I am not (visibly) disabled, myself, but write software for a demographic that has a statistically high number of folks dealing with various challenges. Accessibility is a big deal for me (as is Usability –Accessibility's redheaded stepchild). I do things like provide localizable accessibility labels, as well as support for things like colorblind access, high contrast mode, and reduced transparency mode.
I have also released over 20 apps in the App Store (myself), since 2012, and am the proud recipient of many app rejection notes.
One of the more annoying things, is that the reviewers are required to select from a menu of rejection reasons. They can't just write "You need to add a plist row to ensure the new permission we just added is presented to the user." Instead, they have to send you some generalized "blanket" reason that includes that requirement, among a list of others that don't apply.
It's easy to panic, when we get these.
In my case, I sometimes need to break out a Ouija board, to figure out what they mean.
Fortunately, I have had very good luck in getting folks on the phone. They still tend to "beat around the bush," but you can usually figure out what they want.
Not a big deal. I can always work to modify awkward habits.
Give my regards to your dear Ginger. I'm married to one.
Congratulations on your award.
This is the standard corporate playbook at this point.
Screw over lots and lots of people, then opponents will find some sympathetic cases like this one and put them in the news to put pressure on the company to do something.
The company fixes the one specific case that made the front page. Neither the million other instances, nor the systemic problems that led to them, are addressed. But if anyone refers to the case that made the news, the company can say that it turned out alright. "The system works."
It only turns out alright in that case because it made the front page. Things are still broken everywhere else.
I suggest dropping a line about this to dang at [email protected]. He is extremely nice and helpful.
I've always felt HN should use nested lists for comments.
I had someone else mention that rare bug too but unfortunately I haven’t been able to reproduce it to be able to narrow it down. I will see what I can do to fix it.
Two that display comments: https://hackerweb.app/ https://hn.premii.com/ I don't know how good they are with screenreaders.
The hackerweb.app site seems very good for accessibility. It uses nested lists as others here have suggested.
hn.premii.com is a little more difficult to use (in terms of getting from the list of posts to the comments), but still quite usable. It uses a slightly more complicated layout of divs and lists.
[0]http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html
>pg: "Arc embodies a similarly unPC attitude to HTML. The predefined libraries just do everything with tables. Why? Because Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.
>(...)
>Tables are the lists of html. The W3C doesn't like you to use tables to do more than display tabular data because then it's unclear what a table cell means. But this sort of ambiguity is not always an error. It might be an accurate reflection of the programmer's state of mind. (...)
... and yes, that decision is baked into the server, web app, HTML and forum code (which to my knowledge have never been changed in the standard Arc distribition,) making it a de facto requirement for all Arc based webapps and a PITA to change.
No, it seemed awful at the time as well. Table layouts were already long obsolete by the time Hacker News was launched. Here’s a discussion from over a decade ago on the subject:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2019950
Quotes:
> If this were anyone other than pg, you'd all be excoriating the developer for living in the 90s.
> The big benefit is to accessibility through screenreaders or other alternate clients.
> Look, do what you want. You want to write bullshit markup, be my guest. But there isn't a single web dev in this community who would code output like this for their own site. They're just too chickenshit to tell you.
And here we are, a decade later: nothing has changed, we’re still having the same discussion about the same flaws, and it’s still causing problems for people with disabilities. It doesn’t “only seem awful in retrospect” – it has been awful all along and people have been pointing it out for over a decade.
This is a different case -- HN genuinely does not have a complicated UI, and it genuinely would not be difficult to make a UI that worked better with screen readers. It would not be difficult to rebuild a HN UI to stop using tables without even making any visual changes to what the site looks like.
There is very little complicated functionality going on in HN pages. They're paginated, they don't have a ton of content, they don't have a lot of complicated UI controls they need to support. They're mostly static pages with some very minor form controls.
In this specific case, there really is no excuse for HN to be screenreader inaccessible. This would not be a complicated conversion for even a single experienced web developer. You wouldn't need to use React, you wouldn't need to use any 3rd-party library or dependency at all. You wouldn't need complicated CSS features, you wouldn't need to redesign the UI.
