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Blind developer here. So surprised to see so many negative comments here. Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelcha
by mltony 5y ago
Blind developer here.
So surprised to see so many negative comments here. Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed. Accessibility of websites is a real problem for blind people. And the thing is it is relatively easy to make your website accessible:
* Use simple HTML controls: all of them work great in all screenreaders. Only when custom behavior is implemented in javascript this might cause problems.
* Test accessibility with keyboard. That fancy combobox that you wrote that expands with beautiful navigation cannot be opened from keyboard.
This ADA guidance actually doesn't even mention this. Sure, providing alt descriptions can be useful but it's almost never preventing me from using a website. But a combobox or a button that won't click is a real problem. But I hope this is just the first step in making Internet more blind-friendly.
- asah 5y agoHey I'm curious: how's MS teams? Slack? Discord? Zulip (chat.zulip.org)?
- heavyset_go 5y ago> Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed They were. AM talk radio hosts would whine about that one for years.
- noobermin 5y agoAbout four months ago, I used to cycle every week to the store, but an auto-immune disorder has me now disabled and I use a wheelchair. A lot of this annoying attitude honestly is people really feel like accessibility is for "other people" and many just lack empathy in general. But really, no one lives forever, no one is 25 forever hitting the bars every night, even abled bodied people grow old and their bodies change or like me, an illness or injury can strike without warning. At the very least if you cannot be empathetic to other people who are disabled just know that one day it could be you and you'll be thankful someone somewhere thought of accessibility. Today, the ramps I used to walk my bike up to the walkway under my apartment are now a godsend for the wheelchair and the stairs that I used to haul my bike up begrudgingly are now a curse. This is a cringe analogy but may be, just may be this will help since this is hacker news: think of the "Master Foo and the Programming Prodigy" and how writing comments is for your "future self." Well, making things accessible is for your future elderly or injured self if you're able bodied today. If you can't do it for others out of mere empathy, at the very least do it for a potential version of yourself in the future! [0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html
- toto444 5y agoThere is a category of non disabled people who benefit from wheelchair accesses : parents of newborns who have to push a buggy wherever they go. I find it interesting that this positive side effect is rarely mentioned in the discussions about this topic. Edit : this is actually mentionned in other comments.
- runarberg 5y agoSame with the web. Fully abled users benefit from keyboard accessibility when e.g. their mouse runs out of batteries, or they’re dominant hand is occupied (e.g. carrying baby).
- Mezzie 5y agoAlso accessibility isn't all or nothing. A lot of elderly people benefit from low vision concerns being incorporated into web design.
- ikiris 5y agoThey still are if you talk to small business owners. Vast majority of people want to completely ignore accommodation and absolutely hate being told to do the bare minimum for other people, especially when it costs them money or time. Many of them rail against how the "government" or some other boogeyman lawyer is after them and how they're the victim when they ignore the needs, and are then cajoled into meeting legal minimum requirements. This site especially has a vocal block of libertarian leaning self centered priviliged tech workers who see an affront in doing anything for anyone other than themselves, even if it is in their own best interest.
- Jiro 5y agoGenerally, if you're asking person X to spend money they don't want to spend, claiming that it's in their own best interest, it probably isn't.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y agoYou could say that about all of taxes.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoWhat is best interest is debatable, but we know for a fact that some people show no interested in survival of people around them - like drunk drivers. Or like management of Grenfell tower in UK was asked to address fire safety problems, they didn't want to spend the money and about 100 people burned alive. Also the building is gone. Or like that apartment block in US that collapsed recently. Or like management of Bhopals fertiliser plant, that failed due to lack of maintenance and produced positions gasses that killed thousands of people, ofcourse starting woth employees of the plant. The CEO ofcourse escaped to US and US is refusing to extradite him. In fact I don't know how to apply your advise to anything safety related, there are literally millions of examples of people saving a bit of money on safety and dying as a result and killing people around them.
- ikiris 5y agoHackernews: "Externalities happen to other people, now why are my gas prices so high?!"
- lhorie 5y ago> Test accessibility with keyboard One very simple step a dev can take is to just `tab` over their pages and check that important elements (links, buttons, etc) receive focus. Especially if they toggle something on the page via JS. If something doesn't, replace the div soup w/ a focusable element like `<a href="javascript:;"></a>` For those saying accessibility is hard, doing just this one thing can make a big difference.
- Benjammer 5y agoYou don't even really need to replace the divs, just add tabIndex="0" on the things that should be focusable/tab-able.
- MrJohz 4y agoThis is mostly true, but it's usually better/easier to use the semantic element for any particular use case. In this case, for example, to correctly mimic how the <a> tag works, you'll need to handle both click events and keyboard events (e.g. space for clicking), and even then you'll struggle to handle right-clicks, ctrl-clicks or middle clicks in a way that is truly cross-platform. The <a> tag, on the other hand, just does all that for you.
- ximm 5y agoBonus points: if you realize that you get annoyed from having to tab through the navigation every time, add a skip link at the beginning of the page.
- dawnerd 5y agoI've always wondered but never really investigated... do screen readers handle css-only drop downs well? We've always avoided it and instead used javascript to toggle aria attributes which seems very backwards.
- runarberg 5y agoI think it depends on the implantation. I think it is more important that your drop down is keyboard accessible. I usually expand my menus with ":focus-within" as well as ":hover" and make sure that one element which is always visible is also focusable. That way you can tab to it and the menu expands.
