Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

http://lightgetsin.dreamwidth.org/312472.html

by ColinWright • 15 years ago

154 136 15 years ago

lightgetsin.dreamwidth.org

"# Google (for the search engine) – Google Instant crashes Jaws, and the current “solution” is to have a link to turn Instant off. Except it only works for a single pageview at a time, ARRRRGH)."

How is this Google and not Jaws fault?

CJefferson2• 15 years ago

Most people would consider it Google's fault if their main page crashed Internet Explorer, even though it would technically be IE's fault. The internet is full of compromises.

Also in this case, even if Google Instant wasn't crashing Jaws, Google Instant plays havoc with screen readers (yes, I have experience of this), and as the article says, Google haven't provided a global off option, which would be really useful.

All most screen-readers want is a really basic HTML interface, preferably no AJAX at all. Even if it is slow and needs to re-load a lot, that is still preferable to no access.

prodigal_erik• 15 years ago

> basic HTML interface, preferably no AJAX at all

This mode is step one, just basic competence in authoring. If your content isn't available in a self-describing form at a stable URL (regardless of any presentation you may layer on top of that later), you are building a lowly client/server app that leeches off the Web rather than contributing to it.

jquery4• 15 years ago

Most people would consider it Internet Explorer's fault if it crashed on the majority of webpages.

comex• 15 years ago

What's wrong with [gear icon] -> "Search settings", select "Do not use Google Instant"? I accidentally kept Google Instant off for months by selecting that option.

lini• 15 years ago

We've been using NVDA (http://www.nvda-project.org/) for a while now and it works (for our screen reader needs) better than JAWS. Plus it's free and open source.

jquery4• 15 years ago

Interesting, I may begin contributing to that. I strongly believe this a problem to be solved by technology, not heavy-handed legislation that will add billions of dollars of costs to web development and innovation.

skermes• 15 years ago

The same way that it's your fault if your new building doesn't provide adequate wheelchair access, not the wheelchair's fault for not being able to climb stairs.

masklinn2• 15 years ago

> How is this Google and not Jaws fault?

Not making it easy to disable is definitely google's fault.

mathattack2• 15 years ago

Interesting. Is this a civil rights issue or a libertarian issue? The libertarian in me says, "let the restaurants that don't comply lose their business". But then I think, would I feel the same about businesses (and government agencies!) that disallowed blacks/jews/gays/etc? I lean to the latter, accepting that changing everyone will take time.

ugh6• 15 years ago

What business is there to lose?

For example: No restaurant will go bankrupt or even perceptibly lose money because blind people can’t read the menu on their website. There are too few of them.

Also: Getting accessibility right would be costly and complicated for those restaurants. The vast majority of restaurant owners knows nothing about accessibility in the web, they would have to hire someone who does.

Creating a successful product means more often than not picking the commonly used stuff and leaving everything else out. The same dynamic is at play here, the only difference is that the affected people have no choice.

The incentives are set up in a way to favor inaccessible websites. I don’t see how the market can solve this problem.

GiraffeNecktie• 15 years ago

" Getting accessibility right would be costly and complicated" What's costly and complicated about plain old HTML?

MaysonL• 15 years ago

Well, if they get a hundred complaints from potential or former customers saying they won't eat there until it's fixed, something may happen. Some of these problems are only soluble by mass, organized action. Suppose there were a blind guy standing outside your restaurant, handing patrons informative pamphlets? How long would it take for a few infuriated regulars telling him they wouldn't be back till the problem was fixed to get the owner's attention to the problem? Just sayin': squeaky wheels get greased.

Mz11• 15 years ago

For example: No restaurant will go bankrupt or even perceptibly lose money because blind people can’t read the menu on their website. There are too few of them.

Old people often have money. They also tend to have eyesight issues and other physical limitations. At the moment, old people are underrepresented online. Give it a few years and that won't likely remain true. At some point, making it easier for people with eyesight issues to access your site may become a much bigger issue. Some businesses may not realize it is impacting them, but I strongly suspect it will seriously begin to impact them in the not too distant future.

lizzard• 15 years ago

Therefore, it would be a good thing to educate more web developers and the public in general about what it takes to make sites more accessible.

