Beware the good intentions. You likely left the big company because you hated being a small cog in the machine filling out the TPS reports.
You went to work in a smaller company because you feel that you are actually making a change. You see the direct result of your actions and motivates much more than a steady paycheck.
I understand that making a small niche product and having to monetize it yourself could be extremely tough, and it looks like a much bigger change to talk a huge player like Cloudflare in following your path, although there's a caveat. If you want them to do the job, you will be always seen as an extra expense line and dealt with it accordingly.
Imagine that you are approached by another blogger demanding that you add support for right-to-left languages to your program, and due to some technicalities, it would push your release date another 6 months on. Or some people find the voice used in the program offensive. Would you happily take on the extra work, or would you just try to sweep them under the rug?
It's always the same formula. Requiring others to do what you believe is right (and they don't) sparks tensions. Offering others something that solves a specific problem they need gives money to you and satisfaction to them. Unfortunately, recently we see too much of the former and too little of the latter.
I'm not targeting anyone and I'm not affiliated with Cloudflare. I used a throwaway account because sharing an opinion that goes against certain narratives is seen by some people as a valid reason to declare a personal vendetta against you, demanding that your employer fires you and any future one refuses to work with you. I am merely trying to avoid that, while expressing a point of view that I believe has merit.
I wish we lived in a free country and I didn't have to do that, but sadly this is no longer the case.
I don't work at Cloudflare. I am merely trying to share my personal pragmatic point of view.
In this specific case I would argue that the problem is taken out of scope. The idea of browser isolation is to specifically replace the "smart" stream of data that is prone to attacks with a "dumb" pre-rendered version that is much more rigid. This eliminates the whole class of attacks by design.
Sure, it won't work for blind people. So if your organization employs them and you want to achieve comparable level of security, you set them up with a properly isolated VM, install the accessibility software there, and add an exception rule for that VM. Problem solved: the blind person has comparable experience to a regular browser, while the average level of security in the company has raised. If the employer specifically refuses to set up such a VM, it would be reasonable to demand it or sue them.
To put it into a perspective, a blind person cannot drive a car in regular traffic due to obvious reasons. So it's reasonable to provide them with alternate means of transportation, but it would be unreasonable to demand that all cars should be banned until they can accommodate blind drivers. It can be technically done if you make every car remote-drivable, but the cost and safety considerations make it completely unviable.
Because the only publicly acceptable answer would be to agree to all the poster's current and future demands, regardless of the cost, priorities, risk of breaking other features, etc. And it never works out because the demands tend to increase over time, and the PR damage of rejecting the very last demand is proportional to the number of ones previously accepted.
Make a thought experiment: think what if Cloudflare answered trying to explain the complexity, risks, and maybe cost estimates for supporting something like that, but refusing to add it right away. Nobody would listen to their reasoning. They would be immediately labeled as blind haters or whatnot, supported by endless news articles and retweets.
Make another thought experiment: assume they comply with the current demands and add the functionality at some fixed cost. Then in the future, the poster decides that the accessibility support is not sufficient and still makes life hard for blind people. He would come up with another set of demands and Cloudflare would again be forced to comply, because nobody would listen to their reasoning. And because it is physically impossible to make a blind person as productive at certain tasks as a non-blind one, there will be always room for improvement and room for more demands.
If you want to truly help the blind, please go ahead and launch a competing product. Or offer an ML-based tool working on top of existing products. Or create Wiki-like system where people would maintain semantic models of commonly used non-accessible sites, letting the accessible tools work over them. But all of that requires hard work, countless hours and numerous trials-and-errors. Trying to strong-arm someone else to put in that effort surely gives a much faster gratification, but it only results in further alienation and ghosting.
Sure, Cloudflare will release an official statement saying how they are committed and dedicated and working and planning and hoping, and the whole thing will get forgotten in a few weeks, but ultimately if you want to someone to help you, maybe try to understand their constraints and find a compromise, rather than trying to use the buzzwords to throw the mob at them.
You went to work in a smaller company because you feel that you are actually making a change. You see the direct result of your actions and motivates much more than a steady paycheck.
I understand that making a small niche product and having to monetize it yourself could be extremely tough, and it looks like a much bigger change to talk a huge player like Cloudflare in following your path, although there's a caveat. If you want them to do the job, you will be always seen as an extra expense line and dealt with it accordingly.
Imagine that you are approached by another blogger demanding that you add support for right-to-left languages to your program, and due to some technicalities, it would push your release date another 6 months on. Or some people find the voice used in the program offensive. Would you happily take on the extra work, or would you just try to sweep them under the rug?
It's always the same formula. Requiring others to do what you believe is right (and they don't) sparks tensions. Offering others something that solves a specific problem they need gives money to you and satisfaction to them. Unfortunately, recently we see too much of the former and too little of the latter.