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I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

blind.guru

221–230 of 333 posts

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am blind. I know or have known at least 20 other blind people sufficiently to know what their browsers are. None of them used Links. One of them used Edbrowse. The rest (including myself) are Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. I have at least one personal project (not public) which uses React heavily. Saying that Links is necessary is an outdated view, so much so that we have things like the accessibility object model [0]…

Experiences vary, I'll grant that. There's also a difference between those who acquire perceptive limitations (sight, hearing, also motor control, etc.) later in life, whether through accident, injury, illness, or degeneration, and those who have limitations from birth or a young age. Having to learn some (admittedly arcane) interface such as emacs late in life, with fewer capabilities and often declining cognitive c…

Google themselves are your example. Leaving aside some horrible accessibility keybindings in Docs, both Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best spreadsheet program I've used. It's not as powerful as Excel, but Excel is laggy for a variety of technical reasons that shouldn't exist, at least with NVDA. I can also read presentations in slides, and I might be able to make one. I've never tried; web or not, making slides just isn't something super feasible for a blind person if it's going to look any good.

I have gripes about Aria. It's definitely possible to abuse this stuff and end up with an inaccessible mess, but overall we have been trending toward a more accessible internet and things like the aforementioned do exist.

I've been blind since birth. I started on a device called the Braille 'N Speak 2000, which functioned very much like Emacs. I don't use Emacs because Emacspeak requires Linux desktop and adds a ton of extra complexity on top for very little gain. Linux dropped the ball big time on accessibility and audio in general, and never really recovered. Obviously this is opinionated, but I feel like you're implying that I lost my vision later in life and am forming my opinion around that perspective. You might additionally want to look into Jaws and NVDA. Learning those is about as bad as learning Emacs or etc; knowledge from when you were sighted doesn't transfer in the slightest and the interface is much more arcane than you probably imagine it to be.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#222
post #168
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to make DDG Lite chrome's default search engine? Chrome seems to let me create non-default search engines, set the full DDG as the default, but not set lite as the default.

The problem is that the search query does not go in the URL in the Lite version. That really sucks. It makes it useless in the browser history as well. In fact, because all the URLs are the same on each query, they're not even added as separate entries in the history.

They don't?

Search term(s) are the URL parameter:

   ?q=
Which does show in my history AFAICT.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#223
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am blind. I know or have known at least 20 other blind people sufficiently to know what their browsers are. None of them used Links. One of them used Edbrowse. The rest (including myself) are Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. I have at least one personal project (not public) which uses React heavily. Saying that Links is necessary is an outdated view, so much so that we have things like the accessibility object model [0]…

I suppose that you are unaware of the spelling difference. You literally can't see it. I'll separate the letters for you: They were discussing this: L Y N X You switched to this: L I N K S Both of those are text-based browsers. I agree that the one you were writing about would be terrible for blind users. The other one is better. Wikipedia links for those browsers: L Y N X is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(we…

I appreciate your assistance but I can check spelling; a simple "Did you know that it's Lynx" would have sufficed. Good to know there's two text-based browsers. I didn't, but I and everyone else I know will go on not using either.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am blind. I know or have known at least 20 other blind people sufficiently to know what their browsers are. None of them used Links. One of them used Edbrowse. The rest (including myself) are Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. I have at least one personal project (not public) which uses React heavily. Saying that Links is necessary is an outdated view, so much so that we have things like the accessibility object model [0]…

> The idea that JS is bad for screen readers--or indeed that we use text-based browsers--is a consistent misconception that is no longer true. To be perfectly blunt, I feel this misconception is pushed mainly by people with an "anti-javascript" agenda. If one can no longer argue that "supporting non-javascript clients is the only way to support accessibility", one is only left with "if you break support for non-javas…

> In fact, I'm pretty sure any competitive search engine these has to have a very complex crawler that is more than able to deal with javascript rendered pages.

Save the region-specific engines which likely lag behind, Google [0] and Bing [1] both support crawling javascript, and Bing is generally the search engine index of choice for all other search engines like Yahoo, DDG (at least for now, I occasionally get crawls from duckduckgobot), etc.

0: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/javascript-...

1: https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/october-2018/bingbot-Series...

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#225
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that "i18n" and "l10n" are about fifteen years old -- not exactly a trend any more (at least, not a new one).

They're a bit older than that – this credible report suggests 'i18n' was in use at DEC in 1985, with appearances in public online discussions by 1989, and in books by the early 1990s: http://www.i18nguy.com/origini18n.html

Amazing. I wouldn't have guessed it was that far back.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#226

There used to be a saying in a11y circles, "Google is a blind user".[1] Now Google are manifestly anti-blind-user. Shouldn't be anything a major ADA lawsuit couldn't fix. Meantime, DDG is actually pretty damned good. For console users: https://duckduckgo.com/lite ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/06-08-steven-web40/

How would I get into such accessibility circles?

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#227
> However, I have to admit, the search results of duckduckgo are by far inferior to what Google used to give.

I've switched to DuckDuckGo since I read its CEO's book "Super Thinking", and I'm not feeling that it's inferior. Sure, it doesn't have rich cards and other goodies, but I've come to realize that these are nice-to-have, but not essential. On the other hand, reducing the confirmation bias by getting out of the filter bubble is, I believe, essential.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#229
post #33

> However, being a blind person, I guess I have to accept that Google doesn't care anymore. Jumping from "this isn't working on my incredibly niche browser" to "Google don't care about blind people" is completely ridiculous.

Lynx is niche now? Low user count, yeah, but it’s a standards complaint browser.

According to some other comments, the problem might indeed be that it is not a browser compliant with the current HTML standard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21629207
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