A couple of days ago I was reading an interview with Kate Swaffer, a very popular blogger who suffers dementia (you can check her blog here, it’s really good!). That interview led me to think about a number of things we left aside in our daily work that could push people away from it, or make an approach really hard. Sometimes we choose to do that and sometimes we’re just ignorant.

Sometimes our website is not well prepared for screen readers, or is not crossbrowser. Maybe our CSS doesn’t have line-breaks, or our Javascript is minified without leaving the source at hand. We may often prefer using our time to write more code instead of documenting what we already have. Perhaps we use a very technical language in our blog posts without a real need to do it. The admin of a community site may take decisions that favor a minority of users above others. I myself, being a native Spanish speaker, write most of my posts in English, maybe leaving behind some potential readers. There’s a ton of things we can do to push people away.

But we sure can’t contempt everyone, right? Doing that would be like an impossible dream. People is different from each other, and that’s what makes the world keep running, for right or wrong. But I do think we can know our public, or at least we can try to do it. And I also think the same can be applied to programmers, because the fact that our work is not so evident for the final users doesn’t mean that we don’t need to be accesible for each other.