8 ms·

But what is the answer? What should I do differently? I get don't use images, but then what? I can't imagine all screen readers have the same capabilities, or t

by RogerL 3y ago

But what is the answer? What should I do differently? I get don't use images, but then what? I can't imagine all screen readers have the same capabilities, or that there is a base common ability, so what should we do? Googling says MathML is the answer (e.g. https://www.washington.edu/doit/how-do-i-create-online-math-content-accessible-students-who-are-blind); https://www.washington.edu/doit/how-do-i-create-online-math-... this site uses MathML and your reader isn't handling it. So now what? (alt-tags? something else?)

bjornasm 3y ago
One option would be to do testing with screen-readers and then find out if the content works, and if not find out why.
- patrec 3y ago
  I think most people are fine with the idea that some of the costs (monetary and otherwise) arising from disabilities should be transferred from the people suffering from them to society at large. But I don't think it's reasonable for producers and users of broken screen readers to expect everyone (including authors of private blogs posts) bending over backwards to accommodate them, nor is it a remotely efficient use of societal resources. It also creates completely perverse incentives.
  - User23 3y ago
    If there is a bug in the screen reader then that's on the vendor. However the overwhelming number of cases where a website is unusable with a screen reader are due to lack of proper semantic tagging, like alt text and so on. The last thing a screenreader user wants to hear on a site is "button," "button," "button..." There's certainly room for tooling to help though. I definitely think it sucks that many accessibility linters are nonfree and thus will never be used by site devs who aren't worth suing. It's worth remembering that accessibility helps everyone, not just the disabled. In fact one of the more popular arguments against accessibility is that it allows non-disabled persons to do more than intended. So while there's a good argument to be made for being charitable to those with a frankly really lousy condition, if you just want to be self-centered you still benefit from properly tagged data.
    - patrec 3y ago
      Did you even bother looking at the website source before writing this?
      - User23 3y ago
        What part of if there’s a bug in the screen reader it’s on the vendor did you fail to understand?
psychoslave 3y ago
It depends on what public you care about. If readability did general public is a concern, just get rid of all these symbols and go with plain prose text, possibly using images as preferred illustrations over any ideographic way to encode ideas.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  You can't discuss math while getting rid of the math symbols. That's not a reasonable proposal. Math on the web is broken, the the affected people should be up complaining about that. This site did the most accessible thing possible; the fact that every tool broke here, just like they do for every other method is not really the author's fault.
  - gbear605 3y ago
    It’s not entirely impossible; mathematicians did it for thousands of years (just read Newton’s Principia). It does use very specific language to do so, and some of the language might not exist for some advanced mathematical concepts, but I think that this whole article could be written that way.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Yeah, let's talk about the difference in accessibility between the text on this site and Newton's Principia...
      - mgunyho 3y ago
        I think parent is referring here to the fact that math used to be written without symbols (other than numbers) up to the 1300s according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notation#Symbolic_stage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notati... (very interesting article!) However, I would say that there is a reason why notation tends towards terse symbols: it's much more efficient and unambiguous.
1-more 3y ago
When I view source (not the DOM) I can see that all of your math has aria-hidden="true". That seems to carry over into the parsed/generated math markup: run `document.body.innerHTML += '<style>[aria-hidden="true"]{ outline: 3px solid red; }</style>'` to see all the hidden-from-screenreader things highlighted. That may be enough. For content that really cannot be written in a way that screen readers can handle, there is always the idea of Screen Reader Only content. It's a hassle, but let's jump in and give it a shot For instance for the first math thing you can have <style> .sr-only { position:absolute; left:-10000px; top:auto; width:1px; height:1px; overflow:hidden; } </style> <p class="sr-only" id="definition-of-reduced-derivative"> The reduced derivative with respect to x is denoted crossed-d over dx of the function f(x). It is equivalent to the the derivative with respect to x (denoted d over dx) of the function f(x) all over 2 pi. </p> Then you make sure that the element that wraps up your first equation has aria-describedby="definition-of-reduced-derivative" so that the SR reads out that content. I think you may need to not have "aria-hidden" on that math wrapper, but I'm not sure. This is not an authoritative answer; I'm just some asshole who writes front-end code a lot. More of a Cunningham's Law situation that anything really. You don't want to end up creating one experience for sighted users and completely different one for screen-reader and refreshable-braille-display users. But this can maybe get the wheels turning for how to address it? Also again maybe TOTALLY unnecessary once you un-hide the math markup.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  How does this interact with Find? Select text?
  - 1-more 3y ago
    solid point: it kind of wrecks them. I just checked in a codepen. Copying the text around the hidden paragraph will also copy the hidden paragraph. Maybe that's a feature? Searching for the content will also show that it's on the page but that you cannot meaningfully get to it, which kind of stinks. These two issues get solved by aria-description where the description exists entirely in an attribute on the element rather than as a reference to another node in the DOM tree. But it's still in the draft for ARIA 1.3 so it's not fully adopted yet. about the attribute https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Attributes/aria-description https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A... CanIUse info (tl;dr only in chromesque browsers) in the property info https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/ariaDescription https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/ari...

