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If you think about this from an accessibility point of view, screen readers for blind users present a linear view of a page. To escape from the linear view, the
by robin_reala 1y ago
If you think about this from an accessibility point of view, screen readers for blind users present a linear view of a page. To escape from the linear view, they also typically allow users to access lists of elements like headers and links, out of context of their original position. If every link is labelled “click here” then you’re effectively removing non-linear access from those users.
- rerdavies 1y agoSure. but who labels every link in there header as "click here"? A completely different use-case from inline hyperlinks.
- charcircuit 1y agoA screen reader should be smart enough to read out what the link is for.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoHow do you imagine that working? By reading surrounding text or by reading the URL? Those are worse experiences than descriptive anchor text. You can use something like macOS VoiceOver right now to see how it behaves.
- charcircuit 1y ago>By reading surrounding text Yes, or it can summarize the text and explain what the link is to.
- bluGill 1y agoLLMs attempt that, but their success is mixed - sometimes the summary is very bad.
- DrewADesign 1y agoImagine how long it would take to load a page of HN search results, or the table of contents of an online book, or a page with a lot of dead links, or a page with links to a whole bunch of non-textual content that it has to figure out is non-textual.
- charcircuit 1y agoYou don't need to load where the link is going. The base line is the context a sighted person would have when they see the "click here" link.
- DrewADesign 1y agoWhile that would work in many situations, I think the number of edge cases would be too great to make it reliable as a primary mode for communicating meaning in an accessible interface. As an alternative assistive feature? Sure. Something to rely on? I'll believe it when I hear it.
- AlienRobot 1y agoIf only there were 4 different HTML attributes[1][2][3][4] you could use to add a descriptive label to an arbitrary HTML element.... 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attributes/title https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... 2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Reference/Attributes/aria-label https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A... 3. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Reference/Attributes/aria-description https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A... 4. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Reference/Attributes/aria-describedby https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
- cluckindan 1y agoOne would hope those work the same in every browser + screen reader + language combination, but alas, it is not so.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoSo maybe those user agents (the browsers and screen readers) should fix their shit instead. Crazy idea, I know.
- cluckindan 1y agoThey definitely should. However, those will be large investments, so at least JAWS and VoiceOver are going to be waiting for WCAG 3.0 before tackling that. NVDA is open source, so I guess you could help them out with it. ;-) The larger issue is that developing software for multiple platforms and multiple browsers and multiple different types of human interface devices (from eye tracking to sip-and-puff joysticks) from dozens of vendors is an extremely complex affair. Users may even employ multiple different screen readers in different contexts to work around incompatibilities.
- snickerdoodle12 1y ago
- crazygringo 1y ago> By reading surrounding text Yes, exactly, if ARIA tags haven't been provided. It's not exactly rocket science to have some heuristics that check if a link is solely "click", "click here", etc., and it reads the entire sentence if that's the case. Seems like it would work 99+% of the time with exceedingly little effort. There's no expectation, and should be no expectation, that the function of a link should be derivable directly from the text it encloses.
- account42 1y agoIt feels like the screen reader industry has somehow managed to bully the entire web into making things easy for them instead of improving their own software.
- kulahan 1y agoGood. The web industry needs a lot MORE bullies forcing developers to build things in more predictable ways. Besides, AMP is the almighty master of this practice, and they’re not trying to help disabled people, they’re trying to control the internet.
- sn0wleppard 1y agoIt's a travesty how much "Freedom" Scientific charges for a developer JAWS licence
- ghusto 1y ago> How do you imagine that working? By reading surrounding text or by reading the URL? Yes. If I had "Amaya!" as the link text to download something, I'd be not much better off and would reach for context too. What's the problem with reading the surrounding text or the URL?
- recursive 1y agoIt's less reliable than the author just telling you what it is. And more expensive too.
- donatj 1y agoWhat I have learned after years of working with accessibility experts is that screen readers are largely incapable pieces of junk that need to be lead around manually. They don't try to be helpful, they only do exactly what they are told. Frankly I think there's rear space for interruption here, particularly with AI.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoThe hilarious part is that we somehow wound up in a situation where the screen readers are useless pieces of crap but instead of fixing those every developer making a website is held responsible instead.
- rpd9803 1y ago[flagged]
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoI'm embarrassed for the screen reader software for needing so much help.
- jodrellblank 1y agoIf you serve your UI as out-of-order HTML content abusing tables for browser layout, if you merge broken fragments of mismatched XHTML from a content management system to cobble a page together on the fly, if you hide items behind burger menus, if you make interactivity from CSS and minified Javascript to visually look like input boxes and buttons instead of using standard buttons, if you add overlays and blocks to stop people selecting or copying text, if you care nothing about tab order and keyboard shortcuts and image alt text, if you reflow text around images, if you name CSS identifiers with no semantic meaning, if you mix in arbitrary advertising and tracking and framework session state, why is a screenreader "a piece of crap" for not being able to magically infer a human interpretation of the page? Why is it embarrassing to need to code against standardised accessibility interfaces so that other tools using those interfaces can function? Is it embarrassing to have to code against a database or filesystem interface to persist data, or a graphics interface to show pictures?
- pacifika 1y agoWhy would every client process the context to the link, when the author can do this once and add it to the link, that's much more efficient.
- charcircuit 1y agoBecause you can't trust people to do extra work themselves.
