It's definitely simpler to completely ignore accessibility. It's also a bad thing.
It's easier to not put a ramp at my shop, after all there aren't that many people in wheelchairs. It's easier to not add induction loops to help those with hearing aids, after all there aren't that many people with them.
We can keep going with this logic. Facial recognition only works with white faces? But most of my users are white, let's just keep it.
It's easier to exclude people. Across society, that ends up pretty poorly, particularly when it's the same groups that are excluded time and time again.
> What's the incentive?
It would be nice if making the content work for people with accessibility requirements was a reward in itself, but this is why we end up with laws, to make not doing these things a punishable offence so that in the end it's easier to actually do them.
Weird how that expectation only seems to apply to tech folk using assistive technologies. I'm sighted and while I think HN is needlessly ugly and user hostile in some places the only thing I need to do to use it is zoom in a bit. But I guess that just means I'm more technically adept than someone who has to mess around with their screen reader or crawl through the pile of poorly maintained "UIs" to make the site work.
> It works and is lightweight.
That's quite the response to someone demonstrating that it doesn't work.
The only way I can see to fix this is to enable something like OAuth2, which would be a fairly significant departure from HN's brand of minimalism.
My understanding is that dang both moderates the site and maintains the codebase. I've seen new functionality slowly pop up over time; the site is definitely in a slow-but-steady state of continuous development. You may have a point in terms of noone wanting to touch the codebase in specific places (like the voting logic), but I can't see semanticity improvements being too difficult - at least, my surface expectation is that it shouldn't be too hard. It's possible the Arc code specifically powering HN is a giant spaghetti mess.
The incentive perspective is also a very good point. IMHO this is one of those things that's high-effort, high-QoL-improvement, yet low-*perceived*-impact. I'm still trying to figure out what to call it. Whatever it is, it's really hard to straightforwardly make the point that this functionality is absolutely worth investing in, very sadly. It's just one of those things that just doesn't pop out in an... obvious way, for want of a better way to put it. And it's an absolute shame.
(Headphone warning: the volume is unfortunately all over the place, the screen reader is way too loud and the speaker volume is way too soft.)
TL;DR, the page design places so much emphasis on visual table layout that it doesn't incorporate a single <h1> or <h2> anywhere, and it is effectively impossible to read the site rapidly without unconditionally listening to all the
at the top of every single page.I just got mad and got JAWS working in demo/evaluation mode. Here's what blind users hear every time they visit HN:
That doesn't sound too bad, but as outlined (somewhat) in the video above, blind users typically don't go for walls of text like the above, they typically navigate interactively by virtually zooming "in" and "out" of the navigation hierarchy in a document.This does not work with sites that do not have any headings - and HN has none.
You'd better not be blind and have ADHD! Not only do you have to listen to all the navigation cruft, you have to listen to the entire front page as a well of text and lean on working memory, because the lack of headings makes it nontrivial to pause/rewind.
Now, 75%+ of the material linked here can be expected to have a minimal level of reasonable common sense with regards to semantically-structured layout, so once you've left the link and title soup you can probably expect to listen to some proportion of articles and information in relative peace.
But hang on... what if you come to the site for the comments?
DUN DUN DUN
All I can say is... hopefully you don't have ADD either. Here's a portion of this thread as a blind user would hear it:
If you actually do read through that you might wonder why it says "vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar" repeatedly. I was extremely confused about this too; I'm not aware of any points where there are three "|"s in a row anywhere. Turns out, the links in the "... ago | parent | context | flag | on: ..." section have aria-hidden=true on them, so JAWS doesn't read them, but it does read every single vertical bar in between.I'm honestly just confused at this point. I am extremely not interested in stepping over the ad hominem boundary here, but... it's clear there is an understanding of Web accessibility, and HN is, you know, the technology startup accelerator, and this is in the middle of the supposed tech capital of the world, so it's like... I look at Hanlon's razor (do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence/stupidity), and I go, well this is supposedly a place that focuses on optimizing for intelligence and "doing things correctly", in an incredibly detail-oriented industry, and I just... exploding brain moment :(
I did have a bit of an idea though. On the one hand the Silly Valley is all about "the next big idea" or "what's just around the corner", while it's well understood that SF municipality facilities (transport, city manglement, etc) are *well* underpar. Maybe, just maybe, that juxtaposition has an underdocumented impact on the culture of everyday living - focus on the inside, on your heart, on what could be, and remember that if you ignore how bad everything is, this is the key to being successful.
That's the only way I can explain the "this is how we do things here" situation in terms of the site design being what I would describe as pragmatic-to-a-fault.
With the above being said, I should point out that I incidentally happen to still be working out some pretty fundamental areas of personal equilibrium, and have a bit of an oversensitivity to invisibility and "it's fine, it's fine (narrator: it wasn't fine)" types of situations. So I have a bit of bias/lack of perspective in this area, and can't help not being a bit snappy when talking about it.