Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

Re:Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief. by blauwbilgorgel on Sunday September 04, 2011 @02:14PM (#2959953)

I included it to make the following point: Accessibility is more than catering for the deaf or blind. It also includes color blindness, mental handicaps or going by the standard:

http://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/photosensitive-epilepsy/web-...

http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/assistive-technologies-for-p...

Which have the following guidelines (or myths?):

  - allow users to control flickering, avoid causing the screen to flicker

  - allow users to control blinking, avoid causing content to blink

  - allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages

  While people with epilepsy are browsing web sites, they 
  may encounter pages that have blinking texts and 
  animation that may trigger seizures. Sudden loud sounds 
  and repetitive audio in some web pages can also cause 
  epileptic seizures.

I do not know much about epilepsy, so I will believe your experience, but believe me when I say I am not using it as a way to further a point. I believe in above guidelines, regardless if they help for epilepsy, because in this case they help other users with a mental handicap or ADHD and so remain good guidelines. Or do you rather have we don't mention epilepsy all together when making sites accessible and just call them common sense? It is easy to ignore even a common sense guideline when there are so many different ones.

It seems you have an uphill battle to fight if mentioning epilepsy and accessibility in one sentence gets up your nose. Like my quotes show, I am not the fringe 'defend epileptics' spreader of myths here, this is part of the accessibility topic.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief. by vacri on Monday September 05, 2011 @08:32AM (#2962014)

It's fair to say that I overreacted a little, but I did admit it (via 'sorry, gets up my nose'...)

What I was really reacting against was if you search hard enough any site will breach some accessibility guideline for a ... epileptic user. The other three, sure. But I just do not come across any kind of website offering a service that violates these principles. You could throw a brick and find any website that violates guidelines for people with blindness or mental illness. You'd have to search for specific audio-based sites to find ones that discriminate against deaf folks (I can't see how HN does so, for example, but I may be missing something). But you'd have to go through a lot of service-offering sites to find a serious one that caused problems for epileptics.

The only kind of violation of these principles I could think of is a bug anyway - the issue where a mouseover changes the shape of a menu, moving it out from under the pointer, reverting the menu back to original shape, repeat ad infinitum.

Apart from that, I just don't see websites that cause problems. Served ads on some low class websites, perhaps (999999!), but not the content that the website itself is providing.

Solutions for epileptics to use poorly designed sites (if they were a real problem like they are for the blind) are here anyway - [Esc] in pretty much every browser cancels image animation. Flashblock kills flash dead, allowing you to throttle it to your needs. If you're really, really susceptible to simple movement as an epileptic (I've never heard of it, but it could happen, I guess - see the orange circle guy), you can install noscript, which breaks a lot of websites, but kills non-image animation dead. But if you're that susceptible, you're extremely rare and the web probably shouldn't be designed around your use case.

It seems you have an uphill battle to fight if mentioning epilepsy and accessibility in one sentence gets up your nose.

Please read my comment again. It's not 'mentioning them in the same sentence', that's a strawman.

[ Parent | on HN ]