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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?

#81

Post by hluska »

I don't agree that accessibility is a training issue and I certainly don't agree that it would take a month to become familiar with accessibility guidelines.

Rather, download a screen reader (for Windows I like Windows Eyes), learn to use it, shut off your monitor and spend one hour trying to use the web. That will give you all the context that you need. Once you're armed with this experience, make navigating through your site with your screen reader part of your regular QA process.

If you follow these steps you will:

- craft sites that are significantly easier for people with visual impairments to use.

- build sites that are easier for search engines to crawl.

- gain an understanding of WCAG that you can apply to everything you develop.

This method will not prevent usability nightmares like horrible font/icons, but it will get you most of the way to WCAG.

Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

#82

Post by sugarfactory »

joblessjunkie wrote: post #32

I have poor vision. This website uses a herd-to-read font and disables pinch-to-zoom (an essential feature) on my iPad.

I use this bookmarklet (taken from Stack Exchange [0]) on webpages that disable pinch-to-zoom to re-enable it on iOS devices. Some pages crash Safari after using it and zooming for unknown reasons.

    javascript:document.querySelector('meta[name=viewport]').setAttribute('content','width=200,initial-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=10.0,user-scalable=1');
[0]: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/28391/how-can-i-for...

Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

#83

Post by mikeash »

nailer wrote: post #72
mikeash wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which "these programmes" are you referring to?

Jackhammering street concerns and installing rubber bits with a texture that said to help the blind.

Isn't the cost essentially zero if you just install them when you're doing other work?

Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

#84

Post by Aardwolf »

leorocky wrote: post #44
joblessjunkie wrote: post #32

I 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…

Just select the text of a downvoted comment to have readable colors

Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

#85

Post by DanBC »

hengheng wrote: post #78
jerf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compat…

> 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.

Yes! It isn't as if "please don't use horrible fonts; please choose high contrast colours; please allow zooming" is some onerous difficult to follow arcane ruleset.

Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

#86

Post by claudius »

shutupalready wrote: post #73
leorocky wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm, I’d be happy with some max-width:50em or so on the actual text. Now if only Firefox had a built-in way to apply custom user stylesheets to websites…

Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

#87

Post by pascalo »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #15
Tomte wrote: post #2

Probably 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%.

...although you can do a damn good job addressing most of them with a few simple things: -Write good, semantic HTML, and use alt tags correctly -Don't overwrite browser defaults for scrolling, tabbing, etc (even if it's "hot design") -Don't rely purely on color to convey information -Use ARIA attributes where you can if you're building an application Some harder stuff that is really still worth it: -Send your media o…

Good you mention application and ARIA ... I've just come out of a project where the initial brief completely disregarded anything in terms of accessibility.

Full on angular app, no native forms or form elements (because they "look ugly" apparently).

Then the ultimate end client wants to go live but forgot to mention they had a mandatory accessibility audit.

So I've spent quite a bit of time working out how to make things work for screen readers using the ARIA specs. And it really worked quite well. My takeaway from this is to make sure everything is working with the keyboard correctly, spend some time thinking about tabindex, labels etc, and where I can push back requests to get rid of native browser elements.

Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

#88

Post by leorocky »

shutupalready wrote: post #73
leorocky wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Regarding HN being too wide, why don't you narrow your browser window?

Narrow my browser window because this one site makes it difficult to read? I could do that, or I could just use a content script and leave my browser at the width I prefer. I maximize my browser for distraction free reading.

Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

#89

Post by tempodox »

Indeed, the question in the title has long been overdue.

And, yes, bad — no, really BAD readability of web sites seems to be quite standard these days (including HN). And, on top of that, the worst offenders block the zooming functionality in mobile browsers. Mankind never had a shortage of torture specialists.

Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

#90

Post by [deleted] »

claudius wrote: post #86
shutupalready wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm, I’d be happy with some max-width:50em or so on the actual text. Now if only Firefox had a built-in way to apply custom user stylesheets to websites…

[deleted]
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