Ya, your reasoning about why the text-only version was ok is what I heard as well.
As far as people being on board with this--I did not have to push it through, it was a task that management wanted done that I happily did, because I could see the value of it.
Amazon actually does a really good job with accessibility across all their products. When I was there, they had at least 2 full time employees (1 Product manager and 1 Quality assurance engineer) whose full time job was just accessibility, across all Kindle platforms and I heard the intention was to grow that team as I was leaving. They had an entire team working on accessibility for the retail website, from what I heard (though I only met one or two of those people).
However, there still was a sentiment among certain engineers that worrying about accessibility was a waste of time because it only helps a small section of the population. Thankfully Web accessibility (both in standards and in culture) has come a long way in the last 8-10 years, and I think a lot more people believe in its importance now that they did back in 2017 when I started working on this.
As far as people being on board with this--I did not have to push it through, it was a task that management wanted done that I happily did, because I could see the value of it.
Amazon actually does a really good job with accessibility across all their products. When I was there, they had at least 2 full time employees (1 Product manager and 1 Quality assurance engineer) whose full time job was just accessibility, across all Kindle platforms and I heard the intention was to grow that team as I was leaving. They had an entire team working on accessibility for the retail website, from what I heard (though I only met one or two of those people).
However, there still was a sentiment among certain engineers that worrying about accessibility was a waste of time because it only helps a small section of the population. Thankfully Web accessibility (both in standards and in culture) has come a long way in the last 8-10 years, and I think a lot more people believe in its importance now that they did back in 2017 when I started working on this.