I have poor vision. This website uses a herd-to-read font and disables pinch-to-zoom (an essential feature) on my iPad.
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3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
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Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of skaters and kids on scooters and have become injured thanks to the those rubber stoppers. You can't rely on them if you're disabled, because they're not on every corner. I've also read that it's cheaper to give disabled people a full time minder than to run these programmes. Solutions that start with 'let's change the world' never, ever work. Let's fix screenreaders. And help the blind by analysing what;'s i…
Which "these programmes" are you referring to?
Jackhammering street concerns and installing rubber bits with a texture that said to help the blind.
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#73I have poor vision. This website uses a herd-to-read font and disables pinch-to-zoom (an essential feature) on my iPad.
This website is even difficult to read on a regular desktop browser (too wide, downvoted comments increasingly impossible to read causing eye strain). I recommend using your own content script with Chrome. This may not help on your iPad but on Android you can use Firefox with your own userscript. It's the only way I can tolerate it. It would probably take a competent someone a few hours to fix the readability issues…
joblessjunkie means the original article's site.
Pinch-to-zoom works fine on HackerNews on an iPad, and the HackerNews font is nothing unusual.
Regarding HN being too wide, why don't you narrow your browser window?
Personally, I like the fact the traditional web design in which HN adjusts the line to screen width rather than imposing a width.
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#74I have poor vision. This website uses a herd-to-read font and disables pinch-to-zoom (an essential feature) on my iPad.
posted by joblessjunkie... WHO ARE YOU KIDDING. A chick posts something on this useless site and it gets so many upvotes, oh awarness etc, am tired of all those hippies around.
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#75As a side note, designing well for disabilities often translates to better design as well. Those alternate text labels and better layout for screen readers can make your site easier for the googlebot to read. You can find navigation and flow issues. Buttons that are hard to click are harder for everyone to click, even if some can manage. Or those buttons are really hard for everyone on tablets to hit because they are…
This is a great, unfortunately under-appreciated point. In many ways it's similar to good responsive design – if you can't maintain the pretense that you can cram every control onto a screen, you're forced to actually think about what is most important to the person using your app.
(One bit of serendipity: sites which were designed to be accessible were ahead of the curve for touchscreens, too. Designers could fool themselves into thinking a 6px button was a good idea when they have a high-precision mouse but the first iPad made everyone appreciate how bad that assumption is)
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#76I'm really glad to see accessibility on hacker news this morning!
There was a talk at WWDC about improving accessibility and usability in web apps if anyone is interested in learning more: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/#516
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of skaters and kids on scooters and have become injured thanks to the those rubber stoppers. You can't rely on them if you're disabled, because they're not on every corner. I've also read that it's cheaper to give disabled people a full time minder than to run these programmes. Solutions that start with 'let's change the world' never, ever work. Let's fix screenreaders. And help the blind by analysing what;'s i…
Give a skater a wall, and they will manage to hurt themselves.
Walls are generally less of a surprise than a random, sometimes concrete coloured, surface.
Also keep in mind scooters (which I added in edit) are also affected - a lot of young kids in big cities scoot rather than walk and they get hurt too.
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#78Probably because those 3% are homogeneous, while the 9% decompose into lots and lots of categories, all with specific needs, and all much smaller than 9%.
Yes. Off the top of my head, I know of at least four different types of color blindness (from red-green all the way down to total monochromatic vision), total blindness, significant visual impairment (listed separately from blindness due to different accommodations), deafness, significant motor impairment making navigation difficult, and dyslexia (which there are ways of accommodating). Thinking about what it takes t…
Remember these people are cooperating with you. They are living with their disabilities full-time, and they might have found some remarkably clever ways to get along with it. I've seen blind people with iPhones (I have no idea), and a kid who used his wheelchair as a tractor to pull machinery around his parents' farm. You can work with these people, they're smart.
Whether you make your site fully screen-reader compatible is up to you, but enabling some simple hacks (e.g. custom stylesheets, browser zooming) really goes a long way. People are not homogenous anyway, so it's a good idea to not narrow down their path, impairment or not. Some people don't like to read as much, some are confused by complex looking graphics, some like animation while others are easily distracted. You need to provide different access paths anyways, at least in many of the more complex cases.
Personally I love reading large bunches of text, but I usually hate videos where I can't go at my own pace. I'd happily read transcripts if I could, but providing video only would lose you a visitor. Incidentally providing transcripts also helps with accessibility.
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#79IE9 isn't a disability? Colour me shocked Apologies in advance for the poor (attempt at) humour, I don't mean to trivialise a real issue, only to ridicule IE9 users. In all seriousness it's due to the complexity of catering for certain disabilities each of which require entirely different technical solutions, and some of which depending upon OS and various devices can be seamlessly provided for. I would say a better…
IMO we are seeing that form sells more than function. MAC and Win 8 are a prime suspect.
I am seeing UIs that look nice but are difficult to use for a fully able user, let alone a user with some kind of disability.
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#80I have poor vision. This website uses a herd-to-read font and disables pinch-to-zoom (an essential feature) on my iPad.
She did say "we".