12 ms·

3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

• tempodox 12y ago
  Indeed, the question in the title has long been overdue. And, yes, bad — no, really BAD readability of web sites seems to be quite standard these days (including HN). And, on top of that, the worst offenders block the zooming functionality in mobile browsers. Mankind never had a shortage of torture specialists.
• Tomte 12y ago
  Probably because those 3% are homogeneous, while the 9% decompose into lots and lots of categories, all with specific needs, and all much smaller than 9%.
  • eli 12y ago
    It's also easy to measure that 3% (and, by the way, it's way more than 3% on some of my sites). Hard to fix something that you don't have good metrics on.
  • didgeoridoo 12y ago
    ...although you can do a damn good job addressing most of them with a few simple things: -Write good, semantic HTML, and use alt tags correctly -Don't overwrite browser defaults for scrolling, tabbing, etc (even if it's "hot design") -Don't rely purely on color to convey information -Use ARIA attributes where you can if you're building an application Some harder stuff that is really still worth it: -Send your media out for subtitling/transcription (remarkably inexpensive) -Actually test your site with some disabled individuals, or at least have a go yourself with the NoCoffee Chrome extension to simulate certain visual difficulties
    • vacri 12y ago
      Don't rely purely on color to convey information And, conversely, don't submit to the current fad of low-contrast grayscale.
      • collyw 12y ago
        Don't worry, my non-technical management have turned our in house app into a rainbow colored mess. Its ugly, but it does convey information quickly
    • dominicgs 12y ago
      A terrible example of relying on colour includes the braille at some Melbourne train stations[1]. It appears that someone directly translated the phrase "Press green button" rather than using left or right. [1] http://wongm.com/2014/06/asking-vision-impaired-to-push-green-button/ http://wongm.com/2014/06/asking-vision-impaired-to-push-gree...
      • greenyoda 12y ago
        And it's not just blind people who can't differentiate between red and green. A significant percentage of the population has red-green color blindness.
        • dllthomas 12y ago
          Yes, but forgetting that is a less glaring (and therefore less amusing) error than writing "press the green button" in braille...
    • pascalo 12y ago
      Good you mention application and ARIA ... I've just come out of a project where the initial brief completely disregarded anything in terms of accessibility. Full on angular app, no native forms or form elements (because they "look ugly" apparently). Then the ultimate end client wants to go live but forgot to mention they had a mandatory accessibility audit. So I've spent quite a bit of time working out how to make things work for screen readers using the ARIA specs. And it really worked quite well. My takeaway from this is to make sure everything is working with the keyboard correctly, spend some time thinking about tabindex, labels etc, and where I can push back requests to get rid of native browser elements.
      • EnderMB 12y ago
        Out of interest, did you do any user testing for this site? I've worked on sites that have required a legal accessibility audit and in my experience a lot of screen readers don't even know what ARIA is, let alone use it. Like users that stick with older browsers a number of users use old screen reading tools.
        • pascalo 12y ago
          Unfortunately there wasn't much budget for anything beyond the build. But the accessibility audit was lead by visually impaired people, and they did suggest what the benchmark was I had to meet and we iterated over that by me making changes and them flagging up what else needed to be done. I also have the impression that there are quite a few people with older browsers out there because of the screen reader setup, and I don't think that's a good thing, but maybe it's a matter of doing what we're doing to older browsers in general: phase out support.
  • jerf 12y ago
    Yes. Off the top of my head, I know of at least four different types of color blindness (from red-green all the way down to total monochromatic vision), total blindness, significant visual impairment (listed separately from blindness due to different accommodations), deafness, significant motor impairment making navigation difficult, and dyslexia (which there are ways of accommodating). Thinking about what it takes to make an IE7 user happy is easy; you just install IE7 and bash on your site until it works. Thinking about all those requirements... it's hard to look at that pile of requirements without recoiling in horror at the size of the task... at least, if you want to do anything else on your site, too. Something as simple as a single drop-down menu colored a bit "cleverly" and you've potentially whacked everyone on that list up there except the deaf. Consequently, I disagree entirely with the idea that it's just a matter of using simple HTML or something... it's actually a matter of choosing to give up on everything fancy, and that's a much harder sell.
    • mikeash 12y ago
      You don't have to give up on fancy stuff. You just have to ensure that you don't rely on fancy stuff. Which many of us think is a good idea anyway. For example, it's fine to use color to convey information as long as that information can also be obtained in other ways. This approach not only makes your stuff usable to the colorblind, but makes it easier for regular folk too.
    • hengheng 12y ago
      Remember these people are cooperating with you. They are living with their disabilities full-time, and they might have found some remarkably clever ways to get along with it. I've seen blind people with iPhones (I have no idea), and a kid who used his wheelchair as a tractor to pull machinery around his parents' farm. You can work with these people, they're smart. Whether you make your site fully screen-reader compatible is up to you, but enabling some simple hacks (e.g. custom stylesheets, browser zooming) really goes a long way. People are not homogenous anyway, so it's a good idea to not narrow down their path, impairment or not. Some people don't like to read as much, some are confused by complex looking graphics, some like animation while others are easily distracted. You need to provide different access paths anyways, at least in many of the more complex cases. Personally I love reading large bunches of text, but I usually hate videos where I can't go at my own pace. I'd happily read transcripts if I could, but providing video only would lose you a visitor. Incidentally providing transcripts also helps with accessibility.