Mz11• 15 years ago

I'm handicapped (different issue). I spend a LOT of time online and do a lot via internet. For someone who has physical limitations, being able to do things online is a godsend. My life would basically not be manageable without it. So I think if you have a physical limitation of a sort where the web is basically saying "fuck you and the horse you road in on", I imagine that's a real serious problem. I imagine it's about like being invisibly restricted to the Dark Ages while everyone around you enjoys modern life. I would probably be postal rather quickly.

jt2190• 15 years ago

Having done A LOT of accessibility work I've come to the conclusion that it's extremely difficult to achieve universal accessibility. At first it seems like a it's all about alt tags, but those don't help users with poor reading comprehension, for example. (Dyslexics, some deaf.)

Lately I've been wondering if a better approach would be to provide an API to functionality, and let the disabled or their advocates build interfaces for themselves. That way they'd get exactly what they need. Mouse-free versions, high-contrast versions, simplified text versions... All could be built ane everyone would be happy. Companies could even support these efforts with open source or donations or training.

What do you think? Could this work in practice?

tzs• 15 years ago

The problem with the libertarian view that businesses that purposefully exclude some customers will lose business, and so eventually disappear from the market, is that it only actually works that way if the businesses exclude a large customer base, and there aren't compensating factors to make up for the loss.

That's why economic forces didn't do much to open up things for blacks in the south between the Civil War and the era of Federal civil rights law. If you have a "No Coloreds" policy, and the store down the road does not then yes, they'll get the black business you are giving up--but they are giving up to you the business of people who do not want to shop around black people. The latter is worth more to the bottom line than the former, so you'll actually likely come out ahead economically with a "No Coloreds" sign hanging out in front of your shop.

Then that business down the road decides they'd rather have half of the whites-who-don't-want-to-shop-around-blacks business rather than all of the black business, and out comes the "Whites Only" sign on their store. Yes, they have less total customers after the change, but the white customers are wealthier than the black customers and that makes up for the difference in quantity.

Now it gets interesting. The mathematics of this kind of discrimination turn out to be the same as the mathematics of a boycott of a small country by the rest of the world. (I don't remember where I saw this--it might have been in Posner's "Economic Analysis of Law"). Unless the small country is completely self-sufficient, it loses badly. The net result is the discrimination keeps the blacks poor, and so they don't as a group rise to the point where the stores gain by integrating.

Humans in small groups of approximately equal status and means where everyone knows everyone else simply do not behave the same as humans in very large groups of widely varying status and means where people only know a small part of the group. Libertarianism probably works great in the former case, but not in the latter.

nirvana2• 15 years ago

Actually, the economics didn't work out to favor discrimination. The change was not as slow as many people liked, of course, but the change was there. Where discrimination was really entrenched and difficult to change was in government. It was racist government policies that really kept segments of the population down, and in fact, many of those racist policies still exist today. For instance, the primary motivators of the anti-drug and anti-gun laws were racist. "Saturday night specials" were regulated because they were popular among poor blacks for self defense. The sawed off shotgun, which is actually safer (because the shorter barrel means wider shot spread and makes the firearm less lethal) ware popular among italians who wanted protection from the mob, so the mob leaned on white politicians and got them banned, good for the mob, and served white political ambitions, etc.

Where there has been no supply (the small country example) blacks, for instance, often would band together and form businesses that served their community. This was inhibited by government regulations that would often deny them the "license" needed to operate that business... but it was not economics that kept those businesses from forming, it was regulation. (And where there wasn't regulation, the businesses would form.)

ataggart2• 15 years ago

>That's why economic forces didn't do much to open up things for blacks in the south between the Civil War and the era of Federal civil rights law.

