I think what you just indirectly pointed out is that software is largely written by young, ignorant people who don't appreciate that everyone will get to experience presbyopia, and it happens sooner than you think. Maybe we should require product owners to be at least 40 years old ;-).
In the hands of a lot of people though Powerpoint is a tool for insulting the intelligence of the whole room.
Just like native apps do...?
From time to time people complain and say I need to "get with it", but not a single person has complained they couldn't read them from the back of the room!
The web was not designed with accessibility as default. Instead it is a significant amount of work to make things accessible. Every project incurs huge cost in order to achieve it. I truly believe from an accessibility standpoint the web is simply broken. So sure, blame it on young programmers. But that's a poor excuse for where we are at today in my humble opinion.
It seems to me the web is accessible by default. Write a plain old HTML page and everybody should be able to read it (assuming they have a computer to open it or a printed version).
People go out of their ways to mess this up by using fancy colors, fancy web fonts, messed up JS (frameworks), non standard components because it's cooler, disabling outlines, and so on.
Do you have examples where the Web is not accessible by default, apart from the by default unlimited line width which is easily fixable with one line of CSS?
Sure you need to use the right markup for the right things (and, no, <div> is usually not the right element for building a button or writing a paragraph, there are dedicated tags for those) but I can't see a way to avoid this.
I remember back in the late 90's, and we decided to create a static website for internal use on a project. Everything was supposed to be quick and simple. We weren't after anything fancy, just something that worked.
We used Microsoft's whatever-it-was-called at the time for writing webpages. It turned out that the html produced required some special Microsoft fonts for the web.
Hells bells. The whole point of the Internet is interoperability. But no. We can't have that, can we Microsoft? We need special fonts. Interoperability? Screw that!
About the same time Java on webpages was a thing. We never used them, but I had seen sites that had. So the site had to download some Java craplet, whatever it was called, you had to enable it, plus of course you had to have Java.
Even when the web was still young, people had some really dumb ideas.
Then there was a fad that sites had to have some kind of animated intro on the front page. I remember seeing one for my bank and a recruitment site. No doubt that cost them a pretty penny.
Those early internet fads have died out, but today's websites are no better.
Why does my browser have to download fonts? I already have fonts! Just use one of those!
Anyway, that's me done. I'm off to shout at some clouds. Not the virtual clouds, actual real ones.
This has got to be satire right? HTML is accessible by default, it's your horrible JS SPA frameworks that break thid. See [0]
I haven't perceived maintaining accessibility to be a big burden in the long term.
Interestingly the accessibility project forced me to raise my game on CSS/HTML, graphic design, etc. and probably had a bigger impact on my side projects than it did on my work.
It is on my mind because one of my hobbies is a cyberphysical artsystem that has a small book of design rules and presbyopia is what sets the limits on feature size. (You can't just tell people "hold the card closer")
https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
and is made of 8″x8″ cards. That's the first constellation I made, most of the output is either stand alone 4″x6″ cards or constellations. I'm working now on my third constellation from images published by Ukraine's MoD.
I've been dragging on my feet about blogging a manifesto for the three-sided cards, first because the system was changing by the day (it was a big thing for me to realize I could eliminate paper jams by printing the back side first) and then because I found hugo is good for anything except things that involve quantitative thinking or artistic sensibilities. I am still looking for a static site generator that's the equal of the subjects I want to blog about.
Circa 2008 I was working on a Silverlight RIA in a company that had MSDN subscriptions for everyone.
It worked just fine over the LAN off the server in our Ithaca office but when we demoed it for the people at the office in Rochester it took the application 40 minutes to boot because of all the round tripping.
That won me all the arguments I'd been having about excessive round tripping, getting that 40 minutes down to 40 seconds wasn't hard once those questions were resolved.
