I can tell you, I have personally worked with a global corporation and we estimated that for one of their websites, supporting the 3% that we exclude by using “modern standards” would be more costly than the amount of revenue they get from them. So in that case, it was a rational decision. And up to the 10% cut, management just didn’t want to do the extra investment. So if something falls below that 10% threshold, they just don’t care to get it fixed.
> it was a rational decision. And up to the 10% cut, management just didn’t want to do the extra investment
Rational, or economical? I find it rational to help someone in need since I'd want others to do the same to me, even if it's not financially profitable for me. Imo more factors flow into what's rational, but I understand what you mean by corporate greed working this way (less than 10% of people are blind, neither male nor female, run a free operating system or can't afford a new computer, etc., so yep they're not profitable groups and for-profits don't optimise for that)
You are using the notion of rationality wrong. Rational reasoning can only help you find how to achieve goals that align with your values. It is strictly worthless in choosing your values.
If a corporation has determined that profit maximization is their core tenet, excluding the needs of a minority of users can likely be deduced in a rational manner from that tenet. That is precisely why values need to be forced onto corporate actors through regulation, e.g. in this case through mandatory accessibility guidelines like EU directive 2019/882 that enters into force this very week.
Rational reasoning also takes into account long-term and second and higher order effects which quarterly profit-driven reasoning often ignores. If you support 95% of users and your competitor supports 100% then that may help your competitor getting 100% of them while you get none.
In my experience, accessibility features are needed by about 1.5% of users (E-commerce and some internal business tools). So by your logic, the rational choice is to exclude accessibility?
Or Linux users? Or even Firefox users in our market?
Something is off in this calculation, how did they get to such a high cost for such a simple thing as an alternative image format when the web supports multiple???
My guess would be that the users hitting different types of issues are mostly the same; someone who can't view an alternative image format is using an obscure old browser or obscure OS that will inevitably have a ton of other issues too, and fixing only a subset of the issues would not make much difference.
No, this was not about the alternative image format. This was about the browsers and screen resolutions that we choose to fully support.
We took the data directly from the website visitors analytics.
Basically .. resolutions under 1024px and anything older than edge 11 was left out of the scope.
Thanks for demonstrating why laws like ADA are needed to force companies to not be bad citizens. We desperately need similar laws to force compatibility with older hardware - one could even champion it under environmental protection.
> 5% of people can't view them, yet 25% of top websites use them?
That's not how it works.
The server declares what versions of media it has, and
the client requests a supported media format. The same trick have been used for audio and video for ages too.
This problem was solved by HTTP since forever. Client sends `Accept` header with supported formats and server selects the necessary content with corresponding `Content-Type` header. You don't need any HTML tags for it.
Images are often at different resolutions too, that way, depending on the pixel density of the device, and the physical size, the browser can select the photo that has high enough resolution, but not one that is needlessly large, while also selecting the preferred image format.
File extensions are just a hint about what the file might be and have nothing to do with what the file actually is. If the server sets the MIME type, the browser will use that as the hint.
But even beyond that, most file formats have a bit of a header at the start of the file that declares the actual format of the file. Browsers already can understand that and use the correct render for a file without an extension.
I agree with the point you're trying to make, but your examples are terrible. Music industry doesn't have too much to do to help deaf people. It's not like they're deliberately making deaf-inaccessible music instead of relying on the old good deaf-accessible music formats.
(Also, the parent comment's example is also not so good because as someone else pointed just because the top 25% websites are serving webp it does mean they're not serving alternative formats for those who does not support it, as this is quite trivial to setup)
In what other industry would it be considered acceptable to exclude 5% of visitors/users/clients?