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Accessibility is much more than just labels for a screen reader. Please stop trivializing anything that you don’t use directly, it’s a common thread between all

by dagmx 4y ago

Accessibility is much more than just labels for a screen reader. Please stop trivializing anything that you don’t use directly, it’s a common thread between all your comments, and it’s a disservice to both the points you’re trying to make and the people who actually use those things . Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom ability, audio commands, action link ups, alternate rendering modes, alternate motion modes, hooks for assistive devices to interact with the system. It goes far deeper into the system than just labels for a screen reader. If you stopped to just think about the vast number of disabilities out there, you’d realize how untrue your statement is.

grishka 4y ago
My point is that accessibility being a thing shouldn't ruin the UI for the people who don't need it. There's no need to visually redesign anything to introduce accessibility. Apps don't need to be made aware whether some control has focus because the user has pressed the tab key, or because it's being focused by a screen reader, or because of some other assistive technology. Colors and font sizes can also be configured and they've been configurable since at least Windows 3.1 — and that is exposed to apps. Again, I don't see how the things you specified can't be built into existing win32 APIs and why anything needs to be designed from the ground up to support them.
- dagmx 4y ago
  Your point about “apps don’t need to be made aware” is precisely the reason accessibility is part of the system UI framework. Accessibility is also not something that is just a binary. You may be slightly short sighted and need larger text, you might need an OS specified colour palette that overrides the apps rendering. There’s just so many levels of nuance here. It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system If you have the time, I really suggest watching the Apple developer videos on accessibility to see why it’s not just as simple as you put it. Microsoft do a lot of great work for accessibility too , they just don’t have much content up to delve into it. As to why it has to be developed from the ground up, it doesn’t, but it needs to be at the foundation regardless. Apple for example didn’t redo their UI for accessibility, however Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs. Also , again, I’d point out that you’re purposefully trying to trivialize something you don’t use.
  - grishka 4y ago
    > It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system There is a system-provided color palette. I don't know where this UI is in modern Windows, but in versions where you could enable the "classic" theme, you could still configure these colors. They are, of course, exposed to apps, and apps are expected to use them to draw their controls. That, as well as theme elements since XP. > Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs. Making sure you don't break existing functionality is called regression testing. I'm sure Microsoft already does a lot of it for each release. And actually it's not quite that. The transition from 9x to NT involved swapping an entire kernel from underneath apps. Most apps didn't notice it. In fact, the backwards compatibility is maintained so well that I can run apps from the 90s — built for, and only tested on, the old DOS-based Windows versions — on my modern ARM Mac, in a VM, through an x86 -> ARM translation layer.
- coev 4y ago
  > There's no need to visually redesign anything to introduce accessibility. People with motion sickness (reduced animation), the deaf (captions!), and the colorblind would beg to differ
KronisLV 4y ago
> Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom ability, audio commands, action link ups, alternate rendering modes, alternate motion modes, hooks for assistive devices to interact with the system. It goes far deeper into the system than just labels for a screen reader. I wonder where the current status quo lies in regards to both desktop computing and web applications/sites. Which OSes and which GUI frameworks for those are the best or worst, how do they compare? How have they evolved over time? Which web frameworks/libraries give one the best starting point to iterate upon, say, component libraries and how well they integrate with something like React/Angular/Vue? Sadly I'm not knowledgeable enough at the moment to answer all of those in detail myself, but there are at least some tools for web development. For example, this seems to have helpful output: https://accessibilitytest.org There was also this one, albeit a bit more limited: https://www.accessibilitychecker.org I also found this, but it seemed straight up broken because it couldn't reach my site: https://wave.webaim.org/ From what I can tell, there are many tools like this: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/ And yet, while we talk about accessibility occasionally, we don't talk about how good of a starting point certain component frameworks (e.g. Bootstrap vs PrimeFaces/PrimeNG/PrimeVue, Ant Design, ...) provide us with, or how easy it is to setup build toolchains for automated testing and reporting of warnings. As for OS related things, I guess seeing how well Qt, GTK and other solutions support the OS functionality and what that functionality even is is probably a whole topic in of itself.
- dagmx 4y ago
  > Which OSes and which GUI frameworks for those are the best or worst, how do they compare? Hands down macOS/iOS are the leaders here with Cocoa/SwiftUI/UIKit etc (ultimately basically the same). The OS also has many hooks to allow third party frameworks to tie in to the accessibility. Windows is second in my opinion. Microsoft does some good work here but it’s not as extensive in terms of integrations and pervasiveness due to how varied their ecosystem is now. They do however do excellent work on the gaming side with their accessibility controllers. In terms of UI frameworks, Qt is decent but not great . Electron actually does well here because it can piggy back off the work done for web browsers. Stuff like Imgui etc rank at the bottom because they don’t expose the tree to the OS in a meaningful way. I can’t speak to web frameworks. In theory it shouldn’t matter as long as the components are good. Many node frameworks try and install a11y as a package to encourage better accessibility.
userbinator 4y ago
All that extra crap doesn't make any sense, when the earliest versions of Windows up to ~7 had controls to let you adjust the UI to exactly how you'd like it, which is of course very important for accessibility. Then starting with Windows 8, they removed a lot of those features. 11 is even worse.

