5 ms·

According to a blind friend of mine, the web, despite the constant touting of it as being great for accessibility, has been a total disaster for accessibility.

According to a blind friend of mine, the web, despite the constant touting of it as being great for accessibility, has been a total disaster for accessibility. As you point out, windows applications have much better accessibility (and Microsoft still cares) than most webpages.

mwcampbell 9y ago
I'm not surprised by your friend's observations, but that's rather beside the point of my comment. I was simply giving one example I know of a case where redesigning a system to work efficiently across address space boundaries is difficult. I'm curious about other examples, particularly in mainstream applications.
dotancohen 9y ago
The Web is great for accessibility in the traditional sense of the word. Information is accessible. The HCI sense of accessibility is completely dependent on the Web page authors. The hoards and hoards of them, who are using a technology that was specifically designed to be used by people with no training in the medium.
- dcow 9y ago
  Unfortunately when differently-abled people are simply another user segment there is absolutely no way to get business resoures to address them because they sadly aren't your target market. That's been my experience amyway. IMO it's one of the biggest issues with agile: MVPs aren't accessible (among many other things).
  - flukus 9y ago
    I think MVPs are another casualty, having a server spit out html is surely the minimum viable approach?
nils-m-holm 9y ago
I have slightly impaired vision, so I need a 30pt font to be able to read comfortably, and the web is already a disaster in terms of accessibility. There are lots of sites that I cannot use, because of overlapping content, unreadable text, hidden buttons, etc.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  While I doing my solution would work for 30pt fonts, for years I have disabled all fonts and sizes outside of my preferred font and narrow size range
- hollerith 9y ago
  Same here. The web of 1996 was very accommodating to people (like me) who can read from screens, but need or strongly prefer a larger-than-normal text size, the web of 2018 vastly less so. Some developments that made things harder for me were: Mobile Safari's decision not to reflow the paragraphs when the user does the inverse of the pinch gesture ("zoom"?), which seems to have encouraged the makers of the other browsers to give less priority to reflow even though they did not completely give up on it; at large text sizes, that decision required the user to scroll horizontally left and right for every line of text; Google's purchase of Blogger followed by its changing Blogger so it will not show the reader any text unless Javascript is enabled, which seems to have encouraged other sites to do the same; this made it impossible for me to continue to visit those sites in Lynx (a browser that ran inside a terminal window, but did not support Javascript); HTML5 in general was a disaster for me. For example, at large text sizes, the elements that remain at a fixed position relative to the window regularly end up taking up most of the window's real estate, leaving little room for the text I want to read. Clarification: those have been my frustrations when trying to read what is or easily could have been static content; this comment is not about web apps.
- Fnoord 9y ago
  Does Firefox "Reader View" feature help you in any kind of way? Or is it that reading isn't the issue, but browsing around is?
  - 9y ago

mwcampbell 9y ago

I'm not surprised by your friend's observations, but that's rather beside the point of my comment. I was simply giving one example I know of a case where redesigning a system to work efficiently across address space boundaries is difficult. I'm curious about other examples, particularly in mainstream applications.

dotancohen 9y ago

The Web is great for accessibility in the traditional sense of the word. Information is accessible. The HCI sense of accessibility is completely dependent on the Web page authors. The hoards and hoards of them, who are using a technology that was specifically designed to be used by people with no training in the medium.

dcow 9y ago
Unfortunately when differently-abled people are simply another user segment there is absolutely no way to get business resoures to address them because they sadly aren't your target market. That's been my experience amyway. IMO it's one of the biggest issues with agile: MVPs aren't accessible (among many other things).
- flukus 9y ago
  I think MVPs are another casualty, having a server spit out html is surely the minimum viable approach?

nils-m-holm 9y ago

I have slightly impaired vision, so I need a 30pt font to be able to read comfortably, and the web is already a disaster in terms of accessibility. There are lots of sites that I cannot use, because of overlapping content, unreadable text, hidden buttons, etc.

paulie_a 9y ago
While I doing my solution would work for 30pt fonts, for years I have disabled all fonts and sizes outside of my preferred font and narrow size range
hollerith 9y ago
Same here. The web of 1996 was very accommodating to people (like me) who can read from screens, but need or strongly prefer a larger-than-normal text size, the web of 2018 vastly less so. Some developments that made things harder for me were: Mobile Safari's decision not to reflow the paragraphs when the user does the inverse of the pinch gesture ("zoom"?), which seems to have encouraged the makers of the other browsers to give less priority to reflow even though they did not completely give up on it; at large text sizes, that decision required the user to scroll horizontally left and right for every line of text; Google's purchase of Blogger followed by its changing Blogger so it will not show the reader any text unless Javascript is enabled, which seems to have encouraged other sites to do the same; this made it impossible for me to continue to visit those sites in Lynx (a browser that ran inside a terminal window, but did not support Javascript); HTML5 in general was a disaster for me. For example, at large text sizes, the elements that remain at a fixed position relative to the window regularly end up taking up most of the window's real estate, leaving little room for the text I want to read. Clarification: those have been my frustrations when trying to read what is or easily could have been static content; this comment is not about web apps.
Fnoord 9y ago
Does Firefox "Reader View" feature help you in any kind of way? Or is it that reading isn't the issue, but browsing around is?
- 9y ago