I write sites for a government, and I most certainly write code to standards, then to aria, and finally pick apart any IE weirdness. This has been quite the fight over the years, but if we want to be considered professionals and called engineers, then we follow standards, and when an employer says "I want you to ignore standards because we don't need it" you have to say no, I'll do this right, or you can find someone…
3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
221–230 of 250 posts
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#222With this one weird trick, you can make the web better for up to 20% of your visitors! Let me tell you for free! Please caption your videos, or make transcripts available. Did you get that? Please caption your videos, or make transcripts available. Yes: 20% of people over the age of 12 have some degree of hearing loss[1]. That's 6% more (two IE9 marketshares!) than the total of vision and mobility disabilities. And i…
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#223Well to be honest I can test my code in IE9 to see if it works. But I have no idea how a disabled person is experiencing my website, I do put all the "alt" attributes etc...but it's hard to imagine it.
Color Oracle is a cross-platform app for the same purpose, though I haven't used it much, yet: http://colororacle.org It seems rather good in my limited testing.
Colour Contrast Analyzer is a Windows/Mac app for testing whether text/background contrast is sufficient. This is a matter of both color and brightness - a color combination that looks fine for a normally-sighted user may he completely unreadable for others for a variety of reason. (Part of why everyone's suggesting designers avoid the gray-on-gray or light-gray-on-white design hipster crap.)
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#224Couple of things. First, these two groups may or may not be mutually exclusive. Catering for the former may take care of some of the latter too. Second, this question is actually very easy to answer. Catering to disabilities makes almost no money. Catering to IE9 gets the customers that forgot or don't know how to upgrade. That's a wash when it comes to advertising. Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not playing devil's adv…
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#225Are there stats on whether having a disability makes you more or less likely to make a purchase in a given product category? E.g. does having a disability correlate with not having a job, which correlates with having less disposable income, which correlates with making fewer purchases? Or does a disability correlate with going out less which might correlate with spending more time and money online?
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#226Show me a virtual machine that I can test with, that puts me in the shoes of a user w/ a disability, and I'll develop with accessibility in mind. But the inability to replicate the experience in full, I think , inhibits catering to that demographic.
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#227Earlier 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.
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#228Earlier 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…
"Solutions that start with 'let's change the world' never, ever work. Let's fix screenreaders. And help the blind by analysing what;'s in front of them, rather than changing it." It's not screenreaders that are the problem, its the quality of the content (in terms of structure, perceivability, operability, usability and robustness). In short, GIGO. The garbage input is where the fix is needed, not the tool that's att…
Now nearly all screenreaders can run JavaScript. The thousands of hours spent, for a 0.5% (grossly overestimating) solution, are completely and utterly wasted.
What specifically else is wrong? What wouldn't be solved better be actually fixing what screenreaders can't see, rather than trying to fix All Websites Ever Made?
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#229Earlier 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…
I can't imagine what "these programmes" you're referring to could be that could possibly be cheaper than providing full-time personal assistants to every visually impaired person in your area. The statement sounds pretty unlikely, and really demands a very reliable source, but you've provided none for support. Beyond that though, even if this were true, the added expense alone is not enough to justify treating people…
Jackhammering, buying tactile surfaces, installing tactile surfaces, having a safety inspector, stopping traffic. I read this from a source, but it's my wedding anniversary and I'd rather not go into too much effort finding it right now.
For your second comment: having full time assistants is a first class experience and saves money: having inconsistent tactile surfaces is a second class experience and does not.
You are advocating for disabled people to have a second class experience, which is shameful.
Re: 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?
#230I don't know that I agree that looking at this from a market share perspective is useful. If only 1% of your audience uses screen readers, should you use that fact to decide it's not worth supporting them?