Perhaps, though the fact that states felt the need to enact Jim Crow laws lends some doubt to that claim.

mathattack2• 15 years ago

I hear you and agree very much. Gladwell had an interesting article posted here recently about the racism of the Red Sox owner.

The challenge is what to do about it? It would be VERY hard to regulate since the internet is so dispersed.

Could a non-profit offer to help?

tehwalrus• 15 years ago

do you have a source or reference for this effect? I'd love to be able to reference it, but this HN post might be stretching the definition of a reference...

Thanks, great point! :)

priggy2• 15 years ago

Do you think there is a similar explanation as to why Scotland's economic fortunes haven't actually improved over the last 304 years despite being in a union with England which promised and still promises that there is economic benefit for Scotland to be in a union with England. Is it possible that they are deliberately or through their own ignorance/incompetence be keeping Scotland poor.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

blacks/jews/gays/etc is a different issue entirely. You don't need to do anything special to make your service accessible to them, except perhaps in the case of gay people trying to use your dating site with a 100% straight userbase.

ars6• 15 years ago

That's not actually completely true. Hotels with electronic locks are a major problem for Jews on the Sabbath.

Luckily most can also be used with a mechanical key.

Electric automatic doors are also a problem for hotels and hospitals (most other places would not be visited on the Sabbath anyway).

jquery4• 15 years ago

The software engineer in me says this can be solved by more intelligent screen-reading technology.

mikeash• 15 years ago

I strongly doubt that the handicapped are a large enough group for most businesses to notice the loss of their custom from not being accessible, or the gain from embracing accessibility. If that's true, then the question is whether one wants the handicapped to have access to these places, and what measures are worth doing.

vacri3• 15 years ago

The difference in your example is effort - it costs to increase accessibility for people with disabilities, whether it's spending more time on web development or installing a ramp at a building. It's less cost not to do that.

Not allowing blacks/jews/gays is about admittance policies that don't cost, unless they require some sort of infrastructure to be created for them.

It would be good to hear from a UK web designer as to opportunity cost, as accessibility is a legal requirement for .uk sites, if I recall correctly. I imagine if everyone's doing it, it's cheaper from the outset as the pool of web talent is trained in the issue.

sern2• 15 years ago

This is a civil rights issue, as evidenced by existing case law in Australia: in 2000, the Sydney Olympics organisers were fined $20,000 for discrimination on the basis that their website was not accessible to the visually impaired.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/31.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HREOCA/2000/49.html

patio114• 15 years ago

I get one of these emails every once in a while.

I understand that X Does Not Support Screenreaders is an imposition for folks who have issues with standard browsers, particularly because there are an awful lots of Xes. At the same time, X Does Not Support Screenreaders Because Of Y, and there are an awful lot of Ys, too.

You might think that scanning a menu and formatting a menu in HTML are approximately equally as easy. Not so much, no. There is an actual cost here. For a restaurant menu, that is likely to only be in the couple hundreds of dollars range. (<joke>I will entertain complaints about this from people who don't bill in six minute increments.</joke>)

For more complex applications, this can -- easily -- run into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is easy to underestimate how expensive it is because you only see the element from the set of Ys that caused non-compatibility in the present instance, not the entire set of Ys which you have to a) avoid and b) rigorously test against.

Getting down to brass tacks, the population which benefits from any particular engineering effort to address a Y is generally very small and, often, far smaller in marginal value to the business than the cost of addressing that Y. It has occasionally been the public policy of the US that businesses are supposed to subsidize that population (see: Americans with Disabilities Act, etc). Reasonable people can disagree on whether that is a justice-maximizing policy.

jquery4• 15 years ago

The optimal way to solve this is to invest more money in screen-readers. Unlike robotic wheelchairs climbing stairs, software can be copied for free once it's developed. If the government wants to step in, they can provide purchase vouchers to the disabled and let them drive the direction of screen-reading innovation.

vegardx• 15 years ago

Also, that's the best way of putting of the problem for the future to solve it. We have really good ways of dealing with it /right now/, as long as people pay attention to it early in the process of building/creating/designing something.