  • thumbtackthief 12y ago
    That's a good point, but personally I'd rather cater to the people who don't have a choice in their capabilities rather than those purposely remain ignorant.
• peterwwillis 12y ago
  > So why do we think it is perfectly acceptable to spend time ensuring that our websites work in IE9, but not that you can navigate them with a keyboard? Lack of empathy, basically. There's very little financial or technical incentive to supporting disabled users. People just don't give enough of a shit to help people who have a hard time using technology. Sadly it's going to take a strong push from an advocacy group for disabled users to be taken seriously, just like they were necessary to get ramps and rails as required for all businesses.
  • GFischer 12y ago
    I advised my political party (here in Uruguay) on a bill to mandate accesibility throughout government websites, and we submitted it to Parliament. Sadly it "died", it wasn't deemed important enough to be voted on and so languishes in a drawer or cabinet somewhere.
• smackfu 12y ago
  I don't know that I agree that looking at this from a market share perspective is useful. If only 1% of your audience uses screen readers, should you use that fact to decide it's not worth supporting them?
  • netcraft 12y ago
    What other metrics would you propose to use? (genuinely curious)
    • smackfu 12y ago
      Yes, it's a tough decision what to support. My point is that the percentages of disabled users are often far below what would make financial sense to support, but often there is a need or legal requirement to support them regardless.
      • DanBC 12y ago
        Perhaps the numbers are low because usage is so hard?
      • Isofarro 12y ago
        "My point is that the percentages of disabled users are often far below what would make financial sense to support" Yet every dollar spent focused on web accessibility further improves the usability of the site for your entire audience too. I rebuilt the Legal & General's online home insurance purchase flow. That resulted in a doubling of the number of people completing an online purchase. http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/legal-and-general-case-study http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/legal-and-general-case-study There's a before/after graph in my presentation: http://isolani.co.uk/presentations/wsg/ http://isolani.co.uk/presentations/wsg/
    • furyg3 12y ago
      Ethics? I don't think it's necessarily cost-effective for many places to have accessible toilets. They do it because they've decided it's the right thing do to, or because society has decided this and made a law. Nor do I yield my seat to the elderly because it's somehow cost-effective. While you and I may consider IE8 a handicap :) it's theoretically possible to upgrade. Barriers to upgrades are usually corporate policy, very old OS versions, or low tech knowledge. All are solvable, to some extent, by action on the users part (or their IT guy). There are exceptions, but it's a tool issue on the user's side, and other tools are generally available. True disabilities are usually not within the users, or their companies, control. They can't use their own resources (time / money) to fix the problem, or lobby someone else.
• __xtrimsky 12y ago
  Well to be honest I can test my code in IE9 to see if it works. But I have no idea how a disabled person is experiencing my website, I do put all the "alt" attributes etc...but it's hard to imagine it.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Download the Visual Impairment Simulator? Try Microsoft Narrator (or VoiceOver, if you're on OS X) with your eyes closed? Both are easy and free.
    • mwcampbell 12y ago
      If you want to test with a free Windows screen reader, you're much better off testing with NVDA (http://www.nvaccess.org/ http://www.nvaccess.org/) than Narrator.
  • bitJericho 12y ago
    I like to remove all formatting and see how things look. If it still makes sense and is laid out well, you're doing ok.
    • TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      Similarly, testing in Lynx is a good idea.
  • smackfu 12y ago
    Yes, that's a real issue. I've had to add JAWS Screen Reader support to an app, and even after you shell out for the thousand dollar license, it's very difficult for a casual user to use it in the same way that an actual blind user does. Ideally you test with an actual impaired user, but they have real jobs and don't want to spend all their time testing your apps.
    • DanBC 12y ago
      There's a gap in the market for usability testing. This would mean that things are not just validated against specs but checked in real world use. There are probably many groups already doing this stuff. Perhaps they just need better organisation or SEO?
• eknkc 12y ago
  I hate the font choice of this article.
  • mbillie1 12y ago
    I had the opposite reaction - both the font and the text color detracted enormously from my ability and desire to continue reading the article.
    • Isofarro 12y ago
      I am thankful you still had a choice to continue reading or not. I am thankful you had the choice to use a user-stylesheet to override both the font-family and the text colour into something more readable for you. I am thankful that the ability to work around these shortcomings was in your control. (Chuck it through a readability bookmarklet, as an alternative to overriding CSS) Spare a thought for people where the choice of whether or not to consume a piece of content is taken away from them because they are disabled, and they have no straightforward way of working around the barriers the website has placed before them. These people don't have the choice you have, unfortunately. I wish they did.
  • TheAnimus 12y ago
    I thought it was because I'm dyslexic, but I really struggled to read the article.
  • syf81 12y ago
    Same here, I thought she picked the font on purpose for this article, but her entire site uses awful unreadable fonts, colours, etc.
  • fionatg 12y ago
    I think its a love/hate thing with my site theme. I've had a lot of comments that it looks fantastic. I think I'll have to increase the font size at least.
