Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
That doesn’t explain why already established products are ditching things like plainly visible scroll bars in products like Microsoft word and other content viewers.
That’s true. I can speak from experience how I’ve seen it go down in many products, but no idea what apple and Microsoft are thinking.
It’s bizarre, because usually at some point in size, companies will start to explicitly have accessibility UAT processes. Even directorship roles specifically with that responsibility
I used to be a programmer for a large cable company (rhymes with “bombast”) and at one point I was the only programmer there working on accessibility in all their mobile products. The executives there at all levels had a shocking contempt for accessibility as something to even be concerned about at all and it showed in the disastrous state of all their apps. The only reason they even began to address the problem was the threat of million-dollars-per-month fines from the FCC for all the accessibility audit failures. They even hired a blind guy as accessibility VP but he quit in despair over the corporate lack of concern after just a few months.