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So somehow along my career I fell into accessibility dev for a while. Funny enough it was one of the most lucrative dev jobs I did and there was always plenty o

• mltony 7y ago
  I work in a big IT company and often times internal tools are not very accessible. Sometimes when I talk to their respective maintainers, they are willing to help me, but they don't know what is accessibility and what is screenreader. Is there a good document on how to make web sites accessible that I can show them?
  • kls 7y ago
    The W3C preliminary check is a great document to get you to at least usable: https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/
  • carlmr 7y ago
    Are CLI tools inherently accessible?
    • mlang23 7y ago
      I guess 99.9% are. However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza or buy your weekly load of groceries with a CLI tool :-) If you want to interact with the rest of the world, you will likely need to use the web...
      • downtide 7y ago
        I often use w3m.
      • jdnenej 7y ago
        Have you tried Emacs?
        • coldtea 7y ago
          Emacs is a GUI tool using curses (or similar). That it runs on a terminal doesn't make it a cli app in any of the regular sense...
          • Filligree 7y ago
            Huh. This makes me wonder how many blind people prefer using ed.
        • mlang23 7y ago
          Since 23 years now :-)
      • comex 7y ago
        > However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza [..] with a CLI tool :-) You’d be surprised. ;) Here’s a classic from 2004: https://www.slashdot.org/story/45782 https://www.slashdot.org/story/45782 (That specific tool probably no longer works, but Domino’s still has an API for ordering pizza… although apparently the new one isn’t officially supported.)
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Google have a good course on web accessibility which includes doing a little basic coding, looking at ARIA specs and such. I'll dig out the link when I'm back later.
  • mch82 7y ago
    Consider installing a screenreader and the Lynx web browser so you can demonstrate what it’s like to access internal apps/websites with those tools. It might help to record your experience so people can watch the demo at their convenience. Lynx... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29?wprov=sfti1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29?wprov...
    • akavi 7y ago
      What does lynx have to do with anything? No blind person I know browses the internet without JS, and every major screen reader supports it.
      • mwcampbell 7y ago
        You're absolutely right. Aside from a few stubborn hold-outs, the blind people I know stopped browsing with Lynx, or Links or w3m, in the early 2000s at the latest.
        • VBprogrammer 7y ago
          I have no experience at all with screen readers. Is there a modern FOSS screen reader that would help give an idea of what a visually impaired user would realistically experience?
          • dbjorge 7y ago
            The most popular FOSS screen reader by a very, very large margin is NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org https://www.nvaccess.org). It is Windows specific, though.
            • mwcampbell 7y ago
              There's also the Orca screen reader for GNOME. And I believe TalkBack for Android and ChromeVox for Chrome OS are both open source. If you don't care so much about open source, as I said elsewhere on the thread, Mac has VoiceOver built in (Command+F5 to enable), and Windows has Narrator (Control+Windows+Enter to enable on recent versions). Disclosure: I'm a dev on the Narrator team at Microsoft, but I'm posting on my own behalf here.
  • lallysingh 7y ago
    We had a "professionalism" class in my CS undergrad program. A day using the web with a screen reader would do wonders, I think, for awareness of the issue.
    • mwcampbell 7y ago
      I'm extending a standing offer to come in and give a guest lecture on accessibility, focusing on blind and low-vision users, for any university or high school in the Seattle metro area, free of charge. I've done this a few times already. My presentation would have a mix of concepts, demos (both good and bad), and practical advice. My email is in my profile if anyone is interested.
      • wtmt 7y ago
        Have you done this or could you do this as a video or audio that’s posted online and available to anyone? That’d help thousands of people. If you have any links to your lectures online, please share them. It could perhaps be a “Tell HN” post here (I’m not entirely sure if that’d violate the guidelines).
• jameslk 7y ago
  > In my opinion there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility, it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags so that the readers can pick them up and actively describe the page. Not every disabled person is blind. It's not enough to set some tab indexes, add alt tags and call it a day. It's not a process that can be automated and not a simple matter of turning off your screen and using a screen reader (again not all disabled are blind). And as a small business, even if you think your website is accessible (after paying that accessibility dev who you thought fixed it), if you were pursued by a law firm and your options were to try to fight it in court or pay a settlement, you'll likely only be able to afford the latter.
  • DubiousPusher 7y ago
    Yet in an increasingly online world, refusing to make one's site accessible is tantamount to refusing to install a ramp in place of stairs.
    • rednixion 7y ago
      A counter to that analogy is that where/when ramp access is needed and how one should be built in order for it to be usable is defined by building codes and the concept is well understood. Without what clear definition or a method to get a website's accessibility "certified" makes it seem like allowing litigation is not going to be produce meaningful results and could be easily abused.
