Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with image buttons like the ones shown are that they visually break when zoomed in

Breaking features that paying users overwhelmingly do not use is not a showstopper for most businesses. I don't actively hate power-users, but if you're savvy enough to do anything other than open up the browser in the default settings and make with the clicky-clicky, you're savvy enough to undo it when you run into problems.

See also: "I disabled Javascript and your website broke", "I disable first-party cookies by default and your website broke", "I couldn't get your website to work on my wife's computer which I set up to run Lynx on Ubuntu Dapper" (no, really), etc.

I feel a lot worse over the related answer for disabled users, since they typically don't have an option to turn off being disabled, but the economics are the same: 100% higher development costs to improve the experience of under 1% of users is not feasible.

I'm one of the people perennially angry over 'I disabled JavaScript and your website broke,' but that's limited to sites that should work fine with JS off. Like this guy's - it's a blog post. A blog post should not completely break with JS off.

What I think isn't that 'the site breaks with JS off' is inherently terrible. Some sites actually do require JS - but that's far fewer than the number that think that they require JS, and completely breaking with JS off is a very distinct code smell. It says 'this person does not sweat the details.'

RE: disability, the economics are a little different, insofar as if you're a big enough target [1] it can be considered discrimination in a bunch of places.

Also, angry geeks aren't your decision-making customers/normal users, so you're not [as likely to be] foregoing revenue with them as you are with disabled users.

I don't mean this to come off as a holier-than-thou accessibility rant, but just thought the two situations were different enough to note.

1. http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1159347929235 (pun possibly intended)

That economic argument against paying to help the disabled access services is the reason why the ADA was passed.

It's a tough decision where to draw the line. A purely economic decision seems soulless; accommodation of everyone will bankrupt you.

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