    • hluska 12y ago
• ColinDabritz 12y ago
  As a side note, designing well for disabilities often translates to better design as well. Those alternate text labels and better layout for screen readers can make your site easier for the googlebot to read. You can find navigation and flow issues. Buttons that are hard to click are harder for everyone to click, even if some can manage. Or those buttons are really hard for everyone on tablets to hit because they are too small.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    The reverse is also sometimes true: If you use best practices, your website will hopefully be relatively accessible.
  • speg 12y ago
    This happens in the real world too, aka the sidewalk effect. The cutouts in the sidewalk for wheelchairs are now used by everyone else too for their: strollers, bikes, shopping carts, and anyone else who doesn't want to raise their foot an extra couple of inches.
    • lmm 12y ago
      OTOH I've seen pedestrians almost-hit by an out-of-control car that would have been stopped by a proper kerb but instead hit one of those ramps.
      • colanderman 12y ago
        I've seen multiple bicyclists almost hit by in-controls cars because they couldn't ride safely on the sidewalks without those ramps. (Yes, riding on sidewalks is technically illegal. There are many places where it's much much safer and there are no pedestrians to bother.)
        • JoshTriplett 12y ago
          > Yes, riding on sidewalks is technically illegal. That differs by jurisdiction; in many places it's completely legal.
• pyrrhotech 12y ago
  worrying about either is financially dumb until you already have millions of customers and economy of scale calls for it* *there are exceptions for some industries
• seanbehan 12y ago
  Show me a virtual machine that I can test with, that puts me in the shoes of a user w/ a disability, and I'll develop with accessibility in mind. But the inability to replicate the experience in full, I think , inhibits catering to that demographic.
  • seanbehan 12y ago
    I think this would make a good product. Browserstack for different types of disabilities.
  • didgeoridoo 12y ago
    Try the NoCoffee extension for Chrome. Great for simulating a wide range of visual difficulties.
  • furyg3 12y ago
    Yes, outdated browsers is the devil that developers know. We hackers are frequently solution driven, with a heavy focus on tools. This quickly tailspins into goals focused on incremental changes (load faster, show more info, integrate with this other thing) instead of stepping back and looking at the larger picture (who are my users and what do they want to do?) Fighting for 3 hours to get your graph to load properly on IE7/8/9 is silly if a table displays the information more clearly and is more accessible.
  • krschultz 12y ago
    That's a strawman. Making a web site or mobile application accessible is about making it parseable to the accessibility application that the user with disability has installed on their machine. A text to speech app needs to be able to access all the content. Put the right tags on fields. Add alt tags on images. On Android, the Lint tool actually calls these things out. I have no idea what it feels like to use a screen reader, but I spent the time to actually put in those tags to enable it for the users of the app. It doesn't take long.
    • nailer 12y ago
      > Show me a virtual machine that I can test with >> Making a web site or mobile application accessible is about making it parseable to the accessibility application that the user with disability has installed on their machine. He wants access to a VM (or many VMs) with the accessibility application that the user with disability has installed That doesn't sound like a straw man at all.
• Nanzikambe 12y ago
  IE9 isn't a disability? Colour me shocked Apologies in advance for the poor (attempt at) humour, I don't mean to trivialise a real issue, only to ridicule IE9 users. In all seriousness it's due to the complexity of catering for certain disabilities each of which require entirely different technical solutions, and some of which depending upon OS and various devices can be seamlessly provided for. I would say a better question here is why isn't there more standardisation on the technology and approach to better serve the needs of people with a disability. It's not a purely technological issue either, I've never seen a tender for website or application development with any provision for it. And I've seen a fair few.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Don't Governments usually mandate it?
  • bitJericho 12y ago
    IE9 users are most often workers who are your best customers.
  • DanBC 12y ago
    If you've seen tenders for websites that ignore usability for disabled users you've seen companies that are, depending where they are, breaking or close to breaking the law. Obviously you can't name and shame, but a blog post saying "I have seen X number of website tenders and none of them include any mention of usability for disabled users" would get some notice.
    • 6cxs2hd6 12y ago
      Speaking of name and shame. People sometimes bring a lot of intensity to bear on a single statement or campaign contribution. It would be great to see similar intensity for acts of omission. If someone leads an organization that hasn't made even a weak effort at improving accessibility or diversity, that deserves some gnashing of teeth. I think what accessibility and diversity both have in common is that the problem can seem overwhelming. Progress needs to happen step by step, organization by organization. We should encourage and compliment people who are taking even small but meaningful steps -- and "shame" the ones who are making excuses for not even trying.
• bitJericho 12y ago
  Why wouldn't you use the spec to learn HTML5? Of course I use books and samples, but I also use the spec quite a bit.
• thefreeman 12y ago
  Where are those numbers from? 3% seems really low. I would guess the IE8 (being the highest version that can run on XP) population is much higher then that, but IE9 was chosen to make the number look better.
  • fionatg 12y ago
    IE8 was 6%, which I think still validates the point. I actually chose IE9 because a lot of companies have actually dropped support on IE8 but are still supporting IE9 (mine included).
    • thefreeman 12y ago
      Fair enough, I guess the usage is just lower then I thought which is great news. As another commenter mentioned though it is very dependent on industry, I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprise applications have much higher IE usage.
  • ceejayoz 12y ago
    Our stats show 2.3% IE8 users. We handle sites for major, general-market brands, so it's not skewed as it would be on a tech startup or something.
