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Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

matuzo.at

61–70 of 81 posts

Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

#61

An Interesting and entertaining article. The most interesting part to me (as someone with vision problems) was the WebAIM link [1]. The biggest problem I have is with the almost total blind adoption of low contrast (so often too low for me to even read) and sure enough the section about low contrast [2] says: "found on 86.3% of home pages. _This was the most commonly-detected accessibility issue_. My basic question t…

The easiest explanation is that the company hasn't been sued yet. Once a company gets sued and has to settle out of court, suddenly everyone will care about a11y.

Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't be surprised if they use it in search rankings, chances are they already do. And not being on Google effectively == dead. They already take into account page load speed (which discriminates against complex but useful & good web apps) and iirc also whether you have AMP.

Do a test and compare your own optimized site to an amp site. See if you can't beat it. Not that hard when you consider the 3rd party requests amp requires.

I never said amp is good or fast, just that (iirc, but 90% sure) Google penalizes you for not having amp.

Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

#63

Imho, 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…

He solution is simple: start disengaging with Goole and it's scores and move to other search engines (DuckDuckGo, Ecosia?), So these "optimization" will stop all together and the monopoly as well

Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do a test and compare your own optimized site to an amp site. See if you can't beat it. Not that hard when you consider the 3rd party requests amp requires.

I never said amp is good or fast, just that (iirc, but 90% sure) Google penalizes you for not having amp.

My experience is that AMP is necessary for google news etc. Haven't seen the outcome you speak of as compared to regular pages which are optimized.

Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

#66
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 increasin…

I'm not sure the argument in your post or the parents hold water - lighthouse scores aren't a "judge, jury, and executioner" sometimes dev tools are just dev tools, and nothing is perfect.

If you read my comment again, you'll see that I'm not claiming that they are "judge, jury, and executioner" at all. I'm saying that people perceive them to be, and act accordingly by optimizing for the score, not what the score is supposed to measure.

Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

#67

Imho, 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…

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

And yet, making it a target can still be a positive move.

The upside of having it be a score, is that makes it easier to have a big cultural push to deal with the issues covered in the score. So the measure isn't as good, but you have more people taking it seriously.

Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

#68
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one extra bit If it's the OS default, it's probably worthless. But if it isn't, I would imagine it could be quite unique, no? Presuming it's an RGB color, that's 16M possibilities. And there are multiple system colors, meaning even more chance you're a snowflake if you customized them. If you chose a random color on just 2 of them, that's probably enough to make you unique among the entire world. (But it is, of cou…

If you turn Javascript off, the only information the website can get is user agent and IP, which would narrow it down much less than using Javascript even just among the pool of non-javascript users. Keep in mind that there are a lot of services that load sites without Javascript enabled (scrapers, mail, preloading).

Pretty sure you can get some extra information through CSS media queries that only trigger a server hit when active (allowing you to add, say, screen size and color range to the fingerprint even without javascript).

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53838754/css-media-queri...

Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

#69
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't understand the article. The article doesn't contain a single loophole. Each of those features has legitimate use cases and it is impossible to detect whether they are illegitimate. Just look at the first example. It straight up denies access to the content and the reason why lighthouse accepts it is because hiding content just hides content. Usually when content is marked hidden the user is not supposed to…

Mostly; I can't think of a good reason for 1px sized text.

The only thing I can imagine are screen reader-only labels (although you're usually achieving this with a special "sr-only" or "visually-hidden" utility class that doesn't touch the font size)

Re: Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)

#70
post #13

First, let me start by saying that this is a good article and sheds light on one of the challenges of accessibility adoption. All of tools like lighthouse, axe-core etc. run a subset of tests that gives a false sense of security about accessibility. Similarly, tools like Accessibility Insights for Web has a fast-pass option, which does the same thing where it runs a subset of tests to catch the most common issues on…

Where I am, we use axe-core as part of our automated integration testing. Any change that regresses on accessibility (i.e. new severe a11y issue etc) is blocked from submission in the same way that it would be blocked from submission by causing tests to fail. I find this useful as it prevents "accessibility rot" where people think "Oh we'll sort out the aria stuff later". But yeah I agree that a human test is best. I…

I usually rephrase the same point as: "Automatic testing is able to tell you if a page is inaccessible. However, it cannot tell you if a page is accessible."
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