Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
1–10 of 81 posts
Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
#2hahahahahahahahahaha
Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
#3I think this actually outlines the standard design process for most major web sites
Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
#4Stop giving people ideas. I can almost guarantee that there is someone out there getting ideas of things to add to their site from this post ;-)
Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
#5So disapointed this isn't about building a tall building at a super remote site on antarctica or something like that :(
Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
#6Imho, the problem with Lighthouse (and Pagespeed before it) isn't that they're not perfect, it's that they assign scores/grades.
When Google assigns a score to something, people understand it to mean highest score = best and start optimizing for the grade Google gives them, not for performance and user experience, which the grade is supposed to represent.
It would be more fruitful to list the issues and their severity but not add overall scores, because scores change the objective from fixing the problems to getting high scores. They occasionally also have the have bugs where they will punish something with a worse score that is actually an improvement in the real world, discouraging people from doing the right thing ("I want my site to load faster, but Google is buggy and will rank me down if I do").
Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
#7So disapointed this isn't about building a tall building at a super remote site on antarctica or something like that :(
I'm sure that you find it funny. Consider though those for whom accessibility is matter of great importance, because for those of us taxes, health and employment might depend on the diligence of some motherfucker who was not in the mood or just decided to copy/paste from Stack Overflow and just ruined someones experience on a rather important webpage.
Not to talk about Atlasian who had the habit of adding aria-hidden to Jira so that enterprises felt insentivized to purchase the accessibility plugin for their employees.
Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
#8Imho, the problem with Lighthouse (and Pagespeed before it) isn't that they're not perfect, it's that they assign scores/grades. When Google assigns a score to something, people understand it to mean highest score = best and start optimizing for the grade Google gives them, not for performance and user experience, which the grade is supposed to represent. It would be more fruitful to list the issues and their severit…
I mostly agree with you, although I think having a "score" can be really useful. It is only as useful as the underlying formula for calculating it, however.
I view it like I do code coverage: it doesn't mean your code is well tested just because it has 100% coverage, but if the number is going down with each commit then that does likely indicate that testing is not a priority and isn't happening with regularity. The real problem comes in when people (especially managers) assume there is qualitative information inherent in the score, when there is not, or that it is a quantitative measure of test quality, when it is not.
Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
#9Imho, the problem with Lighthouse (and Pagespeed before it) isn't that they're not perfect, it's that they assign scores/grades. When Google assigns a score to something, people understand it to mean highest score = best and start optimizing for the grade Google gives them, not for performance and user experience, which the grade is supposed to represent. It would be more fruitful to list the issues and their severit…
The problem, as I see it, is it more or less makes Google the arbiter of the internet, and when their purpose is to provide internet advertising then I see a conflict of interest. Especially when things like "supporting AMP" will likely impact your score.
While unfortunately many businesses have to care about Google SEO due to their complete monopoly status in the search field (one that is of course growing increasingly unhealthy), I'd prefer to not let Google be an ML-driven judge, jury and executioner when it comes to being visible on the net.
Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
#10Imho, the problem with Lighthouse (and Pagespeed before it) isn't that they're not perfect, it's that they assign scores/grades. When Google assigns a score to something, people understand it to mean highest score = best and start optimizing for the grade Google gives them, not for performance and user experience, which the grade is supposed to represent. It would be more fruitful to list the issues and their severit…
> They occasionally also have the have bugs where they will punish something with a worse score that is actually an improvement in the real world
If there's a bug and it lists an issue of "you got the aria roles here wrong" when they aren't, it really isn't any different than a less than 100 score with that issue listed underneath in terms of feeling pressure to fix it.
Completely automating accessibility testing isn't possible (the article calls this out), but it's still a net good for these tools to exist.