- cabalos 5y agoElement visibility should not be triggered via focus or hover. Visibility states should be triggered with a button click or enter key press.
- runarberg 5y agoIndeed, you should probably just use "<details>" and "<summary>" for drop downs today (works perfectly without any javascript and have accessibility built in). CSS only dropdowns were a hack for an era before these elements were widely supported.
- ConcernedCoder 5y ago> Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed. Not as far as I know, nobody I knew was hating on any disabled people, but laziness, procrastination, and the cost of accomodations was enough to prevent quite a few businesses from accomodating the disabled ( with ramps and such ) until they were legally forced to do it under penalty of law... And even today only businesses considered "public accommodations" are required to comply... that's it really not hate, just laziness.
- the_optimist 5y agoHow much of the nation’s wealth has been invested in this, and where has it not been invested? Make sure you count lawsuits, paperwork, planning, construction, maintenance, and enforcement. And try not to respond without pointing out something more wasteful, rather than something productive. Let’s pretend you took that money and invested it in advanced education for young black women in Chicago instead. What did we forgo?
- vangelis 5y agoThere's no guarantee it would be invented in that instead of a new jetski.
- the_optimist 5y agoThe reflexive, but non-engaged and and economically dishonest answer here is to avoid the question by comparing any investment to a write-off, this justifying anything. Nobody thinks like this looking forward, as it’s clearly nonsense. That’s why I proposed you not do this.
- vangelis 4y agoWhere's the incentive for business owners to invest in the latter instead of reinvesting the profits? I just don't see it.
- 5y ago
- tomohawk 5y agoThe ADA is enforced by civil lawsuits. You can make a lot of money going around finding "violations" and suing over them. In the heyday of compliance for restaurants, a fair number of iconic restaurants in our area were put out of business by these lawsuits because they were in old buildings where it was just not possible to make accommodations. No rooms for ramps. No way to put in elevators. You get the idea. This action may result in some benefits for those who need it, but the main beneficiaries will be law firms.
- Hnrobert42 5y agoIs that true? I thought ADA compliance is like building code compliance. It is only enforced during changes. I would guess a lot the restaurants failed because lots of restaurants fail.
- bluGill 5y agoRestaurants remodel all the time. Does replacing an old door trigger lots of other work?
- sokoloff 5y agoMy city has published a guide on this topic. > Americans with Disabilities Act > First, the ADA requires all places of public accommodation, including retail businesses, to remove barriers to access whenever it is readily achievable to do so.. > "Readily achievable" means easily accomplishable, and able to be done without much difficulty or expense. This is an ongoing obligation, and is required even if you are not performing any renovations. > In addition, if you are altering or renovating an existing building, the ADA also requires you to make the altered areas readily accessible to and usable by people with disabilities. The ADA also requires you provide an accessible route from the building entrance to the altered areas, so long as doing so does not result in disproportionate costs. > "Disproportionate costs" are defined as those costs exceeding 20% of the overall cost of the alterations. For example, if you are spending $50,000 on alterations, under the ADA you may have to spend up to an additional S10,000 providing an accessible route. https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/CDD/EconDev/InteriorAccess/interioraccess_accessability_overview.pdf https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/CDD/EconDev/Interi...
- fortylove 5y agoThanks for your perspective here. Surprised at the pushback as well, on HN of all places.
- ikiris 5y agoWhy are you surprised at the pushback?
- sixothree 5y agoYes. The ADA in the 1990s got huge push back from right wing America where it was widely and publicly derided.
- nfw2 5y agoIt is easy to make a basic web form, e-commerce site, or blog post accessible. But the web is largely becoming a space for arbitrarily-complex, fully-interactive applications. Today's web is full of products with: - complex information architecture, with nuanced relationships between nodes communicated by position, spacing, boundaries and other visual cues - real-time data updates that transform the document in arbitrarily complex ways - screens where nearly every square inch is actionable, and these actions transform the document in arbitrarily complex ways - controls that are not simply a button or text link, but regions full of structured content embedded within them. - screens that respond to inputs in real-time in arbitrary complex ways - rich graphics that eschew the traditional document model, with its established accessibility guidelines, altogether To make such an application accessible requires: 1.) auditing all the visual cues, writing supplementary text if necessary, and adding the ARIA properties to communicate these cues 2.) communicating all document transformation to the user, either by navigating focus to the new content, or communicated to the user some other way. In the case of real-time updates, this also can't obstruct the normal usage of the site. This is certainly possible at a small scale, but very hard to do consistently by an organization if engineers and designers on each product team don't have a solid understanding of how screen-readers work or the ARIA spec. It is also hard to have any quality control on this without having someone actually test every product on a screen reader. Unfortunately, few engineers (and even fewer designers) have this expertise. Many years ago, I did a 12-week, 70-hour-a-week web development bootcamp, and, of those 800+ hours, exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes were spent on web accessibility. To be honest, I doubt the instructors even knew anything on the subject. Sure, it would be easier to build an accessibility web by just simplifying product requirements. But I have had little-to-no success doing this as an IC engineer.
- pavlov 5y agoI agree with you. But we’ve had decades to get better at accessibility, and yet it’s practically mostly worse today than with desktop apps in 1999. A forcing function is needed. Those wheelchair ramps didn’t get built because architects and real estate developers thought it was fun and interesting.
- 5y ago