    • eli 12y ago
      Our Energy/Utility industry news site has: 12% IE8 11% IE9 People should always run their own numbers. It can vary quite a bit from the internet-wide average.
      • thefreeman 12y ago
        Pretty off topic, but why would anyone ever stay on IE9? It means you are on > XP which means you should be able to upgrade to at least 10 I believe, if not 11. Is it just a lack of permissions to upgrade the browser combined with lazy administrators?
• joblessjunkie 12y ago
  I have poor vision. This website uses a herd-to-read font and disables pinch-to-zoom (an essential feature) on my iPad.
  • leorocky 12y ago
    This website is even difficult to read on a regular desktop browser (too wide, downvoted comments increasingly impossible to read causing eye strain). I recommend using your own content script with Chrome. This may not help on your iPad but on Android you can use Firefox with your own userscript. It's the only way I can tolerate it. It would probably take a competent someone a few hours to fix the readability issues of this site but they just never get around to it. Edit: Here's a link to what all comments look like for me, even if they're downvoted: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/v5zcn9n4vg4m3cn/2014-06-12%20at%208.30%20AM%202x.png http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/v5zcn9n4vg4m3cn/2014-06-1... I also disabled scores and voting because I dislike that stuff. This is the home page: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/sicqor50smsl4hx/2014-06-12%20at%208.35%20AM%202x.png http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/sicqor50smsl4hx/2014-06-1...
    • pjc50 12y ago
      HN is tiny and unreadable in default Android chrome.
    • dbaupp 12y ago
      I don't think joblessjunkie was talking about HN.
    • shutupalready 12y ago
      joblessjunkie means the original article's site. Pinch-to-zoom works fine on HackerNews on an iPad, and the HackerNews font is nothing unusual. Regarding HN being too wide, why don't you narrow your browser window? Personally, I like the fact the traditional web design in which HN adjusts the line to screen width rather than imposing a width.
      • claudius 12y ago
• dep_b 12y ago
  Because IE9 is the first browser by Microsoft that supports standards sort of reliable like more than 70% of the other browsers out in the wild. So we support it because doesn't take much effort to support it. The choice IE9 or better is because of the quality of that browser, not because we care a lot about the actual marketshare. Furthermore I always try to optimize the "dry" HTML and use semantic HTML not because of the blind and disabled but because I like my documents be read by non-humans that apparently are blind and deaf and have bad JavaScript support in their browsers to boot. Don't do it for the disabled. Do it for the blind and deaf unstoppable corporate robots.
  • Isofarro 12y ago
    Accessibility is more than just Perceivability - a characteristic robots would appreciate. Accessibility includes Operability and Usability, these are more human focused, and less robot focused principles. What's the point of having a perceivable interface without it being usable or operable? See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885113 -- for accessibility tips that have no relevance to spiders/bots, but is fundamental to accessibility. That's where this "robots are like blind/deaf people" argument falls down. Accessibility is about removing barriers for humans, with human related disabilities. That making those changes also makes content more consumable by a spider or crawler is a positive side-effect. A great positive side-effect, but not the primary aim.
• bitbandit 12y ago
  I am guessing that 14% = color blind + users with cataract + various other visual impairments. You usually can't have a design that makes all of them happy at once. For example, high contrast UI themes often leave large white areas on the screen that users with glaucoma find blinding, but other users like a lot.
  • JackFr 12y ago
    I'd like to see the original survey. 14% sounds awful high. http://www.nei.nih.gov/CanWeSee/ http://www.nei.nih.gov/CanWeSee/ http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/2C.html http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/2C.html
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• bunchjesse 12y ago
  I'm really glad to see accessibility on hacker news this morning! There was a talk at WWDC about improving accessibility and usability in web apps if anyone is interested in learning more: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/#516 https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/#516
• hluska 12y ago
  I don't agree that accessibility is a training issue and I certainly don't agree that it would take a month to become familiar with accessibility guidelines. Rather, download a screen reader (for Windows I like Windows Eyes), learn to use it, shut off your monitor and spend one hour trying to use the web. That will give you all the context that you need. Once you're armed with this experience, make navigating through your site with your screen reader part of your regular QA process. If you follow these steps you will: - craft sites that are significantly easier for people with visual impairments to use. - build sites that are easier for search engines to crawl. - gain an understanding of WCAG that you can apply to everything you develop. This method will not prevent usability nightmares like horrible font/icons, but it will get you most of the way to WCAG.
  • tootie 12y ago
    I think the "month" estimate was how long it would take to add accessibility as a feature.
  • judk 12y ago
    That tells you what the problem is, but solving it with current tools is still very hard.
  • Isofarro 12y ago
    "but it will get you most of the way to WCAG." Or, you could start with the 4 principles of Accessibility (Perceivability, Operability, Usability, Robustness) and build a working knowledge set on that. Screenreaders are complicated pieces of software, just an hour a day is not enough, you do need to fully immerse yourself as a blind person. Do your day job for a month using a screenreader and no monitor (from turning on the computer all the way to turning it off) - that will give you adequate platform in which to appreciate the blind people you want to serve. But that's just one disability (though a large chunk). Visual impairments isn't just blind people. It's partially sighted, low vision, photosensitivity, tunnel vision, colour blindness - each have their own accessibility characteristics. And that's just sight-related accessibility issues... I haven't even started talking about motor-related disabilities, cognition related impairments. Seriously, WCAG took absolutely ages to write, but it will give you a better perspective of a wider range of accessibility issues than using a screenreader for an hour a day.
