Nearly two decades into its existence, Twitter does not and did not need an accessibility “team,” which was shitcanned by Elon Musk basically before he sat down for coffee. And rightly so.
A qualified developer of any stripe is indeed expected to build accessibility into all his or her work. Like producing valid HTML, it’s a baseline competency. (I kid. I’m the last one writing valid HTML.)
The scenario of autistic Democrats, furries, or Indics on work visas banging out a Web app, with an accessibility “team” swooping in to unfuck that Web app minutes before launch (or, quite commonly, years afterward), gets the process ass-backward.
Accessibilitistas expected, as the saying goes, to put themselves out of business. You’re supposed to be able to code accessibly just to get an interview for any kind of Web job, least of all a blue-chip position paying six figures.
I previously warned that the cannibalistic subsuming of accessibility under the rubric of diversity (or – much worse – of equity) has a single outcome: To discriminate against persons with disabilities who are male, White, or both. Vizmins and gendergoblins will get first dibs in this régime. And that is the intended, planned-for outcome.
The problem here is that gendergoblins and vizmins should benefit from accessibility. So should Whites, Indics, males, autistics, and Democrats. Accessibility is about levelling the playing field so that you, an army of one, can valiantly prevail or die on the battlefield according to your discrete adjusted-for abilities. Accessibility accommodates individuals. There manifestly is no such thing as a “disability community.”
American leftists (in practice, this does mean Democrats) insist There’s So Much Still to Be Done after each and every one of their irreversible victories. Right on cue, justly-shitcanned Twitter accessibility manager Gerard K. Cohen wrote “We had so much more to do, but we worked hard!”
Apparently not. If you’ve got a staff of about a half-dozen working “hard” all day, why couldn’t you manage to resolve every support ticket and fix every problem?
Which precise accessibility defects were still in place at Twitter at time of shitcanning, and why had they been left in place? What did this “team” do all day, apart from gripe internally about how their political enemies had still not been censored enough? (Or, as they would actually have preferred, genocided.)
Of course they got new jobs immediately after firing
Cohen listed a raft of “engineers” and designers, the latter category not necessarily having been shitcanned along with the former. They exhibit exactly the phenotypes you would expect. (There is indeed a shaven-headed black lesbian† whom one would not want to cross lest complaints to the Indian-American gals in H.R. be submitted. Said complaints were, after all, prewritten and ready to go, with names filled into blanks.)
Basically all of them got new jobs or were never fired in the first place.
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Brett Lewis, a judoka (and, apparently, a half-black), does not list a subsequent job.
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Richard Knowles, a black guy with dreads, apparently still works at Twitter. (I thought only the shaven-headed black lesbians† were unfireable. How naïve.)
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Tim Kettering’s personal Web site fails to resolve; I suggest this bespeaks underlying competence. He lists no new position. (“Also, being deaf, Tim finds it interesting that photography reflects the deaf worldview [sic] to everyone.”)
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Andrew Hayward – unsurprisingly in retrospect given his name, a ginger – works for WordPress now and typesets his site in a bullshit open-source clone of Cocon.
(Recall that I’ve known Müllenweg since he was barely old enough to lawfully enter a bar in Austin for Break Bread with Brad. Recall, further, that I have failed to finish, or even really start, my biography of Evert Bloemsma.)
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†Absolutely do not taunt Amber Antoi (“Mask-wearer. She/her”), least of all about the fact she does not list a followup job.
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Lauren Race (“she/her”) got hired by Oracle.
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Something called Deer (I did warn you about furries) lists Mastodon, BLM, and pronouns in her bio. Now she works for Zillow.
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@dc_at_work(sic) still lists zimself as working at Twitter. -
Peter Gould (“Quality Is King”) works at Miro, whatever that is.
I asked all of them how much they earned at Twitter, how much they’re earning now (and where), and what precisely remained to be done vis-à-vis Twitter accessibility. They surely won’t answer, and will try to get me in trouble. (As if!)
But in no respect whatsoever was the compensation of all the above costing Twitter less than a million and a half bucks a year. Charles Haywood, who is right about everything except perhaps Orthodoxy, was in turn correct when he ran the published numbers and determined that Twitter could run in the black solely through a bonfire of diversity-hire vanities.
Musical-chairs lifetime employment is a form of money-laundering among the progressive technology elite
Or, more accurately, patronage.
The prime directive of any and all Silicon Valley progressives is to ensure that no member of their political class stays unemployed for any period longer than the severance payout from that member’s immediately preceding job. The subprime directive is to ensure that I never earn a dime, least of all from accessibility, a field I cofounded and for which I wrote the bible.