Some of you might be interested in this Mastodon thread. It’s a bit of bashing PDFs for having poor accessibility, and some guidance on improving PDFs for accessibility.
Some people are saying they prefer MS Word over PDF for accessibility reasons. Of course the elephant in the room is that “accessibility” is an over-loaded word. It usually refers to usability by impaired people, but in the case of being generally usable to all people on a broad range of platforms, MS Word is obviously inaccessible due to being encumbered by proprietary tech by a protectionist corporation.
That was a great description of the day-to-day work for a commercial dev. I feel your pain.
I like to think I produce better software at work though. It’s not just me writing my magnum opus, there’s structure around it. I also like to enjoy my free time doing other things, so I don’t think I’m as focused as some other contributors - I don’t really have passion projects. There’s something to be said for the uniformity you get at a large company.
Things like your ability to get to a dev are great when you’re a dev, but not so much when you’re far removed from the industry or the concepts. I get my bug reports from people with deep technical and subject matter knowledge (be they testers or customer support), not panicked users, and I absolutely love it.
As a consumer, I’ve also gotten great turnarounds from multiple companies.
At the end of the day, it’s hard to make blanket statements, but, particularly when the requirement is still mistakenly considered a niche, you get a lot out of more structure in a project that’s beholden to stakeholders, regulators and public perceptions.