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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

#291

Post by Piskvorrr »

mumblemumble wrote: post #167
jrockway wrote: post #7

I feel like many of the text-mode browsers have failed to keep up with changing web standards. We were all mad when IE was holding back the Internet, and I'm not sure we should give lynx and w3m a pass because they're geek tools. (Accessibility is an important concern, but web browsers running under a GUI system support screen readers.) https://www.brow.sh/ is a console-based browser that claims to support modern sta…

> We were all mad when IE was holding back the Internet As I recall it, we weren't mad about IE "holding back the Internet", we were mad about IE encouraging web designers to stick a bunch of dynamic clutter such as ActiveX controls into their webpages. Largely because they created this lock-in where sites only worked well on one browser. It turns out that JavaScript has been co-opted into being the new ActiveX, and…

Amen, amen! The ignominous "best viewed in" which we fought in the Second Browser War is creeping back in - except now it says "this hour's current Google Chrome" instead of "MSIE 6".

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

#292

Post by [deleted] »

superkuh wrote: post #35
jrockway wrote: post #7

I feel like many of the text-mode browsers have failed to keep up with changing web standards. We were all mad when IE was holding back the Internet, and I'm not sure we should give lynx and w3m a pass because they're geek tools. (Accessibility is an important concern, but web browsers running under a GUI system support screen readers.) https://www.brow.sh/ is a console-based browser that claims to support modern sta…

> brow.sh Does headless Firefox (what brow.sh is at it's core) even launch if there's no X11 available? Is it that headless?

[deleted]

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

#293

Post by Piskvorrr »

superkuh wrote: post #35
jrockway wrote: post #7

I feel like many of the text-mode browsers have failed to keep up with changing web standards. We were all mad when IE was holding back the Internet, and I'm not sure we should give lynx and w3m a pass because they're geek tools. (Accessibility is an important concern, but web browsers running under a GUI system support screen readers.) https://www.brow.sh/ is a console-based browser that claims to support modern sta…

> brow.sh Does headless Firefox (what brow.sh is at it's core) even launch if there's no X11 available? Is it that headless?

It does work without an external X11 all right (trick question, actually, there's an Xvfb underneath all the turtles - so X11 actually is required, even though it's all hidden inside the container ;))

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

#294

Post by mumblemumble »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #291
mumblemumble wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were all mad when IE was holding back the Internet As I recall it, we weren't mad about IE "holding back the Internet", we were mad about IE encouraging web designers to stick a bunch of dynamic clutter such as ActiveX controls into their webpages. Largely because they created this lock-in where sites only worked well on one browser. It turns out that JavaScript has been co-opted into being the new ActiveX, and…

Amen, amen! The ignominous "best viewed in" which we fought in the Second Browser War is creeping back in - except now it says "this hour's current Google Chrome" instead of "MSIE 6".

TBH, I think it's worse than it was with IE6. Targeting just IE was annoying, but, even so, 20 years ago, I could use BeOS as my primary desktop OS, and Net+ was a decent enough browser. Nowadays, the bar to successfully render a modern JavaScript-heavy website is so high that even Microsoft couldn't successfully maintain their own independent rendering engine, and is shifting over to Google's.

Anyone who has heard of the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish" should be at least a little bit uncomfortable with this situation. For example, it implies that any potential alternative OS needs to be able to compile Chromium (or, as what can only be seen as a second-class substitute nowadays, Gecko) before it can really be viable. If you're the kind of person who likes a free, open and competitive software landscape, that's a looming threat.

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

#295

Post by danShumway »

CAMLORN wrote: post #221
dredmorbius wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experiences vary, I'll grant that. There's also a difference between those who acquire perceptive limitations (sight, hearing, also motor control, etc.) later in life, whether through accident, injury, illness, or degeneration, and those who have limitations from birth or a young age. Having to learn some (admittedly arcane) interface such as emacs late in life, with fewer capabilities and often declining cognitive c…

Google themselves are your example. Leaving aside some horrible accessibility keybindings in Docs, both Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best spreadsheet program I've used. It's not as powerful as Excel, but Excel is laggy for a variety of technical reasons that shouldn't exist, at least with NVDA. I can also read presentations in slides, and I might be able to make one. I've neve…

> Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best spreadsheet program I've used.

This is off topic, and I don't want to distract from the current conversation, but speaking of sheets -- as a web developer, I often build SVG charts with d3, and I've been racking my brain lately trying to figure out how to make them more accessible to blind users beyond just linking to tables of data.

If you're using Sheets, are you also regularly consuming charts as well? Is there a common auditory shorthand for representing something like a pie chart?