by RogerL 3y ago

bjornasm 3y ago

One option would be to do testing with screen-readers and then find out if the content works, and if not find out why.

patrec 3y ago
I think most people are fine with the idea that some of the costs (monetary and otherwise) arising from disabilities should be transferred from the people suffering from them to society at large. But I don't think it's reasonable for producers and users of broken screen readers to expect everyone (including authors of private blogs posts) bending over backwards to accommodate them, nor is it a remotely efficient use of societal resources. It also creates completely perverse incentives.
- User23 3y ago
  If there is a bug in the screen reader then that's on the vendor. However the overwhelming number of cases where a website is unusable with a screen reader are due to lack of proper semantic tagging, like alt text and so on. The last thing a screenreader user wants to hear on a site is "button," "button," "button..." There's certainly room for tooling to help though. I definitely think it sucks that many accessibility linters are nonfree and thus will never be used by site devs who aren't worth suing. It's worth remembering that accessibility helps everyone, not just the disabled. In fact one of the more popular arguments against accessibility is that it allows non-disabled persons to do more than intended. So while there's a good argument to be made for being charitable to those with a frankly really lousy condition, if you just want to be self-centered you still benefit from properly tagged data.
  - patrec 3y ago
    Did you even bother looking at the website source before writing this?
    - User23 3y ago
      What part of if there’s a bug in the screen reader it’s on the vendor did you fail to understand?

psychoslave 3y ago

It depends on what public you care about. If readability did general public is a concern, just get rid of all these symbols and go with plain prose text, possibly using images as preferred illustrations over any ideographic way to encode ideas.

marcosdumay 3y ago
You can't discuss math while getting rid of the math symbols. That's not a reasonable proposal. Math on the web is broken, the the affected people should be up complaining about that. This site did the most accessible thing possible; the fact that every tool broke here, just like they do for every other method is not really the author's fault.
- gbear605 3y ago
  It’s not entirely impossible; mathematicians did it for thousands of years (just read Newton’s Principia). It does use very specific language to do so, and some of the language might not exist for some advanced mathematical concepts, but I think that this whole article could be written that way.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Yeah, let's talk about the difference in accessibility between the text on this site and Newton's Principia...
    - mgunyho 3y ago
      I think parent is referring here to the fact that math used to be written without symbols (other than numbers) up to the 1300s according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notation#Symbolic_stage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notati... (very interesting article!) However, I would say that there is a reason why notation tends towards terse symbols: it's much more efficient and unambiguous.

1-more 3y ago

When I view source (not the DOM) I can see that all of your math has aria-hidden="true". That seems to carry over into the parsed/generated math markup: run `document.body.innerHTML += '<style>[aria-hidden="true"]{ outline: 3px solid red; }</style>'` to see all the hidden-from-screenreader things highlighted. That may be enough. For content that really cannot be written in a way that screen readers can handle, there is always the idea of Screen Reader Only content. It's a hassle, but let's jump in and give it a shot For instance for the first math thing you can have <style> .sr-only { position:absolute; left:-10000px; top:auto; width:1px; height:1px; overflow:hidden; } </style> <p class="sr-only" id="definition-of-reduced-derivative"> The reduced derivative with respect to x is denoted crossed-d over dx of the function f(x). It is equivalent to the the derivative with respect to x (denoted d over dx) of the function f(x) all over 2 pi. </p> Then you make sure that the element that wraps up your first equation has aria-describedby="definition-of-reduced-derivative" so that the SR reads out that content. I think you may need to not have "aria-hidden" on that math wrapper, but I'm not sure. This is not an authoritative answer; I'm just some asshole who writes front-end code a lot. More of a Cunningham's Law situation that anything really. You don't want to end up creating one experience for sighted users and completely different one for screen-reader and refreshable-braille-display users. But this can maybe get the wheels turning for how to address it? Also again maybe TOTALLY unnecessary once you un-hide the math markup.

paulddraper 3y ago
How does this interact with Find? Select text?
- 1-more 3y ago
  solid point: it kind of wrecks them. I just checked in a codepen. Copying the text around the hidden paragraph will also copy the hidden paragraph. Maybe that's a feature? Searching for the content will also show that it's on the page but that you cannot meaningfully get to it, which kind of stinks. These two issues get solved by aria-description where the description exists entirely in an attribute on the element rather than as a reference to another node in the DOM tree. But it's still in the draft for ARIA 1.3 so it's not fully adopted yet. about the attribute https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Attributes/aria-description https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A... CanIUse info (tl;dr only in chromesque browsers) in the property info https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/ariaDescription https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/ari...