• jl6 12y ago
  Are there stats on whether having a disability makes you more or less likely to make a purchase in a given product category? E.g. does having a disability correlate with not having a job, which correlates with having less disposable income, which correlates with making fewer purchases? Or does a disability correlate with going out less which might correlate with spending more time and money online?
  • lilsunnybee 12y ago
    It shouldn't matter douchebag.
• legacy2013 12y ago
  I've been wondering about this for a while. For my thesis project in college, my class created a web app for a school for the blind and visually impaired. We were greenhorns when it came to creating a production ready system, but we were able to meet the standards for usability by implementing them while the project was going, not as an after thought.
• autokad 12y ago
  "3% browse with IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former? So why do we think it is perfectly acceptable to spend time ensuring that our websites work in IE9, but not that you can navigate them with a keyboard?" if she is so concerned about making websites accessible for those with impairments, why in the heck did she choose that font?!? 2nd, you are really twisting things. first you take ALL people with disabilities (term used generously), and use that to justify websites having to comply with an issue that effects less than 1% of the population. the vast majority of disabilities falls under visual impairment, and all websites should strive to make them readable. Then you do the complete opposite to IE. you disregard all the IE versions and focus on just one. in short, you lumped all disabilities to validate your point about one specific part of it and bifurcated the IE market to make it seem smaller to prove your point.
  • unreal37 12y ago
    The original Microsoft research paper she pulls the number "14%" from uses questions like "do you have a visual impairment?" to determine disability. So if you wear glasses or contacts, you're disabled apparently.
    • autokad 12y ago
      agree, and trying to act like the internet is unusable by 14% of the population (all because they have a disability and those programmers and designers are ignoring their plight) raises red flags. over 1/10 people? really? she claimed she doesn't know much about the process. which makes me wonder why write an article critiquing it then. but i can attest, making web pages usable/readable/etc to as many people as possible is always a huge part of the process.
• obvious_throw 12y ago
  Because "a disability" is extremely broad, and covers such things as back injuries, diabetic neuropathy, and mental illnesses. I would expect that percentage to come down considerably when factoring specific disabilities that actually impede browsing.
• yawgmoth 12y ago
  The fact that her site uses a hard-to-read font has nothing to do with her point. The merits of each should be considered individually.
  • lilsunnybee 12y ago
    But then how is anyone supposed to feel smug and unthreatened if they can't laugh at and disqualify her argument over some irrelevent bullshit?
• samuirai 12y ago
  related: Great thoughts about "WHAT ACCESSIBILITY HAS TO DO WITH SECURITY" by Anna Shubina: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phwEoiqLTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phwEoiqLTM
• xbryanx 12y ago
  It's important to remind developers and clients in the United States that some aspects of web accessibility are required by federal law: http://www.ada.gov/ http://www.ada.gov/ Does the ADA apply to the web? Yes. This has been supported in court, when the National Federation of the Blind successfully sued Target over their e-commerce site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_Blind_v._Target_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_Bli... The ADA is a great example of important legislation that protects the rights of a minority group that is regularly ignored by the market.
• optymizer 12y ago
  I find this font ridiculously hard to read. I clicked the back button after the first paragraph. It's also hard to take the author's opinion on web-design seriously when they make such decisions for their own site.
  • daktanis 12y ago
    I think we live in a time of pretentious graphic designers (not saying you are, saying its a huge trend) who all think they "have it right", which is way all modern websites are looking very samey. It's a personal blog, it's not comic sans, so how bad can it be?
• fnbr 12y ago
  Wow, that's a terrible font, especially for an article talking about catering to those with disabilities. I found it hard to read, and I have perfect vision.
  • lilsunnybee 12y ago
    Nothing to say about the article just the fucking font its printed in?
• robot_ 12y ago
  xScope provides a great tool for testing common vision impairments. What I'd love is a well written overview for keyboard accessibility within websites.
• emehrkay 12y ago
  Do you have to write specific code for Safari users?
• hkdobrev 12y ago
  OK, the topic is great. So could anyone write a decent article about it and post it to HN?
• vegardx 12y ago
  Speaking as a colour-blind person (protanopia) I welcome this kind of thoughts with open arms. There's actually not much you have to do in order to make a website at least readable if you just have some basic concepts in mind when designing. The latest fad with soft pink and grey is really bad, almost unreadable for me. Luckily, I can usually just select the text and get blue/white contrast, which makes it more readable, but lately I've seen people override this too, or simply just hijack the ability to select text. I could open it in a screenreader or something similar, but usually I just close the tap and move along. Just keep that in mind if you decide to override how the browser behaves. A funny side note, which was very clear on this website: When you're using pie charts, also know that it's almost impossible for colour-blind people to read them. The only two I could pick out was Chrome and IE11.
  • alxndr 12y ago
    > ...usually I just close the tap and move along. Just keep that in mind if you decide to override how the browser behaves. This makes it a marketing problem as well.