In a perfect world, we'd do both things at the same time. When people thing about accessibility now they think about people with mental or physical problems, but what about when our generation gets old? The only reason this is not a very widespread problem is that there are very few people with accessibility problems, this will not be the case 10-15 years from now.

beambot• 15 years ago

Incidentally, the robotic wheelchair that can climb stairs (the iBot) is now discontinued [1]. Based on the bevy of comments, users are sad to see it go. Also, I believe Deka (and now J&J) have extensive patents in this space. They should release into the public domain so that others can build on the technology.

[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/02/11/ibot-discontinued-unfo...

extension2• 15 years ago

I see it not as a subsidy but more of an insurance premium. We all put in a little bit of extra effort in exchange for not being royally screwed if it happens to us. The progress of civilization seems to go hand-in-hand with these sorts of arrangements. That's probably because there are so many ways to be royally screwed that, if we didn't look out for each other, everyone would be screwed in one way or another.

But there needs to be economic incentives for this to work (and regulation is an economic incentive). Asking a business to be altruistic is like asking a bear to not eat your trash.

patio114• 15 years ago

Asking a business to be altruistic is like asking a bear to not eat your trash.

I get kinda annoyed by Capitalism Means Being A Heartless Bastard, because it doesn't. Businesses are routinely altruistic for the same reason that businesses are routinely greedy: like soylent green, they're made out of people.

gaius2• 15 years ago

I see it not as a subsidy but more of an insurance premium.

Indeed, we're all going to get old. Being "able-bodied" is fleeting; enjoy it while it lasts.

freiheit• 15 years ago

I think that generating a PDF of a menu is likely to be substantially less work than scanning a menu to get an image. Nobody types a menu on a typewriter anymore, it's all text on a computer at some point before it's ink on paper.

The argument about accessibility has essentially always been that processes and things being designed for accessibility from the outset doesn't really cost anything extra, it's bolting accessibility on afterwards that gets so very expensive.

patio114• 15 years ago

That argument is convenient for some advocates to believe in a way which is orthogonal to its truth about a statement of engineering reality.

rmc• 15 years ago

What if the restaurant only got a final image from the graphic designer? I know it's silly and restaurants should ask for the proper files with layers & text etc., but lots of them don't know about this.

BenSS• 15 years ago

I've done accessibility work for large sites/corps and yes, it can cost to retrofit. Getting to the point of basic accessibility for most users is not that hard if you actually -think- about it during the design and development process!

Even the basic steps of using alt text, and seeing if your pages are readable with no CSS, and with different browser font sizes takes care of a huge number of issues that people encounter every single day. There are many more users affected than you think, and it's insanity to blatantly alienate customers.

keithpeter2• 15 years ago

http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/webaccessibility/lawsan...

In the UK its a bit different. No cases yet, but give it time.

sern2• 15 years ago

Not UK, but relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguire_v_SOCOG_2000

mmelin• 15 years ago

So if the problem with accessibility efforts is that the cost is relatively high and the benefit is relatively low, in that you only gain access to a small number of additional customers for a potentially large development effort, why not fix this dynamic?

Imagine a GetSatisfaction-type site where you publicly list and track accessibility issues. Apart from making these issues more visible, the upside to fixing an accessibility issue goes way up because now you have something embarrassing in your SERP for all to see instead of a few disgruntled non-customers.

colanderman• 15 years ago

FWIW, the two places I've inquired about accessibility (just because these things piss me off) have actually responded "we know it's a problem and we're working on a fix," and have since been fixed. These were the City of Worcester (Java menus) and my former employer, a public high school in Rhode Island (entire paragraphs as JPEGs).

hardy263• 15 years ago

Aside from the bigger companies, I can see why some of the smaller ones wouldn't want to do this, like the restaurants or his vet. Most of the time they just hired someone to create the website, and be done with it. They don't know how to implement the accessibility functionality themselves and hiring someone to do it may cost several hundred to thousands of dollars.

