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I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

blind.guru

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Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#151

Post by dredmorbius »

Pete_D wrote: post #138
dredmorbius wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fundamental principle of the Web is that site-specific clients or apps shouldn't be necessary. That they are only underscores Google's massive blunder here. Yes, there've been CLI wrappers around web queries before. Until the past few years, these simply addressed search format, URI arguments, and namespace. They launched in the user's choice of browser, text or graphical. Surfraw is the classic, I've written a few…

> A fundamental principle of the Web is that site-specific clients or apps shouldn't be necessary. I think this ship, if it hasn't sailed already, is at least starting its engines and getting ready to leave the harbour. User agents and servers are increasingly trending towards an adversarial relationship, where the user doesn't want to do much of what the server is asking of it. This has been true from the first pop-…

Oh, I agree that the ship is now barely visible over the horizon.

That doesn't diminish the fact that the original intent was to have a common, freely-available mechanism for accessing, viewing, and presenting content.

(I'll probably be asked for citations. TBL has probably written on this, and Tim O'Reilly had an essay on his early response to the WWW as opposed to alternative, proprietary, systems, when O'Reilly & Associates were plotting their early course.)

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#152

Post by AmericanChopper »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #143
AmericanChopper wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s nothing like that at all. Those are opinions influenced by technical expertise and experience. User interfaces and design that people like is completely based on personal preferences and tastes. It’s more like the driving instructor telling the pupil that they are factually incorrect for liking Ford cars because of some technical inferiority the instructor believes they have over some other car. Your technical i…

I never said that technical expertise makes my experience more (or less) important. I'm saying that my technical expertise lets me understand my experience better, reason about it better, and communicate it better. I know concepts and vocabulary that a non-tech-savvy user doesn't, which makes it easier for me to pin-point sources of frustration. User interfaces are an acquired taste. A shiny-looking app built on newe…

You say:

> I never said that technical expertise makes my experience more (or less) important.

But then immediately dive into a long winded explanation of why your own personal opinions are superior. If you have some deeply academic reason for not likening something, but millions of user just absolutely love how shiny it is, then you can’t prove they’re wrong for doing so, nor that your opinion is in any way better or more valuable than theirs.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#154

Post by dredmorbius »

duskwuff wrote: post #140
dredmorbius wrote: post #112

There used to be a saying in a11y circles, "Google is a blind user".[1] Now Google are manifestly anti-blind-user. Shouldn't be anything a major ADA lawsuit couldn't fix. Meantime, DDG is actually pretty damned good. For console users: https://duckduckgo.com/lite ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/06-08-steven-web40/

Blind users do not, as a rule, use Lynx. This is a common misconception. The Lynx interface is, in fact, very poorly suited for visually impaired users, as it relies heavily on visual layout, color, and cursor positioning to convey information. The majority of blind users use standard desktop web browsers with screen reader addons like JAWS or VoiceOver.

The blind user in TFA might be surprised at your assertion.

Blind users typically rely on screen-readers, including tools such as emacsspeak (which relies on either Emac's built-in eww browser, w3m (of which I believe eww is based), lynx, etc.

The ability to rely on console-based tools with text-to-speech capability, and receiving typed input, is fairly widespread.

The requirement that interactive content be rendered directly to speech is key.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#155

Post by thom »

inciampati wrote: post #4

Another person notes that ddg is inferior. Maybe people get used to a certain way of searching with Google that doesn't translate to ddg. Haven't noticed a drop in quality myself and I think I might have been retrained to use different patterns and techniques in structuring my queries.

I use DuckDuckGo when I know what the first result is likely to be. If I'm actually _searching_ for something (i.e. the majority of the time) I add !g. I can feel myself flinch every time I submit a DuckDuckGo query. It's just much, much worse.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#156

Post by nonbirithm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #60
ppod wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mistake you are making is that you are trying to answer the question of what the average user wants by looking at what you want. Developers are not representative of users.

