Heather Buchel
I'm going to rant about open source a little, I am so sorry.
So much of open source favors people that ~ have time ~ That usually means:
- They aren't caretakers (i.e. they don't have children or elder family that have care needs) or can rely on a partner to do all of that in their stead.
- They can work long hours outside of their 9-5 jobs which excludes many Disabled people or those that have chronic pain.
- They already have a high paying job, they have health insurance.
Heather Buchel
The amount of incredibly detailed Github issues I've seen where someone has taken the time to do a manual accessibility audit and give suggestions, even to write the expected HTML, but because it's not wrapped up in a PR with proper Typescript and accompanying unit tests and broken down into 5 different components for "potential" reuse it gets no movement. This is why you get no contributors for these things.
Heather Buchel
I think about this a lot when I see maintainers who shrug off accessibility requests as "Well make a pull request! It's open source!"
The very people that are experts that you need contributions from aren't included or welcomed in this community.
Then, throw in the complicated mess that is "modern" javascript or just frontend development in general. You expect people to be experts at accessibility, to have the bandwidth to contribute, AND to navigate that landscape?
Heather Buchel
it just feels like we're never going to live up to the baseline that open source needs to actually thrive. I don't see the current landscape of burnt out maintainers, especially those that are unfortunate enough to have very popular libraries with no corporate backing, as succeeding? People need healthcare. People need UBI. They need childcare. They need elder care.
Not saying we should give up on OS, but sometimes I'm overwhelmed at what we're missing.
Heather Buchel
- OR you work for a company that values open source for one reason or another (there are some very cynical reasons you can think of there, obviously, the potential for unpaid labor).
But ultimately, at the root, because we live in this hellscape where people can't have healthcare and it's a race to the bottom for wages, it's incredibly exclusionary to Disabled people or any one who considers themselves a caretaker.
Heather Buchel
So much of the core of tech leaves out Disabled people and that's ultimately why we can't have nice things. It's why everything ends up being just a little bit worse for everyone. It starts there, then it reaches out to other groups of people that aren't overrepresented in tech, then FINALLY to everyone else who all throw up their hands and say "Who could have seen this coming?"
Heather Buchel
To the people replying to this that are all "you're describing people that have time for hobbies": I'm going to give some of you the benefit of the doubt that you know nothing about open source software, but to the others that are intentionally missing the point so they can be dismissive in a conversation regarding the inclusiveness of the OS community, you can kindly go fuck yourself.
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