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I am blind. I know or have known at least 20 other blind people sufficiently to know what their browsers are. None of them used Links. One of them used Edbrows

I am blind. I know or have known at least 20 other blind people sufficiently to know what their browsers are. None of them used Links. One of them used Edbrowse. The rest (including myself) are Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. I have at least one personal project (not public) which uses React heavily. Saying that Links is necessary is an outdated view, so much so that we have things like the accessibility object model [0] in progress to possibly go so far as even supporting use cases like remote desktop connections in the browser by making fake screen reader only nodes in the accessibility tree. In general, the terminal itself is even not so great. There are efforts like Emacspeak which mandate learning what is essentially a second desktop environment, but outside that it turns out that offering semantics (which only non-text browsers and apps can do) is useful: for example knowing whether or not the cursor is in a text editor, so that deletions are significant, or whether text is a table. The idea that JS is bad for screen readers--or indeed that we use text-based browsers--is a consistent misconception that is no longer true. It was true 10 or 15 years ago, if not longer, but everything AT has come a very long way since then. For a source that's not just anecdotal, this has info on primary browser: https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/ https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/ 0: http://wicg.github.io/aom/explainer.html http://wicg.github.io/aom/explainer.html

dredmorbius 7y ago
Experiences vary, I'll grant that. There's also a difference between those who acquire perceptive limitations (sight, hearing, also motor control, etc.) later in life, whether through accident, injury, illness, or degeneration, and those who have limitations from birth or a young age. Having to learn some (admittedly arcane) interface such as emacs late in life, with fewer capabilities and often declining cognitive capabilities, is difficult. And yes, mainstream commercial software and OS offerings are improving. Slighty. (Most are still abysmally poor.) I'm hard-pressed, though, to see how an increased dependence on dynamic and programmatic web design elements improves accessibility. Especially when wielded by technologists, managers, and clients with little awareness or concern for such access. Again: Google should be much better positioned to grasp this than most. They clearly don't.
- CAMLORN 7y ago
  Google themselves are your example. Leaving aside some horrible accessibility keybindings in Docs, both Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best spreadsheet program I've used. It's not as powerful as Excel, but Excel is laggy for a variety of technical reasons that shouldn't exist, at least with NVDA. I can also read presentations in slides, and I might be able to make one. I've never tried; web or not, making slides just isn't something super feasible for a blind person if it's going to look any good. I have gripes about Aria. It's definitely possible to abuse this stuff and end up with an inaccessible mess, but overall we have been trending toward a more accessible internet and things like the aforementioned do exist. I've been blind since birth. I started on a device called the Braille 'N Speak 2000, which functioned very much like Emacs. I don't use Emacs because Emacspeak requires Linux desktop and adds a ton of extra complexity on top for very little gain. Linux dropped the ball big time on accessibility and audio in general, and never really recovered. Obviously this is opinionated, but I feel like you're implying that I lost my vision later in life and am forming my opinion around that perspective. You might additionally want to look into Jaws and NVDA. Learning those is about as bad as learning Emacs or etc; knowledge from when you were sighted doesn't transfer in the slightest and the interface is much more arcane than you probably imagine it to be.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    > Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best spreadsheet program I've used. This is off topic, and I don't want to distract from the current conversation, but speaking of sheets -- as a web developer, I often build SVG charts with d3, and I've been racking my brain lately trying to figure out how to make them more accessible to blind users beyond just linking to tables of data. If you're using Sheets, are you also regularly consuming charts as well? Is there a common auditory shorthand for representing something like a pie chart?