  • Groxx 12y ago
    As a person without color-blindness, but is interested in making it easier for people with: there are a lot of different varieties of color blindness. Obviously you can (and usually should) do things like "use different brightnesses", but it seems to me that this is more solvable by e.g. an OS-level color filter. Something that allows you to compress colors into the range you can see. Would that be even remotely useful? Are there major problems that I'm not seeing? Is that why I don't see OSes with features like that?
    • vegardx 12y ago
      You can change contrast, brightness and such in most modern OSes, but I'd rather have people take it into account and choose colours wisely. The problem for most colour-blind people is contrast, not the colours them self. I can't speak for all colour-blind people, but generally OSes have been really good at it, the problem is usually inside the browser window. And making everything look like a unicorn had puked rainbows all over your screen, while making it very readable, is not comfortable.
• SeniorDev 12y ago
  it concerns me that you think you can call yourself a senior web developer without even once reading the w3c specification, because that would be crazy
• germs12 12y ago
  Because our managers use IE9.
• tendom 12y ago
  I write sites for a government, and I most certainly write code to standards, then to aria, and finally pick apart any IE weirdness. This has been quite the fight over the years, but if we want to be considered professionals and called engineers, then we follow standards, and when an employer says "I want you to ignore standards because we don't need it" you have to say no, I'll do this right, or you can find someone else to do it. If we all did this from the start, we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.
  • lilsunnybee 12y ago
    That's wonderful! Both brave and very professional! :-)
    • tendom 12y ago
      Thank you, you made my day. Though in truth, I'm not very brave, I'm single, without wife, girlfriend, or kids, or anyone really depending upon me. And I work for government because I got tired of making rich men richer. I'm an idealist, and an idiot in truth. But thank you.
      • lilsunnybee 12y ago
        In a better world principled people wouldn't have to feel like idiots. Glad to make your day! :-)
• broseph 12y ago
  It's interesting to see so many developers demanding an easier way to test whether a website is accessible. > Show me a virtual machine that I can test with, that puts me in the shoes of a user w/ a disability, and I'll develop with accessibility in mind. > Well to be honest I can test my code in IE9 to see if it works. But I have no idea how a disabled person is experiencing my website, I do put all the "alt" attributes etc...but it's hard to imagine it. Turn off your monitor. Turn your laptop brightness all the way down. That's what it's like to use your website while blind. Basic screenreaders for the web cost zero dollars and could not be easier to install [0]. A screenreader for Mac OS [1] costs zero dollars and is already installed on your machine. Stop pretending that these tools are mysterious. You or someone you know might have no choice but to become an expert screenreader user tomorrow. Have a little bit of compassion. [0] http://www.chromevox.com/ http://www.chromevox.com/ [1] https://www.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/ https://www.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/
• btbuildem 12y ago
  > I'd like to start this post with a disclaimer: I don't know much about creating accessible websites. As your font choice and general blog layout seem to indicate, yes.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• JohnHaugeland 12y ago
  I think the question is flawed. 1) We don't cater to IE9, which is at 5.11% according to stat counter. IE9 is a bad choice point for this - it's the first IE that had auto-update. Everyone left. We're catering to IE8+; 8 is currently at 6.5%. 2) You don't count the version; you count the version and all its successors. That is, we're not catering to 8, we're catering to 8+. 8+ is at almost 35% and is still the dominant aggregate browser. 3) Where does 14% come from? This says 6.8%, or roughly half what's claimed, in the same neighborhood as the browsers mentioned: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1417-Accessibilit.. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1417-Accessibilit.... 4) You can't cater to disabled users. They're not one thing. What you do for the colorblind isn't the same as what you do for the blind, which isn't the same as what you do for people who have specialty control systems, which isn't the same as what you do for micro-screens, which isn't the same as what you do for people who have motor control circumstances, et cetera. 5) The web solution for this is WAI-Aria, which began in mid-2012, and became a candidate recommendation three months ago. 6) Microsoft has been requiring WAI-Aria for store apps since late 2012. 7) Most people have never heard of WAI-Aria. 8) As far as I know, no single group of disabled users reaches 1% of the userbase. 9) Supporting old browsers is way, way easier than supporting disabled users. Old browsers mean installing a shim and fighting a couple bugs, and that level of effort leaves people writing angry blog posts for five years. Supporting disabled users means learning how (there's basically no tutorials, but ample angry blog posts with bad statistics) then finding someone who has the equipment to test it on, then learning that you have to re-order everything on the entire site because the reader software can't be told that the source order isn't the reading order, then adding several properties to every single tag on every single page, then having no way to audit. 10) Many of us /do/ cater to the disabled. Your site has no aria markup at all, is peppered with empty iframes (which will wreak havoc on older readers,) and is covered in images that have no reader equivalents. You are actually substantially less disability friendly than the average webpage. 11) Even people with full sight find a font and color scheme like that very difficult to read. 12) In short, because like you, most small web authors are more comfortable writing about the problem than being part of the solution.
