3 ms·

What? It seems to me the web is accessible by default. Write a plain old HTML page and everybody should be able to read it (assuming they have a computer to op

by jraph 5y ago

What? It seems to me the web is accessible by default. Write a plain old HTML page and everybody should be able to read it (assuming they have a computer to open it or a printed version). People go out of their ways to mess this up by using fancy colors, fancy web fonts, messed up JS (frameworks), non standard components because it's cooler, disabling outlines, and so on. Do you have examples where the Web is not accessible by default, apart from the by default unlimited line width which is easily fixable with one line of CSS? Sure you need to use the right markup for the right things (and, no, <div> is usually not the right element for building a button or writing a paragraph, there are dedicated tags for those) but I can't see a way to avoid this.

rootusrootus 5y ago
Yeah I agree. A plain old web page is rarely a problem. Ctrl-plus-plus-plus-plus however many times I need it, and I'm good. It's always 'modern' web pages that insist on fighting me.
- nightski 5y ago
  We need to admit that "modern" web pages are a thing. If we keep ignoring most of the web because "they are doing it wrong" then accessibility will never be solved.
  - jraph 5y ago
    It seems to me you can build quite complex things that will be accessible by default with the web platform. IF don't fight it and if you respect semantics and progressive enhancement / beautiful degradation. You get so much by default: legible colors and font sizes, tabbed page navigation, alt texts, clickable labels, zoomable interface... When you embrace the platform and its spirit, you get accessible results quite easily. But not a lot of people seem to embrace it. Many people seem to think "what to do for what I want to see" instead of "what to do for what I want to mean", and you lose if you do this. You need to get your meaning right and then decorate it carefully. You should not paint first. But that's probably not a web-specific issue. What's more, building accessible things may make you gain time, by having a robust basis. It's not always a cost.
    - nightski 5y ago
      I'm just trying to step back and look at things objectively. Instead of saying "arg developers are just stupid" I'm trying to analyze why these mistakes are made so frequently (even at big corporations with lots of funding). There are native UI frameworks where this is not nearly as big of an issue. Too much freedom perhaps? Should you even be able to give a div an onclick handler? What about inputs? Why do developers have to make custom inputs because the core ones are severely lacking? That's where accessibility goes wrong. Because core functionality is terrible and needs to be augmented with richer functionality (but terrible from an accessibility perspective). There is something fundamental about this platform that does not naturally encourage good behavior. All you have to do is look at the evidence. As an dumb little example, it's not even obvious that making a div a button is bad unless you know that it is. The platform doesn't guide you at all. It has an onClick handler the same as a button. Little attempt is made to differentiate the two from an API perspective. I could give countless other examples, but I think I have demonstrated what I am getting at.
      - jraph 5y ago
        > Too much freedom perhaps? > Because core functionality is terrible and needs to be augmented with richer functionality Well, yes, I agree with both of these points. I think I get your point in the end, and your examples are convincing. I'd say the web platform is accessible by default but this is easy to break inadvertently and maybe not the ideal platform to build applications because despite its strong accessibility features, it's lacking for what we want to do with it today. HTML being a format to write documents first and not applications probably does not help neither.
blippage 5y ago
Yep. Just write in HTML, and the browser will render everything for you. It's almost as if the browser treated HTML as if, I dunno, it was some kind of markup language, you know, with hypertext, and stuff, and could automatically render it. /s I remember back in the late 90's, and we decided to create a static website for internal use on a project. Everything was supposed to be quick and simple. We weren't after anything fancy, just something that worked. We used Microsoft's whatever-it-was-called at the time for writing webpages. It turned out that the html produced required some special Microsoft fonts for the web. Hells bells. The whole point of the Internet is interoperability. But no. We can't have that, can we Microsoft? We need special fonts. Interoperability? Screw that! About the same time Java on webpages was a thing. We never used them, but I had seen sites that had. So the site had to download some Java craplet, whatever it was called, you had to enable it, plus of course you had to have Java. Even when the web was still young, people had some really dumb ideas. Then there was a fad that sites had to have some kind of animated intro on the front page. I remember seeing one for my bank and a recruitment site. No doubt that cost them a pretty penny. Those early internet fads have died out, but today's websites are no better. Why does my browser have to download fonts? I already have fonts! Just use one of those! Anyway, that's me done. I'm off to shout at some clouds. Not the virtual clouds, actual real ones.
- kingaillas 5y ago
  >We used Microsoft's whatever-it-was-called at the time for writing webpages. Frontpage, I'm going to bet. :) I was an early user of Frontpage, shortly after Vermeer released it. A few months later, it was bought by Microsoft. Looks like Frontpage was absorbed and discontinued (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage). It was handy but I was just messing around with a very simple personal website and most of the time I'd just use Notepad or something like that. >About the same time Java on webpages was a thing. Guilty... I wrote a simple java applet to draw a polar plot of antenna radiation patterns. Later I added a calculator applet - after all, how handy would a simple calculator only a website away be?? I should have gone with the trends and converted both to javascript... but I did not. >Then there was a fad that sites had to have some kind of animated intro on the front page I remember the omni-present "site under construction" animated gif. As in, > 50% of websites had them somewhere. Follow the link in this article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/9akenz/this-guy-compiled-every-under-construction-gif-from-the-90s https://www.vice.com/en/article/9akenz/this-guy-compiled-eve...) for an eye-bleeding collection. Haha!