    - CAMLORN 7y ago
      Sadly no. Making charts accessible is an unsolved problem. There have been some efforts for accessible graphing calculators that work more or less, but it's not trivial to make a generic one-size-fits-all solution. For Sheets, the underlying stuff that runs it is quite complicated. They ended up doing something akin to an offscreen model with HTML to make it work because afaik they use a canvas of some sort to draw everything. In fact, unless you turn on braille mode, both products actually have a built-in screen reader that talks via aria live regions. That's terrible practice, but to their credit they got ahead of what the internet was providing for accessibility and didn't have a choice in that regard. For something you can practically implement without a huge project, I suggest text descriptions of the data. If you want to do a bit better, make it an HTML table--that'll give some convenient navigability for free.
spookthesunset 7y ago
> The idea that JS is bad for screen readers--or indeed that we use text-based browsers--is a consistent misconception that is no longer true. To be perfectly blunt, I feel this misconception is pushed mainly by people with an "anti-javascript" agenda. If one can no longer argue that "supporting non-javascript clients is the only way to support accessibility", one is only left with "if you break support for non-javascript clients, you will only be excluding people who deliberately disable javascript". And at that point, the amount of effort to support non-javascript vs. the return on investment shifts heavily in favor of not caring about users who intentionally disable javascript. This is an argument I've had in every shop I've worked at and at the end of the day in every instance we decided it was simply not worth the hassle to support people who intentionally disable javascript. In fact, I'm pretty sure any competitive search engine these has to have a very complex crawler that is more than able to deal with javascript rendered pages. If they didn't, they'd be leaving a ton of content out of their indexes--not a good look for a search engine. So not even the "you have to support text-only browsers to please google" argument has most likely fallen out of favor.
- CAMLORN 7y ago
  I see this like supporting DOS in 2019 or somesuch. There might be an esoteric reason to do so but when 99% of the userbase has left and the old thing can't support new technologies, saying that we need to support the old thing forever because a tiny subset of users still use it stops meaningful progress. If there weren't plenty of good, modern options I would be all for Links but there are, so I'm not. At some point it's on the user for choosing not to leave their little island of familiarity, especially when the user is technical enough to be using Links.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > If there weren't plenty of good, modern options I would be all for Links but there are, so I'm not. What are the good, modern alternatives to Lynx?
    - CAMLORN 7y ago
tropo 7y ago
I suppose that you are unaware of the spelling difference. You literally can't see it. I'll separate the letters for you: They were discussing this: L Y N X You switched to this: L I N K S Both of those are text-based browsers. I agree that the one you were writing about would be terrible for blind users. The other one is better. Wikipedia links for those browsers: L Y N X is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) L I N K S is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)
- CAMLORN 7y ago
  I appreciate your assistance but I can check spelling; a simple "Did you know that it's Lynx" would have sufficed. Good to know there's two text-based browsers. I didn't, but I and everyone else I know will go on not using either.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Experiences vary, I'll grant that. There's also a difference between those who acquire perceptive limitations (sight, hearing, also motor control, etc.) later in life, whether through accident, injury, illness, or degeneration, and those who have limitations from birth or a young age. Having to learn some (admittedly arcane) interface such as emacs late in life, with fewer capabilities and often declining cognitive capabilities, is difficult. And yes, mainstream commercial software and OS offerings are improving. Slighty. (Most are still abysmally poor.) I'm hard-pressed, though, to see how an increased dependence on dynamic and programmatic web design elements improves accessibility. Especially when wielded by technologists, managers, and clients with little awareness or concern for such access. Again: Google should be much better positioned to grasp this than most. They clearly don't.