Honestly in a lot of ways, the current HN table layout is more complicated than it needs to be, the generated HTML could be a lot simpler. Really, there's a difference between being "retro" and using what works instead of chasing modern trends, and having outputted HTML that's broken and hacky, and was broken and hacky even at the time it was released. HN is very solidly in the latter category.
CSS could match the current appearance exactly. I bet if dang put up the code on GitHub he'd get PRs fixing tons of stuff within a week.
pg is very proud of HN's quirky implementation that does what he wants very efficiently.
I'm not sure I agree that it does. HN ships a bunch of extra DOM content that it really doesn't need to ship. If you're optimizing for page size, the HTML could be lighter.
The site does what pg wants, but he really shouldn't be proud of it for doing what he wants well. It's not that the HTML is super-optimized but that the optimization has tradeoffs. It's more like whoever programmed it is very familiar with tables, and when all you have is a hammer everything starts looking like a nail.
For visual use, I would agree that the site is great, far better than most of the bloated nonsense that is out there these days.
Holy shit I didn't realise this? That's terrible!
(I know there’s ways to restructure it completely to do this, but I like focused and surgical changes that don’t affect anyone who doesn’t notice them. Opinions vary on that.)
Basically, the comments on HackerNews are laid out in a tree form. When you first load the page, the comment tree is expanded. You can collapse them by pressing on the little '-' next to the comment.
With the tree expanded, NVDA just reads the comments as a linear stream. Of course, many forums are structured linearly, but the advantage of a tree layout is that you can have tangents like this one, without interrupting the main flow of the thread. Reddit is very similar in that regard. If NVDA can't read the tree structure, it's hard to know what is going on. From my experience, using the arrow keys ( e.g. CTRL + DownArrow ) will not report the indentation, whereas using the numpad keys ( e.g. Numpad 7 or Numpad 9 ) will report indentation, but will not indicate how deep the indentation is, so that isn't terribly helpful. It may be possible to change settings in NVDA to get this to work, but I doubt it, which leads us to the technical implementation.
As others have pointed out, the comments are in a complicated nested table structure, which NVDA seems completely blind to, not even recognizing it as a table. Then, the visual indentation is created by prepending the comments with gif images, which act as spacers. The width of the spacers is determined by a 'width=' attribute.
Others who are more knowledgeable than me have already pointed out alternative ways that this could be implemented, such as using <ol> or <ul> tags.
It wouldn't be hard to also criticize the lack of headings, but we can leave that for another day; if this indentation issue could be sorted out, the usability of the site would go up by about 300%. I've almost stopped coming on here since using a screnreader, whereas I used to browse on here a lot -- it's one of my favourite sites.
To the other commenters: thanks for the useful suggestions and insights; this had been bugging me for months.
Edit: typo
Twice now I’ve had to appeal the review. Each time the appeal worked in my favor and I was able to publish again. Keep in mind, as part of the appeal process they call you, so you will need to be answering unknown calls for a while. But the people I’ve talked to that handled the appeal process were all very nice.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the feature, this is coming to Android as well (well, it already has, though it's fairly recent), in the form of Jetpack Compose.
Normal procedure of Apple to avoid any written communication.
You might want to look into Google's new UI toolkit, for Android, called Compose.
Could you post on how the conversation went?
It's a staple of large corporations struggling scale processes and at the same time properly handle edge cases.
We've created over 100 cross platform experiences, and I'm seriously considering a #FckApple tattoo.
How? He tried talking to them, and they rejected his appeal.
If Apple was more developer-friendly, which they are absolutely not as a company, you would think that all replies to rejection e-mails should go through this board. But unfortunately, that's not the case - you have to go through a different process to submit an appeal, which is what it sounds like the blog poster has done (to get a call with them scheduled.)
Now, I do understand that every app needs to go through review every time it is updated, of course. But this is verion 2.5 of the app, this is in no way the first or second version. So yes, Apple seems to find a new issue when someone just finds a little light in their brain clicking into place, the first version had no such issue. But after 4 or 5 versions, oooooh wait, your app does not comply with blah blah blah. So, yes, I think this is unfair. Anyway, I have some news regarding this whole hing, the update was pushed through and approved finally so I'm a bit less worried, they still say I should talk to them on the phone so they're going to schedule a call with me. Let's see how this turns out. Thanks all.