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Semantic HTML is fascinating, but I think it's pretty challenging/frustrating to work with in reality. The average web user doesn't really benefit from somethi

Semantic HTML is fascinating, but I think it's pretty challenging/frustrating to work with in reality. The average web user doesn't really benefit from something being an aside rather than a div. There absolutely are benefits from having good markup, but those benefits are more for screen readers (which are hard for me to acquire and almost impossible for me to use in the same way that people who need them use them) or for SEO (which tends to be a black box) or for other theoretical cases. If you read the spec, which I find myself doing for semantic stuff more than any other part of my frontend work, you end up with a bunch of cases that seem obvious but rarely track with real-world problems. So much of my work in this area feels like best guesses, without ever really knowing for sure if I did it right. Anyways, that's why articles like this are good. If you have real-world experience for what works and what doesn't, keep posting about it because I want to read it.

moron4hire 6y ago
> which are hard for me to acquire Uh, there's one built in to the OS. Which OS? All of them.
- Brendinooo 6y ago
  Sure, but 1. JAWS and NVDA have a massive chunk of market share, and I don't run Windows 2. Screen readers work differently, so I can't guarantee that something that's fine in Orca does what I want elsewhere 3. Even if I have access to everything, I can't use a screen reader at the speeds that real users prefer, and I don't use them regularly enough to know what's annoying and what's not. I'm happy to learn, just noting the challenges.
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    You're way overthinking the situation. It takes 15 minutes to turn on the integrated screen reader and go through the initial training. Do that and you'll cover 90% of the issues. You can grow an intuition for what works well for screen readers very quickly. And being an infrequent user is an advantage for your testing. If you can make it easy for yourself to use, than someone with more experience will find it even easier. Quit making excuses and do the bare minimum work already.
    - Brendinooo 6y ago
      I can state with extreme confidence that it takes some people more than 15 minutes. Maybe I'm not as smart as you, or perhaps we learn differently. If it's so much easier for you, you should share your knowledge! It was a blog post that got me running the basics with Orca; I found it to be much more approachable and practical than the docs.
    - objectivetruth 6y ago
      How many regular screen-reading-users have confirmed that the sites you've built with your method are as good as the ones built by teams including accessibility professionals?
wwweston 6y ago
The first person who seems to benefit from legible semantics in my projects is... me. It helps keep me oriented on where I am in the document and remember what the content is supposed to be. Sometimes this even transfers to months-from-now me or even other people. I'll grant that markup semantics have limits, and the semantics of selectors can be a greater value here than markup.
totetsu 6y ago
I remember reading somewhere about the history of the HTML standard that there was a camp of people at the start who wanted the html viewer to just show a syntax error if something in the code was out of spec. Luckily what we got was a very forgiving standard that will always try to show something, no matter how it is formatted.

moron4hire 6y ago

> which are hard for me to acquire Uh, there's one built in to the OS. Which OS? All of them.

Brendinooo 6y ago
Sure, but 1. JAWS and NVDA have a massive chunk of market share, and I don't run Windows 2. Screen readers work differently, so I can't guarantee that something that's fine in Orca does what I want elsewhere 3. Even if I have access to everything, I can't use a screen reader at the speeds that real users prefer, and I don't use them regularly enough to know what's annoying and what's not. I'm happy to learn, just noting the challenges.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  You're way overthinking the situation. It takes 15 minutes to turn on the integrated screen reader and go through the initial training. Do that and you'll cover 90% of the issues. You can grow an intuition for what works well for screen readers very quickly. And being an infrequent user is an advantage for your testing. If you can make it easy for yourself to use, than someone with more experience will find it even easier. Quit making excuses and do the bare minimum work already.
  - Brendinooo 6y ago
    I can state with extreme confidence that it takes some people more than 15 minutes. Maybe I'm not as smart as you, or perhaps we learn differently. If it's so much easier for you, you should share your knowledge! It was a blog post that got me running the basics with Orca; I found it to be much more approachable and practical than the docs.
  - objectivetruth 6y ago
    How many regular screen-reading-users have confirmed that the sites you've built with your method are as good as the ones built by teams including accessibility professionals?

wwweston 6y ago

The first person who seems to benefit from legible semantics in my projects is... me. It helps keep me oriented on where I am in the document and remember what the content is supposed to be. Sometimes this even transfers to months-from-now me or even other people. I'll grant that markup semantics have limits, and the semantics of selectors can be a greater value here than markup.

totetsu 6y ago

I remember reading somewhere about the history of the HTML standard that there was a camp of people at the start who wanted the html viewer to just show a syntax error if something in the code was out of spec. Luckily what we got was a very forgiving standard that will always try to show something, no matter how it is formatted.