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I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

blind.guru

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

#311

Post by _8j50 »

magicalist wrote: post #277
_8j50 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will bet good money this is due to your user-agent based content serving. I have similar issues with non-standard browsers I use. I don't know why google and google based sites (including recaptcha) are the only ones uaving this issue. It really is bad for the web to have this sort of user agent discrimination.

> It really is bad for the web to have this sort of user agent discrimination. Eh, if the issue really was (as figured out below) that lynx doesn't support divs inside anchor tags, that seems like the best possible solution if you aren't going to drop lynx support altogether. Even IE6 allows that. It just isn't worth trying to do progressive enhancement by tying everything into knots trying to keep the page strict ht…

Doesn't matter. Google can make a site that works great with all browsers. Not that you have no point but Google is the only company I struggle to get their products working without conforming to their assumptions about user-agents. Don't break things because only a fraction of users use or don't use a feature (includes JS).

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

#312

Post by boomlinde »

blauditore wrote: post #38
TeMPOraL wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the first (EDIT: third) of six. > If all that stuff works for everyone, why did we invent new stuff? Just because? Or perhaps it wasn't really as amazing as well all remember. To better track people and push ads. It's really mostly just it. Modern web has very little to do with providing value to the end-user; any utility that's provided is mostly a side effect, and/or a vector to lure people into situations…

Come on, you can't be serious about this. Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago. Yes, HTML of plain simple text-only pages is still pretty much the same, but most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors. Yes, companies presenting themselvses online profit of more capabilities. And yes, presenting ads is probably easier too. But if you think those…

The crux of the problem is that the page in this doesn't need to be sophisticated. It lists result links from top to bottom. Things afforded by JavaScript that may enhance the interface like autoloading the next page of results can be made progressively. In particular, "visually fancier" content doesn't necessarily happen at the expense of accessibility with limited browsers. That's the point of CSS.

That is really the fault of "modern web", that web pages are more "sophisticated" than they really need to be to present the information they contain in a visually pleasing and usable manner. There are so many round-about approaches to the problem that people don't concern themselves with the most straight forward one. I can't say that it's somehow massively easier to create a simple list of links with some excerpt in a way that it doesn't work on a 15 year old browser than it is to create one that doesn't. You really have to go out of your way to break something as simple and fundamental as linking.

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

#313

Post by zouhair »

ppod wrote: post #56
TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am serious. Yes, it's true it's easier than ever to create sophisticated websites. But it's also true that almost all this sophistication delivers negative value to users - it distracts them, slows them down, and forces them to keep buying faster hardware. It doesn't have to be like this - but it currently is . It's not even just a problem of explicit business incentives - the technical side of the industry has bee…

The mistake you are making is that you are trying to answer the question of what the average user wants by looking at what you want. Developers are not representative of users.

It's ironic that Google got "lucky" because of its minimalistic approach back in the day. Now, it's just a huge mess.

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

#314

Post by zouhair »

nonbirithm wrote: post #164
earenndil wrote: post #53

Try googler https://github.com/jarun/googler

googler no longer works either. I went to use it and got no results. Since they just scrape the results page a layout change is probably going to break everything. This issue was opened recently for it. https://github.com/jarun/googler/issues/306

It got updated and working again.

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

#315

Post by CAMLORN »

JohnFen wrote: post #290
CAMLORN wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox and Chrome both have mature accessibility API implementations at this point. Edge is also at least okay. Internet Explorer has worked forever. You then couple those with a screen reader--most commonly Jaws or NVDA--and you get something that very much resembles Emacs or what have you: there's around 50 or 60 keystrokes I use on a regular basis. It's like a local client-server model (indeed documentation on th…

Ah, I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you meant. You're talking about screen reader compatibility only. I was interested in hearing about browsers that do what Lynx does, but are better. Unfortunately, the browsers you mention are graphical, and so are not Lynx replacements.

From my perspective there is very little difference. The interface I get out of Firefox is exposed as if it were a text-based browser for lack of a better analogy (it's not quite the same, but the differences are subtle and not obvious at first glance). But I also get the ability to do all the non-text-based-browser things with that interface instead of being limited to what a text-based browser supports, and those things can be made accessible to me. But the really big advantage is that my skills at driving Firefox also work with Chrome, IE, and Edge, and any web view on the platform. Plus there is a large common subset that is shared with all the desktop apps as well.

I'm not the right person if you're looking for someone who shares enthusiasm for text-based browsers, in other words. In general I would like it if people would stop using blindness as a point in their arguments that they're necessary because it shows a massive misunderstanding of what the world of accessibility is like.

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

#316

Post by CAMLORN »

danShumway wrote: post #295
CAMLORN wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neve…

> Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best spreadsheet program I've used. This is off topic, and I don't want to distract from the current conversation, but speaking of sheets -- as a web developer, I often build SVG charts with d3, and I've been racking my brain lately trying to figure out how to make them more accessible to blind users beyond just linking to tables of data. If you'…

Sadly no. Making charts accessible is an unsolved problem. There have been some efforts for accessible graphing calculators that work more or less, but it's not trivial to make a generic one-size-fits-all solution.

