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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?

#201

Post by Isofarro »

mbillie1 wrote: post #12
eknkc wrote: post #6

I hate the font choice of this article.

I had the opposite reaction - both the font and the text color detracted enormously from my ability and desire to continue reading the article.

I am thankful you still had a choice to continue reading or not. I am thankful you had the choice to use a user-stylesheet to override both the font-family and the text colour into something more readable for you.

I am thankful that the ability to work around these shortcomings was in your control. (Chuck it through a readability bookmarklet, as an alternative to overriding CSS)

Spare a thought for people where the choice of whether or not to consume a piece of content is taken away from them because they are disabled, and they have no straightforward way of working around the barriers the website has placed before them.

These people don't have the choice you have, unfortunately. I wish they did.

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

#202

Post by Isofarro »

dep_b wrote: post #45

Because IE9 is the first browser by Microsoft that supports standards sort of reliable like more than 70% of the other browsers out in the wild. So we support it because doesn't take much effort to support it. The choice IE9 or better is because of the quality of that browser, not because we care a lot about the actual marketshare. Furthermore I always try to optimize the "dry" HTML and use semantic HTML not because…

Accessibility is more than just Perceivability - a characteristic robots would appreciate. Accessibility includes Operability and Usability, these are more human focused, and less robot focused principles.

What's the point of having a perceivable interface without it being usable or operable? See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885113 -- for accessibility tips that have no relevance to spiders/bots, but is fundamental to accessibility.

That's where this "robots are like blind/deaf people" argument falls down.

Accessibility is about removing barriers for humans, with human related disabilities. That making those changes also makes content more consumable by a spider or crawler is a positive side-effect. A great positive side-effect, but not the primary aim.

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

#203

Post by Isofarro »

dspeyer wrote: post #171
alistairSH wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a screen reader would pick up the down-voted comments as different from other comments. So, it's still broken from an accessibility standpoint.

Aural style sheets? Do they work?

I think Emacspeak was the only screen reader that supported even just a limited subset of aural styles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacspeak

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

#204

Post by lilsunnybee »

dllthomas wrote: post #193
Silhouette wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While your factual statements are true, and cyclists on sidewalks can certainly be a menace, I don't think it's really tenable to argue that cyclists should always be textbook road users unless you also ensure that everyone driving larger and motorised vehicles also plays by the rules. I live in a city known for having many cyclists, and there are always tensions between the local cycling population and the authoriti…

"The difference is that when something goes wrong, it's usually the cyclist who ends up injured or dead, not the motorist." In the case of riding on sidewalks where it is inappropriate, it's also frequently a pedestrian. "I don't tend to get angry at cyclists whose choices are illegal but obviously safer (as in, I've read the actual research and current law and/or public policy clearly doesn't promote the safest opti…

Most big cities to me seem a lot safer for bicyclists than a lot of smaller cities and communities. The traffic is often slower, and accustomed to watching out for bicycles and pedestrians. In less populated areas, particularly those that have clearly provided no thought for the safety of anyone not in an automobile, or the occasional rare pedestrian, drivers can be very careless and accidentally or even intentionally run down a bicyclist at lethal speed. Nighttime is especially dangerous, not least for greatly reduced visibility, but also many more drunk drivers on the road.

A bicyclists safety is much more threatened by a multi-thousand pound vehicle traveling at 40 or more mph with a distracted driver on a seemingly deserted stretch of road, then a pedestrians is by a 150-200 lb body traveling at around 10-15 mph. The reaction time is also much greater, allowing more opportunity to prevent a collision on the part of the oncoming vehicle.

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

#205

Post by andyroid »

pbz wrote: post #181
judk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN doesn't reflow/wrap text to window size on Android Chrome or Firefox. Only the pre-KitKat "Browser" works on HN.

Opera kept that feature, it works.

I just downloaded Opera for Android because of this, but no, it does not work as the old android browser did. Or do I need to adjust a setting for this somewhere?

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

#207

Post by dllthomas »

lilsunnybee wrote: post #204
dllthomas wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The difference is that when something goes wrong, it's usually the cyclist who ends up injured or dead, not the motorist." In the case of riding on sidewalks where it is inappropriate, it's also frequently a pedestrian. "I don't tend to get angry at cyclists whose choices are illegal but obviously safer (as in, I've read the actual research and current law and/or public policy clearly doesn't promote the safest opti…

Most big cities to me seem a lot safer for bicyclists than a lot of smaller cities and communities. The traffic is often slower, and accustomed to watching out for bicycles and pedestrians. In less populated areas, particularly those that have clearly provided no thought for the safety of anyone not in an automobile, or the occasional rare pedestrian, drivers can be very careless and accidentally or even intentionall…

If bicycles are rare, you are still much more likely to be seen and avoided if you are where cars expect a car to be, then if you are where cars expect nothing to be.

Of course, there are still situations where riding in the street - either in a bike lane or taking the lane - is dangerous or otherwise impractical; the question is whether riding on the sidewalk is an improvement, or whether you should be forgoing cycling (perhaps walking your bike).

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

#208

Post by Groxx »

vegardx wrote: post #122

Speaking as a colour-blind person (protanopia) I welcome this kind of thoughts with open arms. There's actually not much you have to do in order to make a website at least readable if you just have some basic concepts in mind when designing. The latest fad with soft pink and grey is really bad, almost unreadable for me. Luckily, I can usually just select the text and get blue/white contrast, which makes it more reada…

As a person without color-blindness, but is interested in making it easier for people with: there are a lot of different varieties of color blindness. Obviously you can (and usually should) do things like "use different brightnesses", but it seems to me that this is more solvable by e.g. an OS-level color filter. Something that allows you to compress colors into the range you can see.

Would that be even remotely useful? Are there major problems that I'm not seeing? Is that why I don't see OSes with features like that?

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

#209

Post by lilsunnybee »

nailer wrote: post #53
speg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens in the real world too, aka the sidewalk effect. The cutouts in the sidewalk for wheelchairs are now used by everyone else too for their: strollers, bikes, shopping carts, and anyone else who doesn't want to raise their foot an extra couple of inches.

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 with disabilities as second-class citizens, who have to be "minded" rather than allowed to freely navigate their own communities, "because it's a bit cheaper that way!"

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