  • Isofarro 12y ago
    " 1) We don't cater to IE9, which is at 5.11% according to stat counter. IE9 is a bad choice point for this - it's the first IE that had auto-update. Everyone left. We're catering to IE8+; 8 is currently at 6.5%." Why bother? in a few months it will be 5.5%. Next year it will be 1%. Why invest any time or attention to a browser whose market share is low and continue downwards into nothingness? Do nothing. The IE8 problem will work itself out naturally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz9810Y7ZRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz9810Y7ZRw "2) You don't count the version; you count the version and all its successors. That is, we're not catering to 8, we're catering to 8+. 8+ is at almost 35% and is still the dominant aggregate browser." That's just a sleight-of-hand obfuscation. If 9+ is 30%, why quibble over the extra 5% (and only dropping over time) that IE8 will offer. It's a diminishing return adding an older browser to the browser support list. "5) The web solution for this is WAI-Aria, which began in mid-2012, and became a candidate recommendation three months ago." No, WAI-ARIA became a Recommendation in March, not a Candidate Recommendation. The distinction between the two is two independent implementations. "8) As far as I know, no single group of disabled users reaches 1% of the user base." * Colourblindness (8% of Caucasian Men) * Dyslexia "9) ... Your site has no aria markup at all" The non-presence of ARIA does not make a site inaccessible. "12) In short, because like you, most small web authors are more comfortable writing about the problem than being part of the solution." Unfortunately, you are presenting the opposite side of the problem. So you have a little more knowledge about accessibility issues than the OP - but not enough to pass a quick scrutiny. Perhaps, what is needed is for you and I to stop being part of the problem of disseminating half-truths, and spend that time quietly doing our jobs properly, and showing the results of these. Invest the time to teach someone else how to build accessible websites, and encourage them to also share what they know. In all fairness, the poster of the blogpost has a fighting chance of improving her skills. She is worth teaching, for the scales of dogma have fallen from her eyes, and she is enlightened.
• jiggy2011 12y ago
  I imagine the main reason is that catering to disabilities is much much more expensive when you consider the variety of disabilities that there are and how much they differ in severity and how they will affect different individuals in different ways. I also guess that people with more severe disabilities are less likely to control large corporate or personal budgets than the general population and those that do are either very good at working around their disability of simply have others to who do it for them. It's also possible that making a site easier to use for somebody with one disability might have the effect of making it worse for a person with a different disability.
  • Zelphyr 12y ago
    I'm sure it is quite expensive but then again, as we a web developer, my job is easily made 50% more difficult (thus VERY expensive) when I have to support IE. The problem as I see it--and to your point--is that I work on enterprise web apps and my Fortune 500 customers have never said a word about accessibility for some reason. I'm sure they honor their Americans with Disabilities Act obligations and build ramps into their buildings. Do they then not care about employees (or customers and vendors for that matter) once they're at their desks?
  • lilsunnybee 12y ago
    I don't even think it's possible to make a website that caters to all disabilities. What is awful is that a lot of the most common disabilities (visual and hearing impairments, etc.), that affect a lot more people than you might think, could be accommodated pretty damn easily and cheaply if anyone was aware and cared in the least. But they aren't aware and they don't care, or they laugh it off like being a decent human being and giving a shit is a joke!
• evunveot 12y ago
  If you want to get started with WAI-ARIA and don't want to read hundreds of pages of documentation, these two references are very helpful: http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#role_definitions http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#role_definitions http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-aria-in-html-20131003/#recommendations-table http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-aria-in-html-20131003/#recommen... Then you can test with the screenreader NVDA (if you have access to Windows or a Windows VM): http://www.nvaccess.org/ http://www.nvaccess.org/ I'm no expert, but the process of using ARIA in HTML feels very much like trying to employ "semantic" HTML5 tags, except that ARIA provides a much richer vocabulary. It can be good inline documentation, too: when you come back later and wonder, "What is this div for?", seeing a role="presentation" attribute is a handy thing. It starts to feel like ARIA takes over the responsibility of semantics and HTML becomes just a scaffold, even moreso than it has been in its relationship with CSS (tags that serve no purpose except as hooks for styling). Which I appreciate, because "semantic HTML" has always felt limited, awkward and a bit pointless, apart from the small part of the effort that has known SEO implications (h1 elements and so forth).
• coherentpony 12y ago
  Couple of things. First, these two groups may or may not be mutually exclusive. Catering for the former may take care of some of the latter too. Second, this question is actually very easy to answer. Catering to disabilities makes almost no money. Catering to IE9 gets the customers that forgot or don't know how to upgrade. That's a wash when it comes to advertising. Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not playing devil's advocate. I do my best to cater to people with poor vision for anything I write. That includes anything I use colour for. I'm simply answering the question as if I were the CEO of a company, where my goal is to make as much money as possible, and not care about anything else.
  • lilsunnybee 12y ago
    Too bad companies aren't people and can't have morals... oh except they're run by people, so that just means the CEOs running these companies are greedy unprincipled douchebags.
• bsimpson 12y ago
  For those who are going to I/O next week, there are over a dozen sessions on Accessibility: https://www.google.com/events/io/schedule https://www.google.com/events/io/schedule
• vanadium 12y ago
  I prefer just hitting WebAIM's periodic surveys and using those metrics instead. http://webaim.org/blog/survey-5-results/ http://webaim.org/blog/survey-5-results/
• daktanis 12y ago
  Unpopular Opinion Puffin: I like the font on her site...
