I only know the very basics of design for screen readers so I’ll stick to talking about your first example. I agree this isn’t a case of the curb cut effect, because the curb cut effect by definition refers to an accommodation creating benefits for a broader set of people than it was originally intended for. Part of my goal was to make it clear that we can’t always expect that to happen. If an accommodation makes life worse for non-users then it’s at best what I’d call a handicapped parking effect, meaning that designers have to make a hard tradeoff. It’s also possible that the people working on your bridge just didn’t think about it or didn’t try very hard, in which case it’s not any kind of cleverly-named effect, it’s just bad design. (but I also don’t know anything about civil engineering, so I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion in any particular case.)
As for financial cost: This post was meant to be about usage patterns around the accommodations themselves, so it doesn’t go into decisions about whether to invest in any particular accommodation in the first place (except for the aside about curb cut effects increasing the total benefits). But I agree that financial cost is real and important. If someone believes that accessibility either is a fundamental moral imperative or has diffuse benefits to all of society, that should lead them to argue that it’s worth paying high costs to make things more accessible, but it shouldn’t let them get away with ignoring cost/benefit thinking entirely.
If an accommodation makes life worse for non-users then it’s at best what I’d call a handicapped parking effect, meaning that designers have to make a hard tradeoff.
Right. The thing is (and this is what I was getting at), it seems to me that disability accommodations are often argued for on the basis of the “curb cut effect” concept, but in fact such accommodations turn out to be handicapped parking effects—at best! It seems to me, in fact, that disability accommodations quite often make life tangibly worse for many more people than those whose lives they improve.
(By the way, here’s something which I find to be… interesting, let’s say. It’s often claimed that curb cut effects are ubiquitous. Yet if you ask for three examples of such things, people tend to have trouble producing them. One’s a freebie: actual curb cuts. Two, also easy, there’s the standard-issue second example: closed captions (although I am not entirely convinced that they’re strictly positive-or-neutral either, but never mind that). But what’s the third? After some straining, you might get something lame like “high contrast on websites” (what websites…?) or “accessibility features in games” (what features…?). At that point the well of examples runs dry.)
It’s also possible that the people working on your bridge just didn’t think about it or didn’t try very hard, in which case it’s not any kind of cleverly-named effect, it’s just bad design.
Sure they didn’t. Why should they? It’s not like anyone is building the thing out of a purely altruistic desire to help disabled people. Someone somewhere passed a law, someone else in another place wrote some regulations, a third person somewhere else wrote some funding proposal, a budget was approved, jobs were created, political capital was made, etc., etc.
But that’s how it almost always is. Almost nobody ever really thinks about it or tries very hard. This entire domain is absolutely jam-packed with principal-agent problems. That’s the whole problem.
From the tone of your text I feel like you’re expressing disagreement, but as far as I can tell we’re in agreement that not every accommodation is a win-win curb cut effect. I’m a lot more enthusiastic about the good outcomes of many accommodations than you are but I fervently agree that 1) sometimes there are negative tradeoffs and 2) it’s harmful and dogmatic, not to mention infuriating, when people insist that this never happens or that negative consequences to non-users are unimportant. Am I missing someplace where my post dismisses the issues you’re talking about?
Am I missing someplace where my post dismisses the issues you’re talking about?
Not explicitly, no.
I would characterize the difference in our views (as I understand your views) as having primarily to do with expectations about the distribution of outcomes w.r.t. whether any given accommodation will be positive-sum, zero-sum, or negative-sum (and the details of how the benefits and harms will be distributed).
If one believes that the distribution is skewed heavily toward positive-sum outcomes, and zero-sum or negative-sum outcomes are rare or even essentially of negligible incidence, then the emphasis and focus of your post basically makes sense; in such a case, overlooking opportunities to provide accommodations is the primary way in which we end up with less value than we might have done.
If one believes that the distribution contains a substantial component of zero-sum or negative-sum outcomes (and, especially, if one believes that there are common categories of situations wherein a negative-sum outcome may be the default), then the emphasis and focus of your post is essentially mis-aimed, and the lack of discussion of costs, of harms, etc., is a substantial oversight in any treatment of the topic.
That said, I of course agree with the basic thesis which you express in the post’s title, and which you develop in the post, i.e. that not everything is a curb cut effect and that there are different dynamics that arise from different sorts of accommodations. You can think of my top-level comment in this thread as additive, so to speak—addressing a lacuna, rather than directly challenging any specific claim in your post. (My other top-level commentdoes directly challenge some of your claims, of course. But that’s a different subtopic.)
That makes sense, thanks. I should think more about cases where design for accessibility just generally makes something worse. You could shoehorn that into the handicapped parking paradigm but it’s not really the best fit—the challenge there isn’t allocating a limited resource, though there probably is an underlying limitation in terms of budget or attention. Those are frustrating because usually you can imagine a thoughtful solution that would make everyone happy, but you can’t count on it actually working out that way.
