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

fionatg.com

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

#101
Because "a disability" is extremely broad, and covers such things as back injuries, diabetic neuropathy, and mental illnesses. I would expect that percentage to come down considerably when factoring specific disabilities that actually impede browsing.

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

#102
post #49
post #6

I hate the font choice of this article.

I think its a love/hate thing with my site theme. I've had a lot of comments that it looks fantastic. I think I'll have to increase the font size at least.

Don't increase the font size (it doesn't help). Even when they're larger, certain characters (ie - SQL) are completely unreadable. Script is always a bad idea on the front-end.

Do your readers a favour and change your font!

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

#103

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…

It's not built-in but the Stylish extension does that.

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

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

A terrible example of relying on colour includes the braille at some Melbourne train stations[1]. It appears that someone directly translated the phrase "Press green button" rather than using left or right. [1] http://wongm.com/2014/06/asking-vision-impaired-to-push-gree...

And it's not just blind people who can't differentiate between red and green. A significant percentage of the population has red-green color blindness.

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

#106

> So why do we think it is perfectly acceptable to spend time ensuring that our websites work in IE9, but not that you can navigate them with a keyboard? Lack of empathy, basically. There's very little financial or technical incentive to supporting disabled users. People just don't give enough of a shit to help people who have a hard time using technology. Sadly it's going to take a strong push from an advocacy group…

I advised my political party (here in Uruguay) on a bill to mandate accesibility throughout government websites, and we submitted it to Parliament.

Sadly it "died", it wasn't deemed important enough to be voted on and so languishes in a drawer or cabinet somewhere.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not built-in but the Stylish extension does that.

greasemonkey can too, with the added benefit of being able to script the page as well.

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

#109

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.

The Original article seems to mis-quote browser marketshare. They have IE10 listed as 3% of the market and "Other" as 36%? And all the IE's combined for 19% market share? Everything I've seen (except the original article) list the IE's at a combined market share somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-70%., with IE8 still having a dominant 15-20%.

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

#110
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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 th…

Out of interest, did you do any user testing for this site? I've worked on sites that have required a legal accessibility audit and in my experience a lot of screen readers don't even know what ARIA is, let alone use it. Like users that stick with older browsers a number of users use old screen reading tools.
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