I'd really appreciate a TLDR for this. I fear I already know it, but still.

Brilliant episode. I've had the unfortunate experience of directly interacting with Shir, the AccessiBe CEO, at the SiteTek Global conference last year and subsequently in a private 1-on-1 Zoom interview much like Chancey's experience, and it did not go at all well. They hate being confronted by actual screen reader users and a11y experts, and I was basically shouted at and had to endure tons of defensive marketing blather while I was trying to directly demonstrate actual and specific problems their tech causes with VoiceOver in MacOS Safari. As brought up in the podcast, AccessiBe did not engage at all nor ask the blind community for input before developing their product, rather they went for the funding and money while thinking they had a home run with good intentions.

The sheer backlash they are getting now is well-deserved and I don't know how they come back from all of the lost trust with the blind community. They launched and spread out to make money, and expect free testing from users, putting us in a position where we have to give them feedback that they should have figured out long ago had they done any basic and rudimentary testing themselves, and then the user still has to fight through their defensive pushback about their tech while waiting for them to fix it, and are fully blocked or have to work around the problems AccessiBe causes until that point. It is just ridiculous, and I wish overlays companies would pull back away from the consumers and focus their efforts more in the development pipeline and education. If more developers learned accessibility and inclusive design in school and in bootcamps, we'd have a systemic improvement in web access overall for all users, disabled or otherwise. If their AI tool would find and help coders remediate issues before getting to the testing stage and help with rolling code out to production, that would be much more beneficial than creating something that produces more problems for the end user without recourse for their self-created barriers.

It is worth the listen. Wow.

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