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

#296

Post by neop1x »

juststeve wrote: post #273
asveikau wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because "javascript is bad" was common geek sentiment at the turn of the century. Now it is flamebait, or being caught up in the past [itself possibly a bit of a code for ageism]. Seeing this attitude change is one of the most interesting things I've seen in tech nerd circles in the last decade or so.

Can you elaborate on why it's funny? javascript (on it's own) has changed a lot in 20 years and it was originally designed in what, one week due to external time constraints? i think the criticisms are valid if $Your_favorite_language had ~4 days only for language design. From my recollection, there were no frameworks, no tooling, no linters, no jquery. it was a basically a primative language for browsers that had no…

JavaScript was made to add a bit of interactivity to webpages. Like "click the button to expand the text". What is it now? There are whole javascript frameworks being made. Maybe soon web(sites) won't even use HTML anymore but rather render custom UI to a canvas. Browsers are new operating systems running on top OS. Lots of performance wasted by this. Yes, there are webapps using it wisely, although JS is often misused on sites which could have been plain html or html+ajax. In many cases CPU is not even doing much but some webs take 2 seconds or more until I start seing some graphical output after entering URL. It takes a lot of time to render templates and construct DOM. Pretty sad.

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

#297

Post by olyjohn »

rige wrote: post #252
rosybox wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG's results are very bad still, and they will likely always be terrible. It's not hard to find a query that is objectively much worse than what Google has. DuckDuckGo will never be able to catch up to Google's search quality results. It doesn't have Google's data, Google relies on the search behavior of most of the people of the internet to guide its results along with its vast human and hardware resources to creat…

From my view, I think it must depend on your use case and common searches. I've been using DDG for years now without any major qualms on search results. For my purposes it finds what I need, and for the few cases where it doesn't (perhaps 1 out of 50 searches?) it's easy enough to just add on a !g to my query to use Google instead.

Every time I do the !g anymore, I never find Google has any better results. Usually, I just get 32,000,000 more results listed that are just auto-generated junk. Most of those don't even have the words in them that I searched for, so I don't understand how they come up.

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

#298

Post by mwcampbell »

mlang23 wrote: post #267
duskwuff wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are falling for a pretty common misunderstanding. While many blind people use text-to-speech in combination with a classical "screen reader", that is not the end of the story. There is another major technology called Braille. And in countries where there is a good social system, blind people actually own so-called Braille displays. That applies to me, for instance. I am pretty much a pure braille user. Sometimes,…

It belatedly occurred to me that blind people who primarily use braille may have a different perspective. I and most of the blind people I know are American, so we're accustomed to primarily using TTS. (I'm partially sighted, but I often use a screen reader for non-programming tasks.)

Still, it seems to me that accessing a GUI through a structured accessibility API would have advantages over accessing screen-oriented terminal programs, even for braille-only users. For example, there are all the quick navigation commands that JAWS introduced and most other GUI screen readers have copied. The screen reader is also free to reformat text in a way that's optimal for a braille display. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to read text in smoothly flowing paragraphs, uninterrupted by screen line breaks? I suppose that's not an issue if you exclusively use computer braille and the width of your console is a multiple of the length of your braille display.

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

#299

Post by patmcguire »

Avery3R wrote: post #132
patmcguire wrote: post #120

Did they also remove link wrapping with this? The HREF goes straight to the destination for me now on Chrome, where previously it went to some Google domain redirect. It's there on the first HTML load too, it's not a JS thing after the fact. Is there a different response for Lynx or are they formatting it in such a way that Lynx doesn't pick it up?

They're using the ping property of the element now, the only good thing to come out of this

Ah yeah that's definitely going to be different HTML on Lynx, then, since I bet they don't support that and Google's not missing out on tracking.

Yup - curling with Lynx user agent gets a targets of href="/url?q=" rather than href="" ping="tracking"

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

#300

Post by duskwuff »

JohnFen wrote: post #290
CAMLORN wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox and Chrome both have mature accessibility API implementations at this point. Edge is also at least okay. Internet Explorer has worked forever. You then couple those with a screen reader--most commonly Jaws or NVDA--and you get something that very much resembles Emacs or what have you: there's around 50 or 60 keystrokes I use on a regular basis. It's like a local client-server model (indeed documentation on th…

Ah, I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you meant. You're talking about screen reader compatibility only. I was interested in hearing about browsers that do what Lynx does, but are better. Unfortunately, the browsers you mention are graphical, and so are not Lynx replacements.

In that sense, there's links2 (http://links.twibright.com/). (While it supports graphical output, it's a text-mode browser at heart.)
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