I was interning in a government related web development job, and it took several weeks to properly remake a site to conform to WCAG AA level standards. Unfortunately, that was just for the templates. The dynamic content generated by the CMS usually breaks the conformance. Making websites accessible is not an easy task, and could cost a heavy amount for small businesses.

blauwbilgorgel2• 15 years ago

It sure does. Also, if you search hard enough any site will breach some accessibility guideline for a deaf, blind, mentally handicapped or epileptic user.

For example http://validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Flightgetsin.dreamwidth... shows some possible WebAIM accessibility guidelines breaches.

- non-valid mark-up.

  4.1.1 Significant HTML/XHTML validation/parsing errors are avoided.

- mixing of inline styling with external styling.

  4.1.2 Markup is used in a way that facilitates accessibility. 
  This includes following the HTML/XHTML specifications and 
  using forms, form labels, frame titles, etc. appropriately.

- Using    and <br> for visual spacing

  See 4.1.2

- using tables for layout

  See 4.1.2

- not providing a label, description or fieldset for the searchform

  1.1.1 Form inputs have associated text labels or, if 
  labels cannot be used, a descriptive title attribute.

And, not a WebAIM guideline, but still a good accessibility guideline:

- Use a modern doctype (of the strict variant if not HTML5)

- Don't use deprecated tags like <b> for article headings.

- Provide an option to skip large lists.

If you start wielding all these guidelines and specifications like a D&D guide you are sure to bump into hostility here and there. :)

nancye• 15 years ago

This is true, but Dreamwidth is a blogging platform (it's a fork of Livejournal), so those errors weren't caused by the post's author. Presumably it's accessible enough for the user in question to be able to navigate and post at, though, since they say they're using a screenreader; I assume the "disabled and disgruntled" tag means this wasn't just an academic exercise.

vacri3• 15 years ago

I've spent about four years as a medical tech working with epilepsy in a neurology lab. Sorry, but this just gets up my nose.

Please stop using 'flashing images' as a way to co-opt epileptics into defense of the issue-of-the-day (that's the only thing I can think of as to why you included it). Yes, some epileptics do respond to flashing images (~15% have the kind required, less actually respond), but the parameters are pretty tight for the bulk of them. The kind of flashing that can trigger a seizure is also monumentally irritating to regular users, and generally hasn't been used since the 90s.

I spent four years in a full-time job where I sat in the dark flashing lights at epileptic and suspected epileptic patients, 4-6 times a day while recording EEG, so I've got a reasonable subjective feel for the kind of flashing that fires it off. I've spent a lot of time on the web, too, and the only thing that even comes close in general use are the flashing-style 'you are the 999999th visitor' ads, and even then they usually subtend too small an arc of the visual field.

For the record, the usual range for photosensitive epileptics to respond to flashing images or lights is 12-20Hz, with a peak different for each patient and with some rolloff at each end. Above 25Hz epileptic responses are extremely rare - I've not personally seen one, but they do exist.

Yes, there are some epileptics that can have a seizure from a single camera flash, and I've seen them, but they're reasonably rare amongst flash-responsive epileptics (themselves an uncommon group). I've also heard of an epileptic whose trigger was orange circles - not orange other shapes, or other coloured circles (anything can be a trigger for a seizure). At what point do you set the bar for rarity?

Sorry, but it gets up my nose - almost every time I've seen someone 'defend epileptics' online, they don't actually know much about epilepsy, and seem more to be using common mythology about epilepsy in order to co-opt the illness to strengthen a point being made.

Of course, two other common forms of trigger, depending on the kind of epilepsy, are stress and hyperventilation (strictly speaking, these are less triggers and more threshold-to-event reducers). In this case, one could argue that frustrating site design works against epileptics...

blauwbilgorgel2• 15 years ago

I included it to make the following point: Accessibility is more than catering for the deaf or blind. It also includes color blindness, mental handicaps or going by the standard:

http://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/photosensitive-epilepsy/web-...

http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/assistive-technologies-for-p...

