@Aral Balkan @✨Nora Tindall Exactly! My grandma of 93 can no longer take the bus because they require a proprietary "app" to pay for the ride. And in Norway accepting cash is actually mandatory by law, but a law that's sadly not enforced.

@harald @aral @tindall
That is actually quite bad...
I have not yet encountered such things here, but I guess it will come one day... :(

@Deadly Headshot

as they don't run a staffed phone line with COVID

Because routing telephone calls is not possible, right? sigh
Companies should be fined hard for behaving like this.

@aral @tindall the >99% marketshare of Dumbdroid and iTrash is probably both a cause and an effect of this

nobody bothers with developing alternative OSes because nobody uses those

nobody bothers with using alternative OSes because they have no apps

@aral @tindall There will be one enforcing accessibility in Europe in 2025 (or later). Here’s what I’ve compiled at work:

The law directive (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2019.151.01.0070.01.ENG&toc=OJ:L:2019:151:TOC).

- Effective starting 28/6/2025 at best.

- There’s an e-commerce category.

- “The obligations of this Directive should apply equally to economic operators from the public and private sectors.”

- The directive is pretty clear on the general principles/requirements regarding UI accessibility (Annexe I, section I.2)

1/x

@aral @tindall

2/2

- Extra requirements for categories listed in https://www.deque.com/blog/2021-mobile-accessibility-compliance-and-legislation-in-eu/ (Annexe I, Section IV), including e-commerce (point (g)): basically everything related to payment, auth & security must be “perceivable, operable, understandable and robust”.

- The directive is sort of saying “let’s not be too hard on small companies (SMEs, defined in chapter 1, article 3.25), let’s consider the existence of disproportionate economic burden (e.g. small ets. who can’t afford compliance)“.

@wmd presumably they sell it to the landlord or bank.

@tindall
Ah yes, those two (problematic) institutions do have a responsibility there though. While people are forced to use those, they need to be accessible to all (they're bot ofcourse, no such thing as a free bank account)

@tindall @wmd i almost said "or government" in reply to this but pretty much every time i've seen a govt agency contract out it's significantly worse than whatever they had previously been doing in-house

@TMakarios agreed, but the bottleneck of resources is usually between the business selling the software and the devs they pay to make it; the business is the one not prioritizing features, not the customers.

@Gerrit Niezen @✨Nora Tindall Or that software is made to be interoperable, based on standards. This way software for a given purpose can be made by anyone. Not all implementaetions need to cover every need, but people and organizations are free to choose the implementations that cover their needs.

Open standards and Free Software are the tools for this to work.

@gendor no, it means that people shouldn't be required to use proprietary software to access vital things. There always needs to be a cash, phone, and/or in-person way to handle necessary life stuff.

@tindall @gendor Ah, so that's the "and people are required to use that piece of software" condition.

So software can be built and deployed in an incremental fashion, but it's the people pushing it on other people, the people who ultimately make the decisions, who need to make sure nobody is left behind.

@clacke @gendor exactly!