So somehow along my career I fell into accessibility dev for a while. Funny enough it was one of the most lucrative dev jobs I did and there was always plenty of work. It is easily outsourced to a remote developer because all you really need is a browser and a screen reader. In my opinion there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility, it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags so that the readers can pick them up and actively describe the page. No I am not saying that this provides a great experience for the blind but it at least helps them to be able to get around the site.
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.
> it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags
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.
These scanners exist, and they can serve a dual purpose; scan the web for websites to sue. And yes this is happening.
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.
IF google would make it part of their rankings it doesn't matter if you could be sued or not - you will make sure you are accessible to avoid being not found.
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.
You'd be surprised. In Florida, there have been cases which have set precedent as websites being similar to libraries, which would mean the ADA applies to purely digital places. The problem is that the ADA has never set explicit rules for website accessibility.
It's also a great way to persuade managers. Actually, a lot of the time you can just tell them you're doing SEO because nowadays they're fundamentally the same. Almost everything you do for accessibility has a positive impact on SEO.
I did accessibility dev in the mid 2000s and hand-crafted accessible html (or stripped down templates) was - at that point - easily the number 1 search result for a relevant query.
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.
It's the argument I made yesterday in a related thread: if the screen reader can't read it, the machine can't read it. Any machine, whether it's the Turing machine that's trying to make heads or tails of your website so it can read the text to a user, or the actual machine running in some Google data center somewhere. Or the machine running your script to make life a bit less of a series of button clicks.
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.
I would be surprised if Google didn't know a given customer was disabled and serve up accessible results. Whether that is something an engineer deliberately coded or whether it was an algorithm that learned that a given cluster of users exhibits a strong preference for accessible sites.
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.
>Note the distinction between accessibility and mobile--mobile was market-driven
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.
You know, I really think this would work. If Google penalised non-accessible sites and provided clear guidance on how to make sites accessible - companies and devs would take notice, and make the changes needed.
In a way it's a bit frightening that Google have that power, but it does have the opportunity to be used for good.
Honestly, if accessibility like this was one of the higher scoring mechanisms for SEO in web sites, not only would screen readers work better, but any kind of automated parsing would be orders of degrees easier.
I work in a big IT company and often times internal tools are not very accessible. Sometimes when I talk to their respective maintainers, they are willing to help me, but they don't know what is accessibility and what is screenreader. Is there a good document on how to make web sites accessible that I can show them?
Consider installing a screenreader and the Lynx web browser so you can demonstrate what it’s like to access internal apps/websites with those tools. It might help to record your experience so people can watch the demo at their convenience.
You're absolutely right. Aside from a few stubborn hold-outs, the blind people I know stopped browsing with Lynx, or Links or w3m, in the early 2000s at the latest.
I have no experience at all with screen readers. Is there a modern FOSS screen reader that would help give an idea of what a visually impaired user would realistically experience?
There's also the Orca screen reader for GNOME. And I believe TalkBack for Android and ChromeVox for Chrome OS are both open source.
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.
We had a "professionalism" class in my CS undergrad program. A day using the web with a screen reader would do wonders, I think, for awareness of the issue.
I'm extending a standing offer to come in and give a guest lecture on accessibility, focusing on blind and low-vision users, for any university or high school in the Seattle metro area, free of charge. I've done this a few times already. My presentation would have a mix of concepts, demos (both good and bad), and practical advice. My email is in my profile if anyone is interested.
Have you done this or could you do this as a video or audio that’s posted online and available to anyone? That’d help thousands of people.
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).
Google have a good course on web accessibility which includes doing a little basic coding, looking at ARIA specs and such. I'll dig out the link when I'm back later.
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.
I guess 99.9% are. However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza or buy your weekly load of groceries with a CLI tool :-)
If you want to interact with the rest of the world, you will likely need to use the web...
(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.)
> In my opinion there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility, it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags so that the readers can pick them up and actively describe the page.
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.
A curious thing is that lots of accessibility improvements tend to be good for all users. Getting rid of crazy Javascript things which screen readers can’t understand makes it less likely that your website is buggy and fails for some regular users. Using simpler HTML (ie with actual links and forms) decreases the chance that it fails in some of the weird browser setups that some people will have (eg old phones or computers or weird devices like smart TVs or kindles).
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.
A counter to that analogy is that where/when ramp access is needed and how one should be built in order for it to be usable is defined by building codes and the concept is well understood. Without what clear definition or a method to get a website's accessibility "certified" makes it seem like allowing litigation is not going to be produce meaningful results and could be easily abused.
This could easily be solved by requiring that the disabled person first contact the company and explain how the site is not accessible and if the company refuses to provide a solution then you can sue. The idea being that it never gets to the legal part because the company knows it is much cheaper to fix their website.
Perhaps rather than object to the court's decision it would be wiser to put energy towards updating the ADA to include standards for electronic access.
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. ;-)
Yea all the work I did was accessibility after the fact. For most cases it is just annotating what is already there. Sometimes it requires restructuring the way the page flows. It would be slightly more efficient to design for accessibility up front but it is fairly easy to bolt on after the fact.
I made $250 an hour, I could do a small website in 2 hours. I had more people beating down my door than I could service and I found the work to be mind numbing, because I like to write code and create things so I stopped doing it.
If, for example, the hourly rate is high but the hours required for a typical mom & pop site are low.
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.
I've also done a lot of accessibility work. For people looking to get into it, another crucial thing is using "Semantic HTML". If every button is a <button> tag and every link is an <a> and every form element has a corresponding <form> tag (even for AJAX), then you save about 80% of your accessibility work up front (no, this isn't an exaggeration).
> there really is no reason for even mom and pop sites to not provide even a base level of accessibility
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.
The United States has already decided that businesses in general (ie. brick & mortar stores) do not have the prerogative to make their content accessible or inaccessible to whomever they see fit. Including websites makes perfect sense.
Only 3% of the US is visually impaired, and often poorer than average due to disability, so for the vast majority of individual businesses, ignoring them would be less than a rounding error in revenue, and therefore warrant no consideration of accessibility. But the point of a society is to decide collectively upon certain moral imperatives that are deemed so fundamental to our collective identity as to take precedence over Randian self-interest, righteous indignation about "muh freedumb" and "don't tread on me" notwithstanding. One of those moral imperatives in the US is the protection of the rights of vulnerable minority classes so that we don't become a caste-based society where the circumstances of your birth (or unfortunate mishap) can indelibly decide your fate by limiting your access to society. This is actually MORE meritocratic than the alternative, and so I think, upon careful consideration, you may find that it dovetails nicely with even extreme Libertarianism.
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.