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Accessibility friends, how do you think about the following?
If a barrier affects everyone…
(Some context right after this toot; this poll supersedes the one shared the other week, and I’m curious whether I’ve reworked it well enough.)
Here’s why this seems interesting:
A barrier is an issue, and the more people are affected, the bigger the issue.
But, somewhere on the spectrum, the scope changes, because with everyone being affected, everyone is also being treated *equally*—compared to another, no one is being disadvantaged.
So at first, a barrier affecting everyone seems to be part of the mission. But—is it?
(Asking solely in appreciation of different views on this—Universal Design, legal constraints, pragmatism, &c.)
Interesting!—I imagined there’d be a tendency, but not as pronounced (if 20 votes can be relied on). Some of you shared your thinking, so that helped, but if others like to share theirs, I’d appreciate learning more!
Personally, I’d be on the “does not require intervention” side, because of the point of equality that seems to be strong in accessibility, too.
Given both polarity and irony (the biggest barrier possible <> the greatest equality), there may be several defensible perspectives?
@j9t I'm... Still a little confused by this. I think I need some actual examples 
If a barrier affects everyone, then there's a problem, because people are shut out of whatever it is you're trying to provide.
If it's a barrier that's more of an annoyance, but that can be got around, then there's likely still some kind of inequality going on there anyway - some people will be more able to do the workaround or cope with the annoyance or stress than others.
@j9t to me it always needs to be fixed but it feels like you're asking when it's an accessibility-as-a-job-role problem or a straight up poor UX or UI bug problem. Like, in whose remit is it.
@sarajw, I do like to keep this open really, also to learn from what comes to people’s minds.
So you could take a website that has all around poor contrast (for everyone to read badly), but also, physically, a house tucked away in the mountains, hard to get to even by seasoned mountaineers. What do we (you 
) do with this?
@j9t for me it depends heavily what's in that house. If that house is a polling station for the local village, or the place you have to go to access welfare payments, or register your car - we have a big problem
@j9t if it's a bothy to provide shelter for mountaineers - well then it's fine. It can stay the way it is.
@j9t so to bring it back - awful contrast on a weird, arty website in a corner of the internet - 
- if it's on a bank's website or government portal, again we have a problem
@j9t buuuuuut I'm also heavily considering what funny arty little websites in the corners of the internet could or should do re accessibility...
@j9t that is an interesting one, yeah. At that point, I think it stops being about equal access and fits better under just general UX in a " this sucks for everyone, why aren't we fixing it?" kind of way. It's things like this that really highlight that accessibility is in some ways not always as inclusive as people'd like just by existing. Is fixing a bug for accessibility a good thing, or is fixing a bug a good thing with accessibility being improved the result?
@j9t nuanced answer: it requires intervention/remediation, BUT it may not formally fail any WCAG SCs as WCAG has a "it's not a failure if everybody's impacted" stance on many things (if that was what the question is leading to)
@j9t I differentiate between accessibility issues and all other issues. So in that regard if it's a problem that affects everyone (widget doesn't render at all), it goes in the regular queue of work to be fixed and prioritized.
If it's an accessibility issue (widget isn't observable to some guests), it goes in the accessibility queue of work to be fixed and prioritized.
The accessibility queue generally takes priority over the standard queue, based on impact.