Live data from Hacker News

HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

htmhell.dev

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean look I have to sympathise with Google here. They've no doubt had the entire combined wisdom of Google looking at this problem and clearly there is just no way for human beings to comprehend what the `Accept-Language` header does. /s because, you know.

It's absurd how they keep finding new ways to make this worse. They have ignored `Accept-Language: en` for a long time but used to at least have a link to switch to the english version. Then that link stopped appearing on search result pages and now it doesn't even consistently show up on the home page. Now it seems they don't even fully respect the account language wile logged in. WTF. While on vacation google decid…

My guess is it's a mixture of malice (I know this person said it doesn't want X, but maybe we can sell them X in this particular situation, so just go for it anyways) and pure simple incompetence and lack of communication in a large enough org

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#23
post #18

> The reversed attribute is used to reverse ordered lists ( ) in the opposite order. Holy shit that’s been a thing for ten years and I didn’t know about it??

How does this help accessibility, though? (Maybe I don't know enough about HTML. Is the usual way to produce a descending enumeration to write the elements in reverse order and then re-reverse them in CSS or so, which makes them be read wrong by screen readers?)

That's a good point. There's no obvious way to mark up a HTML list as being reversed in CSS alone, at least not without a bunch of Flexbox styles and stuff. So the likelihood that someone would use an unsemantic alternative for this is basically non existent.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#24

re: the autocomplete attribute. It would have been nice to include a brief explanation of all the ways this feature is likely to break what you expect. For example, recent versions of Chrome will autocomplete against a table of values across all domains for the given field "name" attribute, regardless of what you put into the autocomplete attribute [0]. I suppose this would be a fine decision if all form fields in al…

The way autocomplete works in browsers is absolutely infuriating. Because a bunch of misguided orgs went around disabling autocomplete on login fields, now browsers aggressively ignore attempts to disable it and there's no elegant way to turn it off when browsers are wrong i.e., when they're autofilling user login data into database credentials.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because of those tags? Or is it just because Google on its own has done a comprehensive job of indexing and incorrectly thought you wanted the French version?

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN. I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results. Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior. Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using r…

Hmm my google chrome seems to correctly handle everything in English. It must be a combination of setting my machine locale to English and probably on my Google account as well, no need for vpns.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#26

re: the autocomplete attribute. It would have been nice to include a brief explanation of all the ways this feature is likely to break what you expect. For example, recent versions of Chrome will autocomplete against a table of values across all domains for the given field "name" attribute, regardless of what you put into the autocomplete attribute [0]. I suppose this would be a fine decision if all form fields in al…

I too am incredibly salty from my past accessibility work. Knowing the HTML attributes is one thing, but applying them to your product in a predictable way is another. Folks talk about the importance of cross-browser testing, but willfully neglect cross-screenreader testing. The incentive for industry to meet the needs of these users just isn't where it should be. Too many stakeholders agree that meeting the needs of able users is good enough. Accessibility is just a checkbox for most organizations. A token gesture that "we care" when really it just means "we care enough until we are forced to care more".

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because of those tags? Or is it just because Google on its own has done a comprehensive job of indexing and incorrectly thought you wanted the French version?

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN. I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results. Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior. Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using r…

[deleted]

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because of those tags? Or is it just because Google on its own has done a comprehensive job of indexing and incorrectly thought you wanted the French version?

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN. I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results. Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior. Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using r…

You can add a "hl=en" parameter to the URL, and most Google sites should respect it.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN. I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results. Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior. Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using r…

I mean look I have to sympathise with Google here. They've no doubt had the entire combined wisdom of Google looking at this problem and clearly there is just no way for human beings to comprehend what the `Accept-Language` header does. /s because, you know.

Except, in non English speaking counties, the vast majority of people do not change the Accept-Language header (through various browser/OS mechanisms), and receive default results. But then experiments show that they are more likely to interact with pages when shown in the languages Google thinks you actually use.

If you go to myaccount.google.com/language , you can remove languages you don't actually speak, or turn off automatically adding languages altogether. It doesn't always work for everything, but it's a good signal.

I agree there should be a way to force this better, but there's a bunch of work being done on it.

You can add a hl=en parameter to the URL, and most Google apps will respect it.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#30

re: the autocomplete attribute. It would have been nice to include a brief explanation of all the ways this feature is likely to break what you expect. For example, recent versions of Chrome will autocomplete against a table of values across all domains for the given field "name" attribute, regardless of what you put into the autocomplete attribute [0]. I suppose this would be a fine decision if all form fields in al…

I too am incredibly salty from my past accessibility work. Knowing the HTML attributes is one thing, but applying them to your product in a predictable way is another. Folks talk about the importance of cross-browser testing, but willfully neglect cross-screenreader testing. The incentive for industry to meet the needs of these users just isn't where it should be. Too many stakeholders agree that meeting the needs of…

The issue is that 1-2% of users of a random service might use screen readers. As an industry we’ve agreed that it often makes sense to drop support for browsers with more market share. Every screen reader is going to have an order of magnitude smaller user base than the browsers we’ve decided to stop supporting.

“No one” is going to do meaningful cross-reader testing. The only reason “anyone” does any accessibility work at all is the law (and thank god for it).

Post reply on HN