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It's my opinion at this point that CSS is one of the things turning the web from a user-centric tool to a means for companies to control people's data. If you

It's my opinion at this point that CSS is one of the things turning the web from a user-centric tool to a means for companies to control people's data. If you just use raw HTML without any CSS, the documents will be pretty easy to read for anyone. Yes, it's not necessarily pretty, but if the user has some issue, such as blindness, they can pretty easily configure their browser to give them the information in a meaningful way. That is to say, the user has control over how the information is presented. Enter 2019, and users have ceded all control of the presentation layer of the web to website owners. Now it's no longer possible to use many sites using a screen reader. And indeed it's not just the visually impaired who suffer from this: it's prohibitively difficult to extract meaningful data from websites. This gives website owners immense power: by coupling their data to its presentation, they make the data useless when separated from that presentation, thereby vendor-locking users into that presentation which they control. As users we don't have the ability to view even our own data formatted the way we want. Not only can careless CSS make screen readers useless, but it can make things invisible to the colorblind, mangled for all but the most popular few browsers, and allow reordering of content that allows the underlying data to become fragmented and therefore less parsable. This would arguably be less of a problem if we had ceded that control to benevolent overlords, but the fact is that the people who control the presentation of data aren't even malicious, they're just absent on this issue: most website owners don't have the funding to present data in a way that's meaningful to any but the lowest common denominator. I've done a good amount of research into accessibility, but despite requesting it a number of times over the years, I've never been given budget to implement accessibility. There are some good tools out there, but only a handful of companies have the budget to use them, and even fewer actually do. The answer, I think, is to return more to schemas for different document formats, and leave presentation to the client software which the user controls. But there's strong incentives against that, so I don't think it will happen.

atoav 8y ago
As a occasional web desiger I think it is entirely possible to make websites that work for the visual impaired by using html the way it was meant to be used and still having a modern design that looks flawless. I don’t think designers don’t care — most are just not aware. Also: often designers have to do things they aren’t remotely okay with, so even if they are aware it might not be their decision to take. Contact those with inaccessible websites. They might not change it immidiately, but enough of these contacts and they surely will not forget
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  2 anecdotes - one time about 4 years ago I was interviewing at a medium big publisher site with a bunch of online properties focused on interior design and so forth and when I brought up accessibility the very young CTO said they didn't have any users with accessibility problems - I wouldn't say I lost my temper but my tone did get sort of sharpish because really, the market was definitely middle aged and up. anyway I didn't get the job. Second anecdote I was working as a consultant for a media company and our designer was nearly blind without his glasses and with his glasses had better than 20/20, I could never get him to take those glasses off and his designs were not especially suited to anyone with vision problems. I think after 2 years I did start making some inroads though, so it isn't always a lost cause.
- kerkeslager 8y ago
  It's possible, it's just not done frequently.
SiVal 8y ago
I think some practical solutions could come via adding features, not taking away, in a way that brought most people into the "needs special help" category. For example, I'd like to be able to "read" interesting web pages when I'm out running or grocery shopping, as if listening to a podcast. Instead of "mobile first", if we went even further and built "screenless first", we could start with page design that was carefully built with sequential text sections, hierarchical landmarks, and standard voice controls that everyone could navigate in a fairly standard way. ("list main sections...stop. section 2, list items...stop. item 3, 150% speed...stop. next item...skip. next item...") Web devs could specially mark certain items with a keyword for direct access, but users could do it themselves with keyword macros for their favorite sites, so pretty soon a word or two takes you to a favorite site and does what you want, while you shop for pickles. Of course, this would need to be a web standard, so devs only had one target and users only had to learn it once for all audio browsers and all sites built for it. Building at least certain categories of sites to support screenless access for the general public would make the marginal cost of making it accessible (in certain ways) free. Then you add your CSS to the screenless code.
- Traubenfuchs 8y ago
  Aren't WAI-ARIA and semantic HTML tags the standards you are looking for?
  - kerkeslager 8y ago
    Semantic HTML tags don't exist. The HTML tags that are being passed off as semantic don't have any standard layout to make them useful in any way. Is there one <header> tag per page, or can each <section> have a <header>? If so, does the <header> go inside the <section> or before it, with some indication of which <header> corresponds to which <section>? What about <h1>/<h2>/etc. tags with regard to <section> tags? If you have a <nav>, does that go inside the <header>, or after it? What the heck is a <section> anyway? "Semantic" means that the tags have meaning, and the meaning of these supposedly-semantic tags isn't specified enough to provide any meaning.

atoav 8y ago

As a occasional web desiger I think it is entirely possible to make websites that work for the visual impaired by using html the way it was meant to be used and still having a modern design that looks flawless. I don’t think designers don’t care — most are just not aware. Also: often designers have to do things they aren’t remotely okay with, so even if they are aware it might not be their decision to take. Contact those with inaccessible websites. They might not change it immidiately, but enough of these contacts and they surely will not forget

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
2 anecdotes - one time about 4 years ago I was interviewing at a medium big publisher site with a bunch of online properties focused on interior design and so forth and when I brought up accessibility the very young CTO said they didn't have any users with accessibility problems - I wouldn't say I lost my temper but my tone did get sort of sharpish because really, the market was definitely middle aged and up. anyway I didn't get the job. Second anecdote I was working as a consultant for a media company and our designer was nearly blind without his glasses and with his glasses had better than 20/20, I could never get him to take those glasses off and his designs were not especially suited to anyone with vision problems. I think after 2 years I did start making some inroads though, so it isn't always a lost cause.
kerkeslager 8y ago
It's possible, it's just not done frequently.

SiVal 8y ago

I think some practical solutions could come via adding features, not taking away, in a way that brought most people into the "needs special help" category. For example, I'd like to be able to "read" interesting web pages when I'm out running or grocery shopping, as if listening to a podcast. Instead of "mobile first", if we went even further and built "screenless first", we could start with page design that was carefully built with sequential text sections, hierarchical landmarks, and standard voice controls that everyone could navigate in a fairly standard way. ("list main sections...stop. section 2, list items...stop. item 3, 150% speed...stop. next item...skip. next item...") Web devs could specially mark certain items with a keyword for direct access, but users could do it themselves with keyword macros for their favorite sites, so pretty soon a word or two takes you to a favorite site and does what you want, while you shop for pickles. Of course, this would need to be a web standard, so devs only had one target and users only had to learn it once for all audio browsers and all sites built for it. Building at least certain categories of sites to support screenless access for the general public would make the marginal cost of making it accessible (in certain ways) free. Then you add your CSS to the screenless code.

Traubenfuchs 8y ago
Aren't WAI-ARIA and semantic HTML tags the standards you are looking for?
- kerkeslager 8y ago
  Semantic HTML tags don't exist. The HTML tags that are being passed off as semantic don't have any standard layout to make them useful in any way. Is there one <header> tag per page, or can each <section> have a <header>? If so, does the <header> go inside the <section> or before it, with some indication of which <header> corresponds to which <section>? What about <h1>/<h2>/etc. tags with regard to <section> tags? If you have a <nav>, does that go inside the <header>, or after it? What the heck is a <section> anyway? "Semantic" means that the tags have meaning, and the meaning of these supposedly-semantic tags isn't specified enough to provide any meaning.