At work our design team came up with buttons that are 10x10 pixels on my screen. They are used to change pages (like on mobile, but this is a desktop program), the scroll events are ignored by design, so you either click the tiny buttons (which are slightly darker gray than the dark background) or you simulate a finger swipe via drag and drop with the mouse. Yes they designed a touch GUI for a desktop application.
The place where I live is very good at pretending to do the right thing while doing absolutely nothing.
For example a touristic social account managed by some government entity posted some extra complicated wheelchair lift (that will inevitably break in 1 month at most) to show how disabled people are well integrated.
Meanwhile of course the real situation is that people on wheelchair can go almost nowhere at all. Newer public transport has even worse accessibility than before, elevators are mostly broken at all times and regular ramps are missing, doors regularly have super strong springs and a button to open them (which breaks all the time) when they should just have a much weaker spring instead.
Designers I've worked with are like the tourist social media account. Showing the one single place they made accessible and explicitly saying in meetings "we are good people, we care for disabled people"… and then hating me for pointing out the million other things that are not accessible.
Well the ones I've worked with couldn't care less.
Of course they love to show off how good they are to the poor disabled people, but that doesn't mean anything until some government reminds us that we are in breach of contract unless we make our GUI accessible.
Designers that come from a background of human machine interaction care and will say that. Designers who come from a background of art don't understand what is being talked about and so don't say anything - they tend to only ensure it works on their one devices which they have selected to be the best and ignore everything else.
The second group does make things that look nicer, but the first ensures it can be used. You really want both, but then you need to be careful about who wins when they disagree.
It is a patronising sentiment, but adjacent tonal cues suggest GGGP is offering it ironically, thus in ridicule of performative compliance.
On flipside, note that many regulations - in any human domain - are oriented to raise the level of the worst performing, not to support the efforts of the best or to optimise the middle.
Yes very patronising, a terrible attitude really. Which is why I criticise it.
Also I'm disabled myself, although not in a way that requires any adaptation to use a computer. But I of course notice these things a bit more than average; and I get to hear my elderly father's complaints about software that he can't use because of inaccessible design.
Of course a designer should be qualified and notice these things even more… but all they do is move buttons around and disable copy paste so that even fully abled people have a hard time using our software between versions.
I believe that was the commenter's point - that the designers described patronizingly virtue signal about their accessibility priorities, while their other decisions are troublesome.
Which everyone is only doing because it's an industry fad likely stemming from copycatting one or two instances where it was done for legitimate reasons.
Said no designer ever.
At work our design team came up with buttons that are 10x10 pixels on my screen. They are used to change pages (like on mobile, but this is a desktop program), the scroll events are ignored by design, so you either click the tiny buttons (which are slightly darker gray than the dark background) or you simulate a finger swipe via drag and drop with the mouse. Yes they designed a touch GUI for a desktop application.