by jraph 5y ago

rootusrootus 5y ago

Yeah I agree. A plain old web page is rarely a problem. Ctrl-plus-plus-plus-plus however many times I need it, and I'm good. It's always 'modern' web pages that insist on fighting me.

nightski 5y ago
We need to admit that "modern" web pages are a thing. If we keep ignoring most of the web because "they are doing it wrong" then accessibility will never be solved.
- jraph 5y ago
  It seems to me you can build quite complex things that will be accessible by default with the web platform. IF don't fight it and if you respect semantics and progressive enhancement / beautiful degradation. You get so much by default: legible colors and font sizes, tabbed page navigation, alt texts, clickable labels, zoomable interface... When you embrace the platform and its spirit, you get accessible results quite easily. But not a lot of people seem to embrace it. Many people seem to think "what to do for what I want to see" instead of "what to do for what I want to mean", and you lose if you do this. You need to get your meaning right and then decorate it carefully. You should not paint first. But that's probably not a web-specific issue. What's more, building accessible things may make you gain time, by having a robust basis. It's not always a cost.
  - nightski 5y ago
    I'm just trying to step back and look at things objectively. Instead of saying "arg developers are just stupid" I'm trying to analyze why these mistakes are made so frequently (even at big corporations with lots of funding). There are native UI frameworks where this is not nearly as big of an issue. Too much freedom perhaps? Should you even be able to give a div an onclick handler? What about inputs? Why do developers have to make custom inputs because the core ones are severely lacking? That's where accessibility goes wrong. Because core functionality is terrible and needs to be augmented with richer functionality (but terrible from an accessibility perspective). There is something fundamental about this platform that does not naturally encourage good behavior. All you have to do is look at the evidence. As an dumb little example, it's not even obvious that making a div a button is bad unless you know that it is. The platform doesn't guide you at all. It has an onClick handler the same as a button. Little attempt is made to differentiate the two from an API perspective. I could give countless other examples, but I think I have demonstrated what I am getting at.
    - jraph 5y ago
      > Too much freedom perhaps? > Because core functionality is terrible and needs to be augmented with richer functionality Well, yes, I agree with both of these points. I think I get your point in the end, and your examples are convincing. I'd say the web platform is accessible by default but this is easy to break inadvertently and maybe not the ideal platform to build applications because despite its strong accessibility features, it's lacking for what we want to do with it today. HTML being a format to write documents first and not applications probably does not help neither.

blippage 5y ago

Yep. Just write in HTML, and the browser will render everything for you. It's almost as if the browser treated HTML as if, I dunno, it was some kind of markup language, you know, with hypertext, and stuff, and could automatically render it. /s I remember back in the late 90's, and we decided to create a static website for internal use on a project. Everything was supposed to be quick and simple. We weren't after anything fancy, just something that worked. We used Microsoft's whatever-it-was-called at the time for writing webpages. It turned out that the html produced required some special Microsoft fonts for the web. Hells bells. The whole point of the Internet is interoperability. But no. We can't have that, can we Microsoft? We need special fonts. Interoperability? Screw that! About the same time Java on webpages was a thing. We never used them, but I had seen sites that had. So the site had to download some Java craplet, whatever it was called, you had to enable it, plus of course you had to have Java. Even when the web was still young, people had some really dumb ideas. Then there was a fad that sites had to have some kind of animated intro on the front page. I remember seeing one for my bank and a recruitment site. No doubt that cost them a pretty penny. Those early internet fads have died out, but today's websites are no better. Why does my browser have to download fonts? I already have fonts! Just use one of those! Anyway, that's me done. I'm off to shout at some clouds. Not the virtual clouds, actual real ones.

kingaillas 5y ago
>We used Microsoft's whatever-it-was-called at the time for writing webpages. Frontpage, I'm going to bet. :) I was an early user of Frontpage, shortly after Vermeer released it. A few months later, it was bought by Microsoft. Looks like Frontpage was absorbed and discontinued (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage). It was handy but I was just messing around with a very simple personal website and most of the time I'd just use Notepad or something like that. >About the same time Java on webpages was a thing. Guilty... I wrote a simple java applet to draw a polar plot of antenna radiation patterns. Later I added a calculator applet - after all, how handy would a simple calculator only a website away be?? I should have gone with the trends and converted both to javascript... but I did not. >Then there was a fad that sites had to have some kind of animated intro on the front page I remember the omni-present "site under construction" animated gif. As in, > 50% of websites had them somewhere. Follow the link in this article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/9akenz/this-guy-compiled-every-under-construction-gif-from-the-90s https://www.vice.com/en/article/9akenz/this-guy-compiled-eve...) for an eye-bleeding collection. Haha!