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Flipboard addresses the accessibility issue in their article. While moving to canvas limits it for now, at least they are making an effort to incorporate it, wh

by kcole16 12y ago

Flipboard addresses the accessibility issue in their article. While moving to canvas limits it for now, at least they are making an effort to incorporate it, which is more than can be said for most sites.

onion2k 12y ago
They're saying "Whooshy effects are more important than disabled people accessing our app. We'll let those people in when it doesn't impact our fancy UI." It could definitely be worse, because they could ignore accessibility completely, but that doesn't make their approach good.
- cwyers 12y ago
  > They're saying "Whooshy effects are more important than disabled people accessing our app." It's a world of trade-offs. There are contexts where accessibility is obvious more important than most other concerns -- the IRS's web site should obviously be as accessible as possible because everybody needs to pay their taxes. On the flip side of things, the point of Flipboard IS the UI. Flipboard is all about aggregating other people's content and providing a different user interface to it. What Flipboard is doing is it is taking limited resources and trying to allocate them, and they're choosing to focus on improving the user experience for the vast majority of their users. Is that the right choice? I dunno. But I don't think condescendingly referring to their focus on user experience as "whooshy effects" adds anything to the conversation.
txu 12y ago
The only concern raised about the new Flipboard in the post is "accessibility" being "eschewed", but afik text in canvas tag aren't encoded proprietarily. If screen readers don't work well with canvas tag then the fix should be making more screen reader friendly than criticizing its adoption.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  It's not just the text. It's links and the overall structure of the document - the screen reader has no context for this. How does the screen reader know that what's on the canvas is a menu, and that you can tab to it and select menu items with the relevant keys?

by kcole16 12y ago

onion2k 12y ago

They're saying "Whooshy effects are more important than disabled people accessing our app. We'll let those people in when it doesn't impact our fancy UI." It could definitely be worse, because they could ignore accessibility completely, but that doesn't make their approach good.

cwyers 12y ago
> They're saying "Whooshy effects are more important than disabled people accessing our app." It's a world of trade-offs. There are contexts where accessibility is obvious more important than most other concerns -- the IRS's web site should obviously be as accessible as possible because everybody needs to pay their taxes. On the flip side of things, the point of Flipboard IS the UI. Flipboard is all about aggregating other people's content and providing a different user interface to it. What Flipboard is doing is it is taking limited resources and trying to allocate them, and they're choosing to focus on improving the user experience for the vast majority of their users. Is that the right choice? I dunno. But I don't think condescendingly referring to their focus on user experience as "whooshy effects" adds anything to the conversation.

txu 12y ago

The only concern raised about the new Flipboard in the post is "accessibility" being "eschewed", but afik text in canvas tag aren't encoded proprietarily. If screen readers don't work well with canvas tag then the fix should be making more screen reader friendly than criticizing its adoption.

vertex-four 12y ago
It's not just the text. It's links and the overall structure of the document - the screen reader has no context for this. How does the screen reader know that what's on the canvas is a menu, and that you can tab to it and select menu items with the relevant keys?