I only know the very basics of design for screen readers so I’ll stick to talking about your first example. I agree this isn’t a case of the curb cut effect, because the curb cut effect by definition refers to an accommodation creating benefits for a broader set of people than it was originally intended for. Part of my goal was to make it clear that we can’t always expect that to happen. If an accommodation makes life worse for non-users then it’s at best what I’d call a handicapped parking effect, meaning that designers have to make a hard tradeoff. It’s also possible that the people working on your bridge just didn’t think about it or didn’t try very hard, in which case it’s not any kind of cleverly-named effect, it’s just bad design. (but I also don’t know anything about civil engineering, so I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion in any particular case.)
As for financial cost: This post was meant to be about usage patterns around the accommodations themselves, so it doesn’t go into decisions about whether to invest in any particular accommodation in the first place (except for the aside about curb cut effects increasing the total benefits). But I agree that financial cost is real and important. If someone believes that accessibility either is a fundamental moral imperative or has diffuse benefits to all of society, that should lead them to argue that it’s worth paying high costs to make things more accessible, but it shouldn’t let them get away with ignoring cost/benefit thinking entirely.
Right. The thing is (and this is what I was getting at), it seems to me that disability accommodations are often argued for on the basis of the “curb cut effect” concept, but in fact such accommodations turn out to be handicapped parking effects—at best! It seems to me, in fact, that disability accommodations quite often make life tangibly worse for many more people than those whose lives they improve.
(By the way, here’s something which I find to be… interesting, let’s say. It’s often claimed that curb cut effects are ubiquitous. Yet if you ask for three examples of such things, people tend to have trouble producing them. One’s a freebie: actual curb cuts. Two, also easy, there’s the standard-issue second example: closed captions (although I am not entirely convinced that they’re strictly positive-or-neutral either, but never mind that). But what’s the third? After some straining, you might get something lame like “high contrast on websites” (what websites…?) or “accessibility features in games” (what features…?). At that point the well of examples runs dry.)
Sure they didn’t. Why should they? It’s not like anyone is building the thing out of a purely altruistic desire to help disabled people. Someone somewhere passed a law, someone else in another place wrote some regulations, a third person somewhere else wrote some funding proposal, a budget was approved, jobs were created, political capital was made, etc., etc.
But that’s how it almost always is. Almost nobody ever really thinks about it or tries very hard. This entire domain is absolutely jam-packed with principal-agent problems. That’s the whole problem.
From the tone of your text I feel like you’re expressing disagreement, but as far as I can tell we’re in agreement that not every accommodation is a win-win curb cut effect. I’m a lot more enthusiastic about the good outcomes of many accommodations than you are but I fervently agree that 1) sometimes there are negative tradeoffs and 2) it’s harmful and dogmatic, not to mention infuriating, when people insist that this never happens or that negative consequences to non-users are unimportant. Am I missing someplace where my post dismisses the issues you’re talking about?
Not explicitly, no.
I would characterize the difference in our views (as I understand your views) as having primarily to do with expectations about the distribution of outcomes w.r.t. whether any given accommodation will be positive-sum, zero-sum, or negative-sum (and the details of how the benefits and harms will be distributed).
If one believes that the distribution is skewed heavily toward positive-sum outcomes, and zero-sum or negative-sum outcomes are rare or even essentially of negligible incidence, then the emphasis and focus of your post basically makes sense; in such a case, overlooking opportunities to provide accommodations is the primary way in which we end up with less value than we might have done.
If one believes that the distribution contains a substantial component of zero-sum or negative-sum outcomes (and, especially, if one believes that there are common categories of situations wherein a negative-sum outcome may be the default), then the emphasis and focus of your post is essentially mis-aimed, and the lack of discussion of costs, of harms, etc., is a substantial oversight in any treatment of the topic.
That said, I of course agree with the basic thesis which you express in the post’s title, and which you develop in the post, i.e. that not everything is a curb cut effect and that there are different dynamics that arise from different sorts of accommodations. You can think of my top-level comment in this thread as additive, so to speak—addressing a lacuna, rather than directly challenging any specific claim in your post. (My other top-level comment does directly challenge some of your claims, of course. But that’s a different subtopic.)
That makes sense, thanks. I should think more about cases where design for accessibility just generally makes something worse. You could shoehorn that into the handicapped parking paradigm but it’s not really the best fit—the challenge there isn’t allocating a limited resource, though there probably is an underlying limitation in terms of budget or attention. Those are frustrating because usually you can imagine a thoughtful solution that would make everyone happy, but you can’t count on it actually working out that way.