, in which case it’s not any kind of cleverly-named effect, it’s just bad design.
Sure they didn’t. Why should they? It’s not like anyone is building the thing out of a purely altruistic desire to help disabled people. Someone somewhere passed a law, someone else in another place wrote some regulations, a third person somewhere else wrote some funding proposal, a budget was approved, jobs were created, political capital was made, etc., etc.
But that’s how it almost always is. Almost nobody ever really thinks about it or tries very hard. This entire domain is absolutely jam-packed with principal-agent problems. That’s the whole problem.
One thing that you largely ignore in this post is the cost of creating such accommodations.
I will give a couple of examples. The first concerns a “curb cut” scenario; the second is about a “Braille signage” scenario.
Making public spaces uglier on the public’s dime
Not far from me is a highway, which has a residential neighborhood on one side of it and a waterfront promenade on the other. In several places there are pedestrian bridges that cross the highway. One of these bridges (which doubles as a ramp onto the highway, in one direction) is currently being rebuilt; the project nears completion (indeed the bridge is already usable, as the remaining work is mostly to do with railings and such), so it is now possible to see, and judge, what the completed construction will be like.
Now, prior to this project, this was a perfectly functional bridge, which was not in any way damaged, decrepit, crumbling, failing, dangerous, or even unsightly. There was nothing wrong with the bridge whatsoever—except that it wasn’t wheelchair-accessible. Hence, the rebuilding.
The new bridge is much less convenient for non-disabled pedestrians (one must walk thrice as far to get from one side to the other, due to the lengthy sloped ramps which the new design uses). It is more dangerous to pedestrians of all kinds, due to the incorporation of a bizarre roundabout in the design of the new ramp. It is much uglier and more obtrusive; it takes more of the promenade away from greenery. The bridge couldn’t be used while it was being rebuilt, of course (the project has taken considerable time, as such things do). And, of course, the rebuilding project is taxpayer-funded.
As far as I can tell, this is a case of me paying (via taxes) for my life to be made strictly worse than it was before.
Helping users who seem strangely uninterested in solving their problems
Web designers/developers routinely hear that we should make our websites accessible to users of screen readers. The specific things that must be done to accomplish this are sometimes reasonable (add alt attributes to images)… but often aren’t.
For instance, I have been told that using soft hyphens as hyphenation hints is bad, because it causes screen readers to get confused and pronounce all the words incorrectly. Alright. Well, why is that my problem? If a screen reader does this, that sounds like a bug in the screen reader program. So the users of that program should talk to the developers of said program; or, if that does not help, switch to a different screen reader. (There seem to be quite a few options!)
Similarly, I’ve been told that using the title attribute (on links, say) is bad, because screen readers will read out the value of said attribute, which is usually undesirable. Again: why is this the web dev’s problem? Fix the screen reader, or use a better one!
And yet “accessibility advocates” seem much more interested in hectoring web developers about all the myriad inconvenient, time-consuming, headache-inducing ways in which we must cater to the strange (and strangely persistent—some of these supposed limitations of screen readers have been around for decades, it seems, despite the plenitude of offerings, of which a good number are even free software licensed and can presumably be patched, forked, etc.!) peculiarities of screen readers than they are in… fixing the screen readers.
“Every web developer must remember to do all of the following long list of specific things—many of which take time and development resources, and substantively restrict your options for implementing certain features or solving certain problems—in order to support users of screen readers” is a demand for a very large number of people to contribute unpaid work (and to keep doing so, indefinitely) to solve a problem which could be solved much more easily (with a solution that needs to be implemented just once) by a much smaller number of precisely the people who are making the demand.
This is clearly a negative-sum solution.