I'm telling y'all, if sighted people had to deal with the kind of senseless bullcrap that blind people *have* to deal with, daily, there would be very widespread protests. Public ones. Miles of people.
So, imagine this. You go to Google. Or Kagi. Whatever you like. The text box has "search" as a placeholder text. When you type into the field, the "search" is supposed to be replaced with what you're typing. So you go to search one day, and find that when you search for "cat food", you get "csatf aroochd". No matter what you do, that "search" is there, messing up all your searches. If you backspace everything out and try again, you get the same thing. No matter what. Now, you can click outside of the box, and type and press Enter and it works, but you don't see what's in the search box. You can paste your search in from notepad, but do you *really* want to do that? And this has been a problem for weeks now. You start to wonder if anyone at Google, uses Google.
And while this isn't entirely comparable with what's happening with the iOS Facebook app right now, it's the closest I can get. Truth be told, I don't post on Facebook. I haven't posted on there in like a year or two. So I, personally, don't have to deal with this. But for some people, Facebook is their lifeline. And no, that's not some stupid cliche like it sometimes is when overused by marketing teams. No. For some people, Facebook is how they communicate with their communities. And you had better not come in the replies all "well they should use Mastodon." No. Humble yourself. So this issue is a huge problem for them. And when you have elderly people who just want to talk to the people they care about involved, who know how to do it one way, and just stick to that because technology is so vast that one can easily get lost in their view? Things need to change. People need to understand these things. And while bugs suck and new frameworks are cool and Facebook loves to move fast and break things, if you want to do that, you'd better have a testing team that includes blind people, Braille users, dictation users, as wide a net as you can cast. And you know what? Maybe that'd cut down on that damn blind employment problem too. Fucking listen damn it! And I could go on and post on Facebook about this, using my computer because I'm privileged enough to have one and know how to work around accessibility issues, while I could even grab my Android phone, or dictate into my iPhone, I'm not the general blind person. And this isn't even just about Facebook, or just about this one situation. Developers of anything of any size should take this kind of thing to heart. And I know people are tired of me all on here dampening the party mood with all this anti-fun accessibility talk since like 2017, but at some point, we need to take things seriously. Because devs' "fun", building, developing, trying new frameworks and new updates sparkle sparkle, effects other people.