Which have the following guidelines (or myths?):

  - allow users to control flickering, avoid causing the screen to flicker

  - allow users to control blinking, avoid causing content to blink

  - allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages

  While people with epilepsy are browsing web sites, they 
  may encounter pages that have blinking texts and 
  animation that may trigger seizures. Sudden loud sounds 
  and repetitive audio in some web pages can also cause 
  epileptic seizures.

I do not know much about epilepsy, so I will believe your experience, but believe me when I say I am not using it as a way to further a point. I believe in above guidelines, regardless if they help for epilepsy, because in this case they help other users with a mental handicap or ADHD and so remain good guidelines. Or do you rather have we don't mention epilepsy all together when making sites accessible and just call them common sense? It is easy to ignore even a common sense guideline when there are so many different ones.

It seems you have an uphill battle to fight if mentioning epilepsy and accessibility in one sentence gets up your nose. Like my quotes show, I am not the fringe 'defend epileptics' spreader of myths here, this is part of the accessibility topic.

nirvana2• 15 years ago

I read this article with a concern about an app I've worked on, where we intended to go thru an add accessibility support in after the first release, but it (and a bunch of other improvements) got dropped when priorities changed. I was reading to see if I could judge how our app (which should be mostly accessible) might have worked for this person... but they never mentioned what their disability was in their sample letter, and so I had no clue, and couldn't hazard a guess. (Except maybe that they are blind? Though I don't have enough clues to be at all confident in that guess.)

I wonder if part of the non-response they got was because they never explained what their disability was in their letters. I understand it really isn't some pizza restaurant's business to need to know it, but if they left that off, then it is hard for someone to understand their dificulty-- they might even read the email too fast and not even realize there is a disability at all. Thus it just sounds like someone who can't describe why the real problem is, and is instead giving web development advice to a customer service rep who, more likely than not, has no ability to even parse the email into actionable or useful information for the developers simply because the context is dropped by missing this key bit of information. (Even though the advice is useful to someone who is a web developer, even without knowing the disability, the CSR may not realize that.)

That said, I have gone thru a recent terrible experience attempting to deal with a company who is bringing in $150million a month in revenue, and can't be bothered to have CSRs actually read letters. Over the course of a dozen back and for the responses, each form letter I got from them, was written by a different person, and seemingly responded to a random word or two from my previous message, where they clearly didn't' read the whole ticket or even take a few minutes to actually comprehend what I was saying.

There's some really bad customer service out there, even from companies that at least don't have lack of budget as an excuse.

Mz11• 15 years ago

but they never mentioned what their disability was

From the article: ...making it inaccessible to blind and low vision users.

jsavimbi3• 15 years ago

> but it (and a bunch of other improvements) got dropped when priorities changed

More CTO's with disabilities need to be hired.

protomyth6• 15 years ago

Or go ask the CTO to talk to the lawyers about what happened to Target. That talk will help avoid a very uncomfortable talk later on with the CEO and HR.

jsn• 15 years ago

I'm sorry, but "I was disappointed" and "I wish you would take steps" probably gets you grief. Asking usually doesn't. "Please" also helps (and its absence doesn't).

I mean, come on. I'm sorry company X site was all but useless to you. It would be nice if they made an extra effort to make it more accessible. But they don't have to. They spend their own money, time and effort to build the site, and they get to decide what their priorities are. Asking is okay, but so is refusal.

selven2• 15 years ago

I agree. If I got an email with "lawyer pomposity" in it, I would likely pretend I never got it and deliberately push back any accessibility plans out of spite. You don't have to stick "please" in every sentence, but you have to phrase things correctly. If it's phrased as a request, I would see an opportunity to make people happy and gladly go along. If it's phrased as an order, I would probably perceive it as an affront to my individual sovereignty and would be motivated to fight back rather than capitulate.

aaronbrethorst5• 15 years ago

iPhone developers: Never considered supporting Apple's VoiceOver technology before? Setting aside positive karma, here's an awesome reason to do it: your app needs to be accessible in order to work with the best functional testing framework out there, KIF [1] (https://github.com/square/kif)

Write tests with KIF, ensure that blind and low-vision users can use your app, ensure that your app is functional. What's not to love?

