I understand and can relate to the feeling that nobody gives a shit. And it may be true that the leadership of all of these companies only care about the bottom line. But let's not make things look worse than they are. Whatever the motive, some SV companies are doing good work in accessibility. The most obvious example is Apple; the introduction of VoiceOver on the iPhone in 2009 was groundbreaking and has been tremendously useful to blind people all over the world. Microsoft (disclosure: my former employer) is also doing good work on accessibility, e.g. its Seeing AI app. Of course, we have constructive criticism for these companies as well, but the state of accessibility in mainstream tech is not all bad.
I understand that no one is perfect. What bothers me is the hypocrisy: making it seem like they care when they really don’t. Did they spend $100k to sponsor that conference? I’d prefer they spend that money actually training people to care.
The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) recently held its annual convention virtually. One of their sponsorships was a company that provides a supposed drop-in solution for screen-reader accessibility. The solution is being widely adopted and does a very poor job fixing all but the most basic and predictable accessibility fails--and it discourages big companies from doing real work to make their products better and promote accessibility as part of their culture. There have been attempts by various accessibility professionals to engage the company, but their concerns were all dismissed and the company continues to make claims that simply are not true. The NFB investigated the company and its product, decided both it and its marketing were harmful to blind people and revoked the sponsorship.
My point--and I may be spitballing a bit here, but I think it's valid--is that CSUN made the choice to take money from a company that didn't do any real accessibility work. That reflects badly on CSUN just as much as it does anyone else, and from what I know of CSUN, a company like the one you're describing shouldn't have ever been represented.
I was unaware of this particular incident, but AccessiBe has had a bad reputation in the blind community for several months at least. Incidentally, I helped develop a browser extension to block AccessiBe and similar "accessibility overlays".
This tempts me to the idea of accepting the sponsorship but making the company name all-but-illegible in every piece of marketing material.
"But why did you do that?" "We'll display your logo to the same level of comprehensibility as your software provides to our users. Feel free to get back to us as it improves."
A more charitable explanation is they may care, but their organization might not put their money where their mouth is.
Also organizations are not monolithic singular minds, especially as they get bigger and bigger. They are groups of people and one end doesn't talk to the other is quite common.
I would expect that marketing has the uncommitted resources to spare in ways that development does not. How many weeks of engineer-team-time in SF or London will $100k get you? One, maybe?
I find a lot of questions, such as this one, boil down to resource management. It's easy to look in from the outside, judge an organization based on what you can see of its resource allocation, and use this to infer emotions. Thus $ORG does clearly not care about $SUBJECT.
Some strange alchemy has now taken place. The question is suddenly no longer about resources and priorities. Now it's about empathy, compassion, decency, and human dignity. To fail to share someone's priorities is now to imply that you do not regard them as human.
When questions of infinite competing priorities over finite resources are rendered into questions of human dignity, it's been my experience that genuine discourse becomes impossible. Perhaps that is the point.
Those of us who are affected by inaccessibility don't have the luxury of coldly viewing this as a resource management problem. Sure, the company has limited resources and pressing needs, but so do we.
Nevertheless, I appreciate that talking about whether a company or its leadership care about this stuff is beside the point. I'm calling on Cloudflare to do the right thing, regardless of whether they care about it.
It is going to cost a whole lot more than $100k to train everyone necessary on accessibility. Especially when you factor in the opportunity cost involved in focusing on that over new features or the like.