by dagmx 4y ago

grishka 4y ago

My point is that accessibility being a thing shouldn't ruin the UI for the people who don't need it. There's no need to visually redesign anything to introduce accessibility. Apps don't need to be made aware whether some control has focus because the user has pressed the tab key, or because it's being focused by a screen reader, or because of some other assistive technology. Colors and font sizes can also be configured and they've been configurable since at least Windows 3.1 — and that is exposed to apps. Again, I don't see how the things you specified can't be built into existing win32 APIs and why anything needs to be designed from the ground up to support them.

dagmx 4y ago
Your point about “apps don’t need to be made aware” is precisely the reason accessibility is part of the system UI framework. Accessibility is also not something that is just a binary. You may be slightly short sighted and need larger text, you might need an OS specified colour palette that overrides the apps rendering. There’s just so many levels of nuance here. It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system If you have the time, I really suggest watching the Apple developer videos on accessibility to see why it’s not just as simple as you put it. Microsoft do a lot of great work for accessibility too , they just don’t have much content up to delve into it. As to why it has to be developed from the ground up, it doesn’t, but it needs to be at the foundation regardless. Apple for example didn’t redo their UI for accessibility, however Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs. Also , again, I’d point out that you’re purposefully trying to trivialize something you don’t use.
- grishka 4y ago
  > It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system There is a system-provided color palette. I don't know where this UI is in modern Windows, but in versions where you could enable the "classic" theme, you could still configure these colors. They are, of course, exposed to apps, and apps are expected to use them to draw their controls. That, as well as theme elements since XP. > Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs. Making sure you don't break existing functionality is called regression testing. I'm sure Microsoft already does a lot of it for each release. And actually it's not quite that. The transition from 9x to NT involved swapping an entire kernel from underneath apps. Most apps didn't notice it. In fact, the backwards compatibility is maintained so well that I can run apps from the 90s — built for, and only tested on, the old DOS-based Windows versions — on my modern ARM Mac, in a VM, through an x86 -> ARM translation layer.
coev 4y ago
> There's no need to visually redesign anything to introduce accessibility. People with motion sickness (reduced animation), the deaf (captions!), and the colorblind would beg to differ

KronisLV 4y ago

> Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom ability, audio commands, action link ups, alternate rendering modes, alternate motion modes, hooks for assistive devices to interact with the system. It goes far deeper into the system than just labels for a screen reader. I wonder where the current status quo lies in regards to both desktop computing and web applications/sites. Which OSes and which GUI frameworks for those are the best or worst, how do they compare? How have they evolved over time? Which web frameworks/libraries give one the best starting point to iterate upon, say, component libraries and how well they integrate with something like React/Angular/Vue? Sadly I'm not knowledgeable enough at the moment to answer all of those in detail myself, but there are at least some tools for web development. For example, this seems to have helpful output: https://accessibilitytest.org There was also this one, albeit a bit more limited: https://www.accessibilitychecker.org I also found this, but it seemed straight up broken because it couldn't reach my site: https://wave.webaim.org/ From what I can tell, there are many tools like this: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/ And yet, while we talk about accessibility occasionally, we don't talk about how good of a starting point certain component frameworks (e.g. Bootstrap vs PrimeFaces/PrimeNG/PrimeVue, Ant Design, ...) provide us with, or how easy it is to setup build toolchains for automated testing and reporting of warnings. As for OS related things, I guess seeing how well Qt, GTK and other solutions support the OS functionality and what that functionality even is is probably a whole topic in of itself.

dagmx 4y ago
> Which OSes and which GUI frameworks for those are the best or worst, how do they compare? Hands down macOS/iOS are the leaders here with Cocoa/SwiftUI/UIKit etc (ultimately basically the same). The OS also has many hooks to allow third party frameworks to tie in to the accessibility. Windows is second in my opinion. Microsoft does some good work here but it’s not as extensive in terms of integrations and pervasiveness due to how varied their ecosystem is now. They do however do excellent work on the gaming side with their accessibility controllers. In terms of UI frameworks, Qt is decent but not great . Electron actually does well here because it can piggy back off the work done for web browsers. Stuff like Imgui etc rank at the bottom because they don’t expose the tree to the OS in a meaningful way. I can’t speak to web frameworks. In theory it shouldn’t matter as long as the components are good. Many node frameworks try and install a11y as a package to encourage better accessibility.

userbinator 4y ago

All that extra crap doesn't make any sense, when the earliest versions of Windows up to ~7 had controls to let you adjust the UI to exactly how you'd like it, which is of course very important for accessibility. Then starting with Windows 8, they removed a lot of those features. 11 is even worse.