That's a cop-out. Being a developer and a long-time computer user biases me, but also gives me a more informed perspective on what's productive and ergonomic, and what's distracting and annoying. I can name the issues I see, instead of writing off the frustration as "this computer must have viruses" or "this is just how things have to be". Bloat because of inefficient design isn't delivering any value to regular peop…

This makes me wonder. If we could have all of the SPA and frontend framework overcomplication and the ability to make four asynchronous loading screens to load what could be rendered server side as an HTML table with a navbar instead - if we had all of that technological progress two decades ago, would we have seen what benefits it would give over minimalist design, if any?

Sometimes it feels like the web of yore was so simple to use and free of unnecessary bloat simply because that was as far as the technology had progressed at that point. React didn't exist and the browser was limited from a technical perspective so the best people could manage was some clever CSS hacks to cobble together something mildly attractive. It might have taken a while to render even those simple pages on computers of the time, so back then those pages might have hit a performance ceiling of some kind.

Maybe as more and more features get added to a piece of technology, there's some kind of default instinct that some people have to always fully exercise all of it even if it's not at all necessary. Simply because you can do more with it that you couldn't do years ago, there's some assumption that it's just better for some vague reason. It's easier to overcomplicate when everyone else is doing it also, so as to not get left behind.

Then everyone who doesn't have knowledge about web technologies in the like get used to it, and people's expectations change so this "new Web" becomes the new standard for them and start enjoying it in some Stockholm syndrome manner - or not, and the product managers mistakenly come to this conclusion from useless KPIs like "time spent on our website" which will obviously increase dramatically if it takes orders of magnitude more CPU cycles just to render the first few words of an article's headline.

I'm only speculating though.

Personally, as someone with a headless server running Docker, it pains me to no end I can't browse Docker Hub with elinks.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#157

Post by jld »

dredmorbius wrote: post #112

There used to be a saying in a11y circles, "Google is a blind user".[1] Now Google are manifestly anti-blind-user. Shouldn't be anything a major ADA lawsuit couldn't fix. Meantime, DDG is actually pretty damned good. For console users: https://duckduckgo.com/lite ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/06-08-steven-web40/

Is there a way to make DDG Lite chrome's default search engine?

Chrome seems to let me create non-default search engines, set the full DDG as the default, but not set lite as the default.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#158

Post by TeMPOraL »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #152
TeMPOraL wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said that technical expertise makes my experience more (or less) important. I'm saying that my technical expertise lets me understand my experience better, reason about it better, and communicate it better. I know concepts and vocabulary that a non-tech-savvy user doesn't, which makes it easier for me to pin-point sources of frustration. User interfaces are an acquired taste. A shiny-looking app built on newe…

You say: > I never said that technical expertise makes my experience more (or less) important. But then immediately dive into a long winded explanation of why your own personal opinions are superior. If you have some deeply academic reason for not likening something, but millions of user just absolutely love how shiny it is, then you can’t prove they’re wrong for doing so, nor that your opinion is in any way better o…

When I meet the user that prefers shiny over functional after working for a few hours with each, I'll change my mind. I haven't met that user yet.

What I've seen though is that users almost never have any say in the matter. Software is generally forced upon users - mandated by their employers, being the only way to access a particular service or a social network, etc. Users have little say in how the software works.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#159

Post by waynecochran »

duskwuff wrote: post #140
dredmorbius wrote: post #112

There used to be a saying in a11y circles, "Google is a blind user".[1] Now Google are manifestly anti-blind-user. Shouldn't be anything a major ADA lawsuit couldn't fix. Meantime, DDG is actually pretty damned good. For console users: https://duckduckgo.com/lite ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/06-08-steven-web40/

Blind users do not, as a rule, use Lynx. This is a common misconception. The Lynx interface is, in fact, very poorly suited for visually impaired users, as it relies heavily on visual layout, color, and cursor positioning to convey information. The majority of blind users use standard desktop web browsers with screen reader addons like JAWS or VoiceOver.

Are you saying the OP is lying about being blind or is a fake?

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#160

Post by tams »

ta0987 wrote: post #141
tams wrote: post #69

Startpage.com, a Google proxy, still works fine in lynx.

Unfortunately, they got bought: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

True, and it's a shame. But it might not matter that much in this accessibility context as Google is also an advertising company.
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