The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by ChrisSD » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #52

aidenn0 wrote: post #43

I'm still looking for "just use links". So many frontends I see use fancy onclicks to emulate links (including updating window.location). However they are either not links or are void links. This breaks all sorts of useful things (copy link location, open in new tab &c.).

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

Yes what will they break next? Scrolling?! It's almost as though web devs enjoy reimplementing the browser in javascript...

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

#82

Post by vinceguidry » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

taeric wrote: post #80

vinceguidry wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like absolute positioning but it's really hard to learn how to use fluently. New devs need to be educated on the concepts otherwise you get a total mess. Flex and grid are more intuitive so they're easier for juniors to train up on.

How is it hard to learn. Put someone in front of some graph paper and let them layout what they want the page to look like. Get someone a little more experienced to help them pick the points that can grow, and off you go. Not to say that they can't do better with flex and grid. But it was like our entire industry didn't even bother trying to learn with the first tools that our industry made.

I think the main difficulty is twofold. First there's the box model, which was different in IE than in the rest of the world for a long long time. Juniors that don't understand the difference will produce markup and styling that work in one browser but not the other. Absolute positioning is way more sensitive to the box model than other kinds of layout.

Second, unless you really want to insist on absolutely positioning everything, you're just going to need elements to flow occasionally. Most devs just aren't going to get a granular enough understanding of how absolute, relative, and fixed positioning work to where they can mix up the two to form fluid UIs.

They'll make one mistake and not realize it and before you know it behavior starts an inexorable slide in sanity, from which the only recovery is to scrap the entire page and start over. Been there done that.

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

#83

Post by jahewson » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #64

rpeden wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's such an extremely simple litmus test: if it breaks the back button of the browser, it's the wrong design. The closest thing to an exception being cases where one needs to be logged in to see a page, or when links are consciously invalidated for some other reason. And even then the website/webapp should still just signal this to the user without a bazillion redirects.

Not necessarily: I do not want to click back 30 times to get out of your slideshow and back to my Google results. Thank you.

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

#84

Post by gnicholas » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

Ironically, this article was posted on Medium, whose apps are notoriously inaccessible. Despite being a reading-focused app, it does not let you change the text size or spacing in any way. And on iOS, it also ignores the user's systemwide dynamic text setting.

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

#85

Post by EGreg » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

How about:

1) Just use text

2) Make all your graphics into an otf font

3) Use CSS to style everything including backgrounds

The ONLY place you may need graphics is user submitted content like profile photos.

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

#86

Post by sml156 » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:50 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #40

another-cuppa wrote: post #3

Posted on Medium with a massive pointless image at the top and page loaded asynchronously using JS.

When attempting to open the website I was greeted with: uMatrix has prevented the following page from loading: https://blog.logrocket.com/the-easiest-way-to-keep-your-web-apps-accessible-c2b57506cc2a I never blacklisted the website on uMatrix[0] myself so I checked the list of hosts files I'm using. It's apparently part of Peter Lowe’s Ad and Tracking Server List [1] [0] Obligatory "How do you know someone uses uMatr…

I usually read HN comments before reading the article, I read your comment and checked the other tab - Ha same thing for me

I did a quick Google search on them, It's kinda ironic

>LogRocket helps you understand problems affecting your users, so that you can get back to building great software.

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

#87

Post by ergothus » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #83

vanderZwan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such an extremely simple litmus test: if it breaks the back button of the browser, it's the wrong design. The closest thing to an exception being cases where one needs to be logged in to see a page, or when links are consciously invalidated for some other reason. And even then the website/webapp should still just signal this to the user without a bazillion redirects.

Not necessarily: I do not want to click back 30 times to get out of your slideshow and back to my Google results. Thank you.

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.

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

#88

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #83

vanderZwan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such an extremely simple litmus test: if it breaks the back button of the browser, it's the wrong design. The closest thing to an exception being cases where one needs to be logged in to see a page, or when links are consciously invalidated for some other reason. And even then the website/webapp should still just signal this to the user without a bazillion redirects.

Not necessarily: I do not want to click back 30 times to get out of your slideshow and back to my Google results. Thank you.

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by judge2020 » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #74

lmm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People use Medium because it's the easiest way to write some plain text and have what you wrote look decent in the browser. That's all it comes down to.

Really? I always figured that plain text looked pretty damn awesome in a browser. Example: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ I'm honestly curious how Medium is an improvement over that. Are you referring to the technical challenges of hosting content, perhaps?

Pretty much. Writing markdown with jekyll is too technical or not WYSIWYG enough for most people who don't want to touch a command line, and running your own ghost/wp/etc blog is too much for the average person to do without using ghost.org or another pay-per-month hosting service.

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

#90

Post by vanderZwan » Wed, Aug 15, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #83

vanderZwan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such an extremely simple litmus test: if it breaks the back button of the browser, it's the wrong design. The closest thing to an exception being cases where one needs to be logged in to see a page, or when links are consciously invalidated for some other reason. And even then the website/webapp should still just signal this to the user without a bazillion redirects.

Not necessarily: I do not want to click back 30 times to get out of your slideshow and back to my Google results. Thank you.

Your example is exactly why we have both History.pushState and History.replaceState[0]. The core question there is whether a new slide represents a new page or not. And in this case, I agree that it doesn't: it's the same page, just in a different state.

EDIT: If you mean one of those 20-image slideshows intentionally made to create fake click statistics, I agree that that's absolutely infuriating. But in that case ergothus' comment applies: the real problem is bad faith webdesign in that case.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History#Met...