- stogot 1y agoThat’s amsomething I had not considered that changes my mind on this
- cluckindan 1y agoScreen readers commonly provide several different ways to navigate on the page, and linear movement through the page is the least efficient method. Users can move e.g. between landmarks or between headings, or both at once in an ”outline” navigation mode. Crucially: screen reader navigation is NOT the same as keyboard navigation.
- layer8 1y agoThere are techniques to solve that: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H33 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H33 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/css/C7 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/css/C7 However, I don’t know how well the first one is supported by screen readers. (Edit: Updated the links from WCAG 2.0 to 2.2.)
- cluckindan 1y agoFor a more up-to-date version, see WCAG 2.2: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/link-purpose-in-context.html https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/link-purpose-in-...
- layer8 1y agoThanks, I updated the links.
- amenghra 1y agoIn a similar vain to the second link, I previously wrote about using css to truncate git hashes so that search functionality continues to work: https://www.quaxio.com/truncating_hashes.html https://www.quaxio.com/truncating_hashes.html
- bevr1337 1y agoI'm particularly fond of the latter approach. There's some joy in applying hints that can be optionally read and only provide clarity. It's a great writing challenge. I did sweat localization with this approach. We use a workflow to ensure some peer review but it's an added challenge. Seemingly all good.
- joelanman 1y agoit's true, but these are more fragile than simply having clear link text, especially over time as a site is maintained
- phkahler 1y agoAnd if every link is just "Amaya" without verbs you can't tell what's what. So I think "get Amaya" and "go to the Amaya website" are rather fine. Also poor form is to have your download button on github.io pulling an executable from malware sites like sourceforge. I'm looking at you wxMaxima.
- rvnx 1y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 1y agoDescribing bundled adware as "fostering a sustainable ecosystem" while portraying Chrome as "forced malware" is a hell of a take.
- rvnx 1y agoOf course I exaggerated it on purpose, but think about it: Remember, in ~2010, it was a trend to add toolbars to Internet Explorer (it was called BHO I think?) These toolbars were changing the search engine for Bing, Yahoo, etc. This is why they were called "Yahoo toolbar". But then, came Chrome, which was bundled among other in: - Adobe Flash Player updates - Java Runtime Environment (via Oracle) - CCleaner - Avast and AVG installers - Many download portals (e.g., Softonic, CNET Download.com, SourceForge) So, the objective of Chrome, instead of replacing the search engine with a toolbar, it was to do it by installing a new app, but this is exactly the same goal. At the end, the goal of Google was not the save the web, it was to replace the search engine and display ads on these pages (+ make sure that the targeting + rendering is under their control).
- ceejayoz 1y agoThe toolbars were bad, too.
- wussboy 1y agoI feel like negative opinions are facts.
- ano-ther 1y agoThat’s a good argument. I would still include more of the action, i.e., ”Get Amaya“ instead of ”Amaya“ as in the article.
- mattl 1y agoBut you’re not getting anything. You’re just surfing to the Amaya website.
- theandrewbailey 1y agoGetting it is what the website wants you to do. It's (presumably) the entire point of why that website exists.
- MangoToupe 1y agoIronically, we really need to figure out away to make accessibility tooling more accessible to those who don't have a need for them. I'm not saying alter the tool, but surely there's got to be a way to visualize this for those who aren't going to put the work into figuring out how screen readers work.
- nodar86 1y agoThis sounds like a great idea, does anyone know a tool like that?
- hombre_fatal 1y agoIdeas for a browser plugin: - Toggle/hide aria-hidden items from the page so you can ensure only the important components are there - Show the ordered list of links, headings, landmarks you'd see in screen readers like when you use the VO+U rotor in macOS VoiceOver - Toggle on a mode where a little "?" appears next to anything with an aria-description that can be hovered as a tooltip Prob would be a decent start. Though I recommend the more curious HNer to fire up macOS VoiceOver, do its tutorial (Settings -> Accessibility -> VoiceOver -> "Open VoiceOver Tutorial..."), and then navigate your own website. Use Safari for this since it has the best VoiceOver behavior. It's very eye opening (heh) and helps you understand what things like aria-hidden actually are for. If that's not enough, it also prepares you for bad luck in the future, and it's also just cool being able to use your computer with your eyes closed. I had some classes in uni where we weren't allowed to use our laptop screens, and I bet I could have gotten away with having my hands inside a half closed laptop with an airpod in my ear scrolling HN/Reddit while the professor droned on for an hour.
- paulryanrogers 1y agoLike WAVE?
- SilasX 1y agoI already kind of get this with extensions that let you browse from the keyboard (e.g. click a link without using the mouse) like Tridactyl. It lets me know when clickable elements are not detected as clickable, and, sadly, this happens quite a lot.
- bmacho 1y agoSurely this is not true, a screen reader must be able to read text with html links inside, and be able to open the next/current/previous link. What is it able to do, if not that? Anyway, "click here" is more accessible for anyone else, since links should look like links, and random half-bold words in a wall of text are not cutting it.
- Vegenoid 1y agoFrom my naive point of view, this seems a very easy problem for screen readers to solve, especially with LLMs: if the link does not describe what it is, include context like the preceding phrase.
- inopinatus 1y agoI find the accessibility concern a much more compelling argument than this article’s focus on “calls to action”, which is primarily a marketing/engagement concern and one that therefore earns my automatic distrust.
- jameshart 1y agoOne of my favorite accessibility accommodation attempts I have ever seen on a website: paragraph on the homepage saying Click here for screen reader accessible version It’s like… ‘click here. No, here. Left a bit. Almost. Come on, you can get it. What are you, blind or something?’