CAMLORN 7y ago
Google themselves are your example. Leaving aside some horrible accessibility keybindings in Docs, both Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best spreadsheet program I've used. It's not as powerful as Excel, but Excel is laggy for a variety of technical reasons that shouldn't exist, at least with NVDA. I can also read presentations in slides, and I might be able to make one. I've never tried; web or not, making slides just isn't something super feasible for a blind person if it's going to look any good. I have gripes about Aria. It's definitely possible to abuse this stuff and end up with an inaccessible mess, but overall we have been trending toward a more accessible internet and things like the aforementioned do exist. I've been blind since birth. I started on a device called the Braille 'N Speak 2000, which functioned very much like Emacs. I don't use Emacs because Emacspeak requires Linux desktop and adds a ton of extra complexity on top for very little gain. Linux dropped the ball big time on accessibility and audio in general, and never really recovered. Obviously this is opinionated, but I feel like you're implying that I lost my vision later in life and am forming my opinion around that perspective. You might additionally want to look into Jaws and NVDA. Learning those is about as bad as learning Emacs or etc; knowledge from when you were sighted doesn't transfer in the slightest and the interface is much more arcane than you probably imagine it to be.
- danShumway 7y ago
  > Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best spreadsheet program I've used. This is off topic, and I don't want to distract from the current conversation, but speaking of sheets -- as a web developer, I often build SVG charts with d3, and I've been racking my brain lately trying to figure out how to make them more accessible to blind users beyond just linking to tables of data. If you're using Sheets, are you also regularly consuming charts as well? Is there a common auditory shorthand for representing something like a pie chart?
  - CAMLORN 7y ago
    Sadly no. Making charts accessible is an unsolved problem. There have been some efforts for accessible graphing calculators that work more or less, but it's not trivial to make a generic one-size-fits-all solution. For Sheets, the underlying stuff that runs it is quite complicated. They ended up doing something akin to an offscreen model with HTML to make it work because afaik they use a canvas of some sort to draw everything. In fact, unless you turn on braille mode, both products actually have a built-in screen reader that talks via aria live regions. That's terrible practice, but to their credit they got ahead of what the internet was providing for accessibility and didn't have a choice in that regard. For something you can practically implement without a huge project, I suggest text descriptions of the data. If you want to do a bit better, make it an HTML table--that'll give some convenient navigability for free.

spookthesunset 7y ago

> The idea that JS is bad for screen readers--or indeed that we use text-based browsers--is a consistent misconception that is no longer true. To be perfectly blunt, I feel this misconception is pushed mainly by people with an "anti-javascript" agenda. If one can no longer argue that "supporting non-javascript clients is the only way to support accessibility", one is only left with "if you break support for non-javascript clients, you will only be excluding people who deliberately disable javascript". And at that point, the amount of effort to support non-javascript vs. the return on investment shifts heavily in favor of not caring about users who intentionally disable javascript. This is an argument I've had in every shop I've worked at and at the end of the day in every instance we decided it was simply not worth the hassle to support people who intentionally disable javascript. In fact, I'm pretty sure any competitive search engine these has to have a very complex crawler that is more than able to deal with javascript rendered pages. If they didn't, they'd be leaving a ton of content out of their indexes--not a good look for a search engine. So not even the "you have to support text-only browsers to please google" argument has most likely fallen out of favor.

CAMLORN 7y ago
I see this like supporting DOS in 2019 or somesuch. There might be an esoteric reason to do so but when 99% of the userbase has left and the old thing can't support new technologies, saying that we need to support the old thing forever because a tiny subset of users still use it stops meaningful progress. If there weren't plenty of good, modern options I would be all for Links but there are, so I'm not. At some point it's on the user for choosing not to leave their little island of familiarity, especially when the user is technical enough to be using Links.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > If there weren't plenty of good, modern options I would be all for Links but there are, so I'm not. What are the good, modern alternatives to Lynx?
  - CAMLORN 7y ago

tropo 7y ago

I suppose that you are unaware of the spelling difference. You literally can't see it. I'll separate the letters for you: They were discussing this: L Y N X You switched to this: L I N K S Both of those are text-based browsers. I agree that the one you were writing about would be terrible for blind users. The other one is better. Wikipedia links for those browsers: L Y N X is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) L I N K S is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)

CAMLORN 7y ago
I appreciate your assistance but I can check spelling; a simple "Did you know that it's Lynx" would have sufficed. Good to know there's two text-based browsers. I didn't, but I and everyone else I know will go on not using either.