For Sheets, the underlying stuff that runs it is quite complicated. They ended up doing something akin to an offscreen model with HTML to make it work because afaik they use a canvas of some sort to draw everything. In fact, unless you turn on braille mode, both products actually have a built-in screen reader that talks via aria live regions. That's terrible practice, but to their credit they got ahead of what the internet was providing for accessibility and didn't have a choice in that regard.

For something you can practically implement without a huge project, I suggest text descriptions of the data. If you want to do a bit better, make it an HTML table--that'll give some convenient navigability for free.

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

#317

Post by CAMLORN »

mlang23 wrote: post #267
duskwuff wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blind users do not, as a rule, use Lynx. This is a common misconception. The Lynx interface is, in fact, very poorly suited for visually impaired users, as it relies heavily on visual layout, color, and cursor positioning to convey information. The majority of blind users use standard desktop web browsers with screen reader addons like JAWS or VoiceOver.

You are falling for a pretty common misunderstanding. While many blind people use text-to-speech in combination with a classical "screen reader", that is not the end of the story. There is another major technology called Braille. And in countries where there is a good social system, blind people actually own so-called Braille displays. That applies to me, for instance. I am pretty much a pure braille user. Sometimes,…

I own a braille display and use the 93-volume trigonometry textbook from high school and the logic around it with respect to making sure the right chapter was in the classroom with me as an analogy when explaining CPU caches to people. In the long run I discovered that incredibly fast speech rates scale better than braille for most tasks outside educational settings, but if it works for you, by all means use it. And before someone inevitably makes the "but braille is important for literacy and brain development" point: it is, and I advocate learning it.

However, putting the burden on site developers to support text-based browsers for this use case is O(sites) but putting it on the screen reader developers is O(1). In other words only the latter scales. Braille isn't a very good argument for site authors supporting text-based browsers from any practical perspective, and in all honesty I think most of them would find this off-putting. It's already hard enough to get people to do accessibility; if we make the bar as high as that and go around claiming that it's necessary for accessibility, no one will ever bother.

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

#318

Post by CAMLORN »

mwcampbell wrote: post #298
mlang23 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are falling for a pretty common misunderstanding. While many blind people use text-to-speech in combination with a classical "screen reader", that is not the end of the story. There is another major technology called Braille. And in countries where there is a good social system, blind people actually own so-called Braille displays. That applies to me, for instance. I am pretty much a pure braille user. Sometimes,…

It belatedly occurred to me that blind people who primarily use braille may have a different perspective. I and most of the blind people I know are American, so we're accustomed to primarily using TTS. (I'm partially sighted, but I often use a screen reader for non-programming tasks.) Still, it seems to me that accessing a GUI through a structured accessibility API would have advantages over accessing screen-oriented…

Sadly the screen readers do actually do a not-so-good job of this, but I think that may in practice be more a function of poor UI for switching indicators on and off. You get 80 cells at most, and even the most conservatively unambiguous abbreviations for controls are going to use 2-3 letters of that. Hit a line with a few links and half your display is gone. I'm not enough of a braille user to know how to go about fixing this for sure, but there is definitely an inefficiency. Ending up in a "but my favorite text-based browser is more efficient" position because it turns a bunch of this off, or because it's configurable in a way your favorite screen reader isn't, or etc is something I can see happening, but nonetheless the real issue there is that screen readers need to be fixed, not that we should go ask all the sighted people to support Lynx.

NVDA's flow for deciding which formatting you care about is to tab through a list of 30 checkboxes. They have hotkeys when the dialog is open but it's still less than ideal if, as I suspect, braille users need to change them more often. And there is also a potential education problem around teaching braille users that the way they get more efficiency is to change them around all the time.

My solution in the world of infinite resources would be to make the cells 5 or 6 dots high so that you can put the formatting in line with the characters it's for. That's something I thought would be useful for a long time. But sadly we live in the world where good braille displays will forever be expensive and thus doubling the price isn't doable.

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

#319

Post by CAMLORN »

anonygler wrote: post #265
dredmorbius wrote: post #112

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/

LOL. Do you know how goddamn strict Google is, internally, regarding a11y/i18n/l10n? The idea that your precious text browser == blind people is wildly presumptuous. Don’t use people with disabilities as your human shield.

Strict or no, Google actually fails at accessibility a lot. The basically broken unergonomic keybindings in docs for starters and the entire fiasco that is Android come to mind immediately. For a really "fun" fail that's recent, Youtube recommendations are now a live region. This means that if you leave that tab focused, your screen reader just starts reading things while you're trying to play music and are across the room and can't stop it. That seems like a minor example except the whole point of Youtube is hearing things so that's kind of a big ball for someone to drop, thinking that live regions are a good plan. Things have improved some (I no longer hate the GCP console) but my point is that strict about accessibility doesn't mean good at accessibility by any means, and Google has a deservedly bad reputation in blindness circles that they earned over a very long time.
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