• jordanlev 12y ago
  For those that are interested in learning more about building accessible sites, I found this tutorial to be quite helpful: http://alistapart.com/article/accessibility-the-missing-ingredient http://alistapart.com/article/accessibility-the-missing-ingr... I agree with the OP that the reason most developers don't build accessible sites is because they don't use the accessibility tools and hence have no understanding of how they actually work and the experience they provide for their users. Reading the List Apart article I linked to was rather eye-opening to me (no pun intended) because I didn't realize that I could just use a Chrome plugin or my iPhone's voice-over as a screen reader to actually experience it myself. I am now wishing I could go back and change a lot of html structure on sites I've built in the past to make it easier to navigate via screenreaders!
• azinman2 12y ago
  That font is giving me a disability
• roberthahn 12y ago
  With this one weird trick, you can make the web better for up to 20% of your visitors! Let me tell you for free! Please caption your videos, or make transcripts available. Did you get that? Please caption your videos, or make transcripts available. Yes: 20% of people over the age of 12 have some degree of hearing loss[1]. That's 6% more (two IE9 marketshares!) than the total of vision and mobility disabilities. And if you caption, it's easy for you to see if you did it right! [1] Google "percentage of people with hearing loss" to see multiple sources converging on this number
  • Semiapies 12y ago
    Also helps with search, and it will often save time to let people in general skim a transcript instead of watching a video to see if really covers the subject they need to know about.
    • roberthahn 12y ago
      Precisely. What I'm asking for would benefit a lot more people than the 20% I'm calling out.
• methodover 12y ago
  I work at a small startup with a somewhat large user base (1M weekly users or so) and every time I bring up accessibility issues I get shot down. Just the other day I was told "You talk more about accessibility than anyone I've ever met." Well, yeah, because apparently no one fucking cares. Including you. (I said this not out-loud, to be clear.) Thing is, making accessible sites is usually not super difficult. It's mostly just about making sure your site follows semantic HTML standards and you're not doing funky javascripty bullshit that a screen reader can't figure out. (e.g., hover-over states on elements that pop up important help information, etc.)
  • lilsunnybee 12y ago
    It would have been soo awesome if you had said that! :-D
    • lilsunnybee 12y ago
      Though advocating for fellow human beings who are treated all the time either like they're this giant burden, or like they don't exist, is pretty fucking awesome too. :-)
  • pascalo 12y ago
    Could you wrap the improvements you're trying to make as something other than accessibility? Making every dynamic control keyboard friendly for example could be sold to the business owner as "for power users", then go, refactor the bit with proper aria labels and you're 75% there?
• jakub_g 12y ago
  If you want your site to be accesible, there are a number of things that are a good way to get started: 1. Contrast. Don't use gray text on gray background [1] 2. Keyboard accessibility. Avoid adding onclick handlers on elements that are not an <a> / <input> / <button> [2]; use tabindex to make certain page element focusable and CSS's :active, :focus pseudoselectors (adding border, outline, changing background color etc.) to clearly indicate where's the focus for the keyboard users so they can navigate the page easily. 3. Avoid quickly-disappearing menus and everything that requires precise mouse pointing (elderly people tend to have problems with that) and can't be triggered from keyboard. There are lots of websites failing at those basic things. When you fix that, you can start going further and making site further accessible for certain minorities. [1] http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/ [2] http://jakub-g.github.io/accessibility/onclick/ http://jakub-g.github.io/accessibility/onclick/
• thathonkey 12y ago
  Great all the comments are ignoring the (pretty damn interesting) point made in the article and rather just attacking the aesthetic of the blog. Way to go HN!
• aidenn0 12y ago
  Because people with disabilities are used to not gettting what they want.
  • pestaa 12y ago
    So it makes perfect sense to continue not giving them what they want?
    • aidenn0 12y ago
      The question was "Why do only cater to the former?" not whether or not it makes sense to do so. In fact the very question strongly implies that it doesn't make sense. Non disabled persons using older browsers are used to things "just working" for them, so they have a lot of energy to expend being pissed off when things don't work. Disabled persons are confronted with lots of things not "just working" for them, so the energy of being pissed off gets more spread out. In the general case, this causes a positive feedback loop where minor issues for people without major problems get fixed, while more significant issues for people with even worse problems don't get fixed.
  • lilsunnybee 12y ago
    Fuck you too! Go fall down a mineshaft or something in the interests of improving the human gene pool.
• joedevon 12y ago
  Great post Fiona! I wrote a similar post ~3 years ago here: http://mysqltalk.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/challenge-accessibility-know-how-needs-to-go-mainstream-with-developers-now/ http://mysqltalk.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/challenge-accessib... which turned into GAAD, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a few months later. http://globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/ http://globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/ I could never have imagined how huge the movement can grow, and I hope you help us celebrate it next year.
• Friedduck 12y ago
  According to WHO only about 4% have a visual impairment of any kind, and how exactly would one design for a dexterity impairment? Simpler to navigate menus? And as wfjackson notes below, the browser statistics appear to also be in question. Finally, I'm sure that someone would contest the claim, but it's far more difficult to design for blindness than browser idiosyncrasies. The entire UX has to be re-thought down to the last detail. When you consider the myriad interactions that could occur and the difficulty of building & testing for a small audience, it's no wonder that it's still the status quo.