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posted by martyb on Friday March 15 2019, @01:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the one-thing-is-not-enough dept.

WebAIM issued a report last month analyzing the top one million home pages for accessibility and web designers Eric W Bailey and Ethan Marcotte each take separate, hard looks at it because it is indicating a very sad state. The report noted all kinds of problems, even including throwbacks like using tables for layout with 2,099,665 layout tables detected versus only 113,737 data tables out of 168,000,000 data points. Web designers, old and new, are largely failing in simple matters that were, or should have been, covered in Web Design 101.

Ethan includes in his summary:

Those are just a few items that stuck with me. Actually, “haunted” might be a better word: this is one of the more depressing things I’ve read in some time. Organizations like WebAIM have, alongside countless other non-profits and accessibility advocates, been showing us how we could make the web live up to its promise as a truly universal medium, one that could be accessed by anyone, anywhere, regardless of ability or need. And we failed.

I say we quite deliberately. This is on us: on you, and on me. And, look, I realize it may sting to read that. Hell, my work is constantly done under deadline, the way I work seems to change every year month, and it can feel hard to find the time to learn more about accessibility. And maybe you feel the same way. But the fact remains that we’ve created a web that’s actively excluding people, and at a vast, terrible scale. We need to meditate on that.

Eric also followed the WebAIM report closely:

Digital accessibility is a niche practice. That’s not a value judgement, it’s just the way things are. Again, it’s hard to fault someone for creating an inaccessible experience if they simply haven’t learned the concept exists.

And yet, seventy percent of websites are non-compliant. It’s a shocking statistic. What if I told you that seventy percent of all bridges were structurally unsound?


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by ShadowSystems on Friday March 15 2019, @04:14PM (1 child)

    by ShadowSystems (6185) <ShadowSystemsNO@SPAMGmail.com> on Friday March 15 2019, @04:14PM (#814849)

    You call it "enhancement", assistive tech interfaces call it a right pain in the ass.
    Why bother hiding/truncating it at all?
    That's just a fancy visual trick to make the content look a specific way, a way that doesn't translate to a non visual interface.

    Think of a sheet of binder paper.
    You can't hide the text without resorting to using "invisible" inks.
    If you want someone to be able to read what you've written, you have to put it in the open without obfuscating it.
    Ditto with a web page.
    If you want us to read it, don't try to hide it.
    That just pisses folks off & makes it that much more likely we will go somewhere else.

    If a newspaper presented content by hiding it, how well do you think that will go over with an audience whose time is valuable, in short supply, & aren't too keen to having to read the (paper/site) multiple times before they get all the content they expected to get the first time?

    Don't hide anything.

    You call it the lowest common denominator as if that were a bad thing.
    You sneer at the LCD, but the LCD is what gets read when your CSS/scripting efforts fail.

    Personally I'd love a browser that ignored CSS & scripting of all kinds, just presenting the plain text.
    If a site doesn't work at that point then I can be sure the coder(s) weren't worth the oxygen they wasted creating the site.

    The more code you use to present your content, the larger the page in Kb, the longer it takes to send to the visitor, the more strain on the server, & the more likely you'll include a security hole in there somewhere.
    Do yourself (and everyone) a favour by just KISS.
    Smaller, lighter, less crufty, more secure, works everywhere for everyone.
    What's not to like?

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday March 17 2019, @02:19PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday March 17 2019, @02:19PM (#815844) Homepage
    "Why bother hiding/truncating it at all?"

    Because I want a summary of as many things on screen on my phone as will fit, but with instant access to the expanded content if I wish to expand it.

    Your argument seems to be nothing more than "your requirements are wrong". That is the height of arrogance. My requirements are my requirements, which are also those of my visually-impaired girlfriend, who typically uses a console-based non-JS browser. That is an immutible fact.

    Your "don't have those requirements" simply doesn't wash.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves