Sounds like it could be part of SEO effort. If it can be checked programmatically then search engines should add accessibilty to their ranking algorithms. It worked for mobile.
Imagine the investment that would suddenly start in accessibility if Google publicly announced it was an important part of search engine rankings.
It's important to note that not every site on the web falls under ADA. The crucial part of this issue is that the business must have a physical “brick and mortar” location to fall under the ADA. Presumably purely online retail businesses are not affected.
I wonder if google can be sued for not making it part of the ranking thus misleading blind users... Interesting angle for a lawyer. I hope someone at google is reading this and mitigates that risk.
This was when css started to become useful and if you were able to make do with little outline and lots of css magic, google would be grateful. This was before the SEO craze, of course.
If that doesn't convince you, then have some pride in your craft, some attention to detail. Visually impaired users aren't the only ones annoyed by the fact that you couldn't be bothered with tab order. We have tools, you don't need me to tell you that you're lazy (or overworked, or underbudgetted...), the machine will do that for you.
For the SEO motivation to succeed, I think search engines would have to regress (by definition of "search engine" and its goals) to serve accessible results to users who don't need it. I'm not opposed to this as a solution, but it requires some interesting decisions: do governments stipulate how much of the search score for a given page is based on accessibility? Presumably it's a bad thing for governments to stipulate _how search engines work_. On the other hand, we could see search engines do this voluntarily; that would be cool and might just work because the search engine space isn't especially competitive, but if it ever becomes competitive, I don't think a gentleman's agreement to artificially boost accessible sites (at the expense of serving up the content that is genuinely most likely to satisfy a non-disabled person's query) is going to hold.
Note the distinction between accessibility and mobile--mobile was market-driven: lots and lots of Google users (as a percentage of total users and absolutely) search via mobile--it behooves Google to improve their search experience by boosting mobile-friendly results, and it therefore behooves sites to optimize accordingly. We're talking about boosting accessibility beyond its market value--I think this is good and right, but I wouldn't expect to solve the problem the same way as for mobile.
Yes, the incentives differ. Its just that if I imagne a more accessible web and try to reverse engineer the way how it come to be I end up with ranking algorithm adjustments. Availability bias, I know :-P
There is a lot of money in SEO. Even a rumor about Google adjusting its algorithm towards accessibility could trigger improvements.
In a way it's a bit frightening that Google have that power, but it does have the opportunity to be used for good.
Lynx... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29?wprov...
If you don't care so much about open source, as I said elsewhere on the thread, Mac has VoiceOver built in (Command+F5 to enable), and Windows has Narrator (Control+Windows+Enter to enable on recent versions).
Disclosure: I'm a dev on the Narrator team at Microsoft, but I'm posting on my own behalf here.
Edit: source tweet is https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/1180100942131277824
Lynx would always think I was making an NNTP connection to news.ycombinator.com unless I put in the HTTP://
Slipped me up every time.
If you have any links to your lectures online, please share them. It could perhaps be a “Tell HN” post here (I’m not entirely sure if that’d violate the guidelines).
Writing a command for a cli tool is probably reasonably accessible to blind people.
But if I think of a typical workflow with unix tools (less, grep, awk, sed, sort, cut, etc), I feel like it involves a lot of glancing at the shape of a big page of results and deciding what to do. I wonder if this is harder/impossible for blind people? Maybe one just gets better at a different workflow involving eg lots of head, tail, grep -o, and less less.
I also would guess that tab-completion isn’t super accessible but maybe I’m completely wrong.
You’d be surprised. ;) Here’s a classic from 2004:
https://www.slashdot.org/story/45782
(That specific tool probably no longer works, but Domino’s still has an API for ordering pizza… although apparently the new one isn’t officially supported.)
Not every disabled person is blind. It's not enough to set some tab indexes, add alt tags and call it a day. It's not a process that can be automated and not a simple matter of turning off your screen and using a screen reader (again not all disabled are blind). And as a small business, even if you think your website is accessible (after paying that accessibility dev who you thought fixed it), if you were pursued by a law firm and your options were to try to fight it in court or pay a settlement, you'll likely only be able to afford the latter.
Making your app/site simpler and easy to use for the large number of people with very low computer skills can often improve things for those people with good computer skills too.
Similarly if your site/app is made accessible to the surprisingly large proportion of the population with low literacy then it will also work better and faster for those people with good literacy too.
And blocked: https://rewire.news/article/2018/04/03/sen-tammy-duckworth-s...
>there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility
Which is it?
WCAG 2.0 Accessibility compliance is within reach of anyone following the most basic of best practices in web development these days.
There are many powerful free tools for developers to use to test and validate their work as they go, and there is a ton of literature and thought leadership out there for anyone to find and learn from.
OP may be referring to retroactively making websites accessible, since it can be a lot of work to fix something that wasn't built with accessibility in mind from the start.
Just like adding a sunroof option to a new car is much cheaper than adding a sunroof to a car that didn't come with one in the first place. ;-)
Example: being a lawyer might be lucrative (just take it for the sake of argument) but their services might remain accessible to mom & pop business owners because they only need a few hours of lawyering per year, for the most part.
Because it costs money to do so, and sometimes mom and pop sites are barely scraping by to begin with. It's also their prerogative to make the content accessible or inaccessible to whomever they see fit - it's their loss if someone cannot buy their product, but it's also their choice to accept that loss. I think it sets a dangerous precedent to make them legally obliged to make their content available in a specific way.
I personally an color blind, which is not a disability but it is a pain in the ass at times, especially give that color has the ability to convey data visualization in a rapid manner that is subconsciously parsed by the user. It's extremity effective if one can see color. It is kind of how I got into accessibility for a time. By simple adding a secondary reference of iconography for the color blind a site can convey the same info. (e.g if you show red put a small stop sign on it, yellow use a triangle etc.)
I see no reason why even the smallest sites should not be able to provide access to the blind, whereas larger sites should be striving to go the extra mile to make it accessible and easy to parse for everyone.