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The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

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Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#191

Post by perlgeek »

vorpalhex wrote: post #190
perlgeek wrote: post #189

> You use ALT text by adding the alt attribute with a value of the text equivalent of your image, like so: > https://example.com/image.png” alt=“developer in an office working feverishly to hit a deadline on a software project” /> Is this actually a good idea? This sounds like a typical "hero" or "teaser" image, to capture the reader's attention or interest. I don't think the alt tag does that in a comparable way, fo…

> Am I totally off base here? https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H37.html

From that link:

> An image on a Web site depicts the floor plan of a building. The image is an image map with each room an interactive map area. The alt text is "The building's floor plan. Select a room for more information about the purpose or content of the room." The instruction to "select a room" indicates that the image is interactive.

And how does it help any blind person to know that there is a building plan, but none of the contents of the building plan are described?

Or am I misunderstanding the purpose of the ALT text?

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#192

Post by [deleted] »

zlynx wrote: post #186
wild_preference wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS generated in the server still means it’s not pegging user CPU for 50ms like they said. I think these meandering rants are a tad silly.

I read it as using 50ms of CPU and it didn't say where. Using an extra 50 ms of server CPU happens all the time in my experience and no one seems to think this is a problem. At least not until they try to solve the C10K problem or survive the "Slashdot Effect." That's when people discover that static pages are king.

[deleted]

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#193

Post by protonfish »

perlgeek wrote: post #189

> You use ALT text by adding the alt attribute with a value of the text equivalent of your image, like so: > https://example.com/image.png” alt=“developer in an office working feverishly to hit a deadline on a software project” /> Is this actually a good idea? This sounds like a typical "hero" or "teaser" image, to capture the reader's attention or interest. I don't think the alt tag does that in a comparable way, fo…

Why not allow the visually impaired to experience the pointless and gratuitous images the rest of us have to endure?

Just kidding of course. I always put blank alt attributes on images that are used purely for decoration, and nobody has complained.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#195

Post by komali2 »

rpeden wrote: post #60
rayiner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's why that happens. Why on earth would you break one of the most foundational aspects of HTML that way?

Breaking it is completely unnecessary too, even with single page apps. It's not all that hard to build a React or Angular apps that use proper links along with the browser history API. Designed properly, the apps should be able to load their state and render correctly even when deep-linked to somewhere other than the app's top level. This isn't a new concern - I remember paying attention to this back in the old days…

As I recall when learning angular (2) and react (whatever 2016 version was), almost every tutorial on the subject of routers would just go "the easy route" that inevitably avoided using the browser history API.

I haven't checked in a while, I wonder if this situation improved? A lot of these frameworks market themselves as dead easy, but I always found a gap between the "dead easy start-up" documentation, and the documentation that essentially amounted to "read the source code."

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#196

Post by ergothus »

beat wrote: post #142
ergothus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the problem there is that they used a carousel in the first place. Were it content that justified clicking 30 times into it, it would also justify backing out of it 30 times.

The problem is that it might take a half-dozen clicks to realize it's not worth reading the other 24, then you need to click back a half-dozen times (worse if there are page reloads during that).

That's my point though - if it takes a half-dozen clicks to decide it's not worth it, then they weren't using a good format anyway. You likely did the last 5 clicks hoping things would be different after the click - the click itself was NOT a value add.

I'm not saying it isn't useful to bypass that to get back, but then you're literally asking the people that made the bad design decision in the first place to make the good one to let you out - and they likely won't, for the same reasons they gave you that UI in the first place.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#197

Post by komali2 »

ddebernardy wrote: post #179
rayiner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's why that happens. Why on earth would you break one of the most foundational aspects of HTML that way?

By the same token, why reinvent things like scrolling, break the back button, or throw font sizes so small at your readers that they need to zoom to read? (To say nothing about top and bottom bars that follow you around on your 13" laptop screen.) Humble suggestion: design fads. My own question would be whether this gets taught anywhere. Because if it does, a few someones need to get fired.

Most web devs I know are self taught. That includes the computer science majors scoring jobs at Google and Facebook - I haven't heard of anybody getting an "education" in web development, outside the bootcamps, and as a bootcamp attendee I recall us focusing on just learning how to program over anything else. Like, there wasn't a web design sprint.

Is this everyone else's experience? How has web design been taught lately?

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#198

Post by izacus »

perlgeek wrote: post #191
vorpalhex wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I totally off base here? https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H37.html

From that link: > An image on a Web site depicts the floor plan of a building. The image is an image map with each room an interactive map area. The alt text is "The building's floor plan. Select a room for more information about the purpose or content of the room." The instruction to "select a room" indicates that the image is interactive. And how does it help any blind person to know that there is a building plan,…

It's in the last sentence you pasted: > The instruction to "select a room" indicates that the image is interactive.

That assumption is that the rooms are selectable, so "tabbing" with a screen reader will select each and speak their Alt text.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#199

Post by komali2 »

astura wrote: post #159
ljm wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some of it is possibly just ignorance, too. For example, I've worked with a fair bit of code full of ` ` tags, where the click handler basically invoked the router and redirected to a new page. Seems to happen a lot in React/JSX code.

There is a special place in hell for whoever does this... I guess it might just bother me so much because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the web works.

I've done that before, when I was noobish and couldn't get the damn framework to work like I thought the internet worked.

There was this hellish twilight area of my learning web dev where I was transitioning from how i thought the internet worked (HTML pages with anchor tags) to how it actually worked in 2015, which is slapped together framework routers that I couldn't fenangle to work with the History API.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#200

Post by Izkata »

zlynx wrote: post #109
ralusek wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a setup where a css preprocessor didn't just generate the output once at build-time.

Oh, people can abuse anything. Maybe they want their CSS all in-line at the top of the dynamic HTML. So they run the preprocessor during page generation on the server. Use a separate CSS via link tag? Oh no, I heard that was slow. Set expires cache header for 1 day? Oh no, that makes testing hard for me and what if the CSS changes? Web developers sometimes use the dumbest reasons to avoid doing good things.

> So they run the preprocessor during page generation on the server.

Allow me to one-up with this: https://github.com/medialize/sass.js/

> API for emscripted libsass to run in the browser

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