      • jdnenej 7y ago
        This could easily be solved by requiring that the disabled person first contact the company and explain how the site is not accessible and if the company refuses to provide a solution then you can sue. The idea being that it never gets to the legal part because the company knows it is much cheaper to fix their website.
        • jameslk 7y ago
• dorgo 7y ago
  > it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags Sounds like it could be part of SEO effort. If it can be checked programmatically then search engines should add accessibilty to their ranking algorithms. It worked for mobile.
  • dansingerman 7y ago
    This is a great comment. Imagine the investment that would suddenly start in accessibility if Google publicly announced it was an important part of search engine rankings.
    • marktangotango 7y ago
      These scanners exist, and they can serve a dual purpose; scan the web for websites to sue. And yes this is happening. It's important to note that not every site on the web falls under ADA. The crucial part of this issue is that the business must have a physical “brick and mortar” location to fall under the ADA. Presumably purely online retail businesses are not affected.
      • bluGill 7y ago
        IF google would make it part of their rankings it doesn't matter if you could be sued or not - you will make sure you are accessible to avoid being not found. I wonder if google can be sued for not making it part of the ranking thus misleading blind users... Interesting angle for a lawyer. I hope someone at google is reading this and mitigates that risk.
      • laken 7y ago
        You'd be surprised. In Florida, there have been cases which have set precedent as websites being similar to libraries, which would mean the ADA applies to purely digital places. The problem is that the ADA has never set explicit rules for website accessibility.
    • esyir 7y ago
      Reducing product performance for your userbase to send a message seems to be a common trend nowadays.
• 34679 7y ago
  >it was one of the most lucrative dev jobs I did >there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility Which is it?
  • charliepark 7y ago
    Those aren't orthogonal statements. Both can be true.
    • shantly 7y ago
      If, for example, the hourly rate is high but the hours required for a typical mom & pop site are low. Example: being a lawyer might be lucrative (just take it for the sake of argument) but their services might remain accessible to mom & pop business owners because they only need a few hours of lawyering per year, for the most part.
  • sbarre 7y ago
    The two are not mutually exclusive. WCAG 2.0 Accessibility compliance is within reach of anyone following the most basic of best practices in web development these days. There are many powerful free tools for developers to use to test and validate their work as they go, and there is a ton of literature and thought leadership out there for anyone to find and learn from. OP may be referring to retroactively making websites accessible, since it can be a lot of work to fix something that wasn't built with accessibility in mind from the start. Just like adding a sunroof option to a new car is much cheaper than adding a sunroof to a car that didn't come with one in the first place. ;-)
    • kls 7y ago
      Yea all the work I did was accessibility after the fact. For most cases it is just annotating what is already there. Sometimes it requires restructuring the way the page flows. It would be slightly more efficient to design for accessibility up front but it is fairly easy to bolt on after the fact.
  • kls 7y ago
• stronglikedan 7y ago
  > there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility Because it costs money to do so, and sometimes mom and pop sites are barely scraping by to begin with. It's also their prerogative to make the content accessible or inaccessible to whomever they see fit - it's their loss if someone cannot buy their product, but it's also their choice to accept that loss. I think it sets a dangerous precedent to make them legally obliged to make their content available in a specific way.
  • gbear605 7y ago
    The United States has already decided that businesses in general (ie. brick & mortar stores) do not have the prerogative to make their content accessible or inaccessible to whomever they see fit. Including websites makes perfect sense.
  • steakknife 7y ago
    Only 3% of the US is visually impaired, and often poorer than average due to disability, so for the vast majority of individual businesses, ignoring them would be less than a rounding error in revenue, and therefore warrant no consideration of accessibility. But the point of a society is to decide collectively upon certain moral imperatives that are deemed so fundamental to our collective identity as to take precedence over Randian self-interest, righteous indignation about "muh freedumb" and "don't tread on me" notwithstanding. One of those moral imperatives in the US is the protection of the rights of vulnerable minority classes so that we don't become a caste-based society where the circumstances of your birth (or unfortunate mishap) can indelibly decide your fate by limiting your access to society. This is actually MORE meritocratic than the alternative, and so I think, upon careful consideration, you may find that it dovetails nicely with even extreme Libertarianism.
• acbabis 7y ago
  I've also done a lot of accessibility work. For people looking to get into it, another crucial thing is using "Semantic HTML". If every button is a <button> tag and every link is an <a> and every form element has a corresponding <form> tag (even for AJAX), then you save about 80% of your accessibility work up front (no, this isn't an exaggeration).