[1] i'm totally unaffiliated with Square, its creators. I just happen to be in love with it, that's all.

sehugg• 15 years ago

VoiceOver is crazy easy to integrate. If you use UIKit, you're already 95% there. The visually impaired community is very social and you'll be winning yourself some advocates if you do it right.

aaronbrethorst5• 15 years ago

And, if you're not sure if you're doing it right, I bet it would be pretty easy to find some visually impaired folks who would be incredibly happy to give you a lot of very detailed, specific feedback.

jhancock2• 15 years ago

Do you find low vision users to prefer text-to-speech instead of very-large-high-contrast-text? I would be uncomfortable walking around with my phone reading aloud to me and everyone else in earshot.

ataggart2• 15 years ago

I find interesting the notion that web apps ought to be written to support screen readers instead of screen readers being written to work with extant web apps.

I also suspect any hostile response would be due in part to the concern that someone is going to swing the big bat of government at them.

protomyth6• 15 years ago

If you are worried about the government getting involved, then for the love of whatever you hold holy, do not be hostile. That response will be shown in court to add damages and will be plastered on the news reports.

tlog333• 15 years ago

I thought this was a really interesting article and I've been interested in addressing the accessibility of startup sites recently. It's true that certain accessibility modifications can be difficult/costly but the majority of them are very easy to make. There are many "low hanging fruit" fixes that any site should make. The improvements will assist with accessibility, usability, and SEO. If anyone would like a quick review contact me on G+ https://plus.google.com/111107665026656718495/posts

mbateman2• 15 years ago

The optimal solution is to find or create some tool that lets you bypass these options. This is a bit of a tangent, since that's really not what this post is about, but it's worth mentioning.

If you're stuck in a wheelchair, it's good when people build ramps, but it's far, far better to have a wheelchair that can go up stairs.

The former makes you dependent on the consideration of others, and sometimes that consideration is really not a reasonable thing to ask or expect.

Even in this apparently simple case, as others have pointed out, it is not easy to make everything accessible to screen readers. Also, what about older websites and archives of scans and so forth? It's far better to focus on tools that let one be as independent as possible.

I understand the annoyance. And I really hate it when people respond to requests like this in a hostile manner. But at the end of the day it is better if the person with exceptional needs can take on the responsibility for making these transactions possible themselves. (Also I'm sure there's loads of money to made developing these tools.)

brudgers• 15 years ago

Ramps are not just intended for persons in wheelchairs. They improve access for people with less serious mobility issues such as those with knee or hip problems or elderly people who simply lack the upper body strength to confidently support themselves using a handrail. Forcing such people into stair climbing chairs is absurd...and of cost far more costly than a few ramps or proper architectural design.

mbateman2• 15 years ago

On modern buildings of course you want to build a ramp. But the cost of adding ramps to every already-built place accessible only by stairs is extremely high. At any rate, that isn't to say that it shouldn't be paid, in many cases, just that it's better (when possible and feasible) to develop technologies that let the disabled deal with it themselves. There are buildings with stairs and ramps or elevators. If you're disabled, it's good to be able to access these buildings when you come across them.

Along the same lines, the purpose of accessible digital text isn't only to help the blind, it's also to help the dyslexic and who knows who else, and generally facilitate content extraction software of all types. It's good when to do when it's feasible, but it's better to not have to rely on people doing it.

ramchip• 15 years ago

And they're a lifesaver when handling a couple of large suitcases! I can't believe how many cities and places neglect to soften the edges for bicycles, travelers, or people carrying stuff. The train stations that have plenty of stairs and no ramp to go around are especially annoying.

keithpeter2• 15 years ago

Up voted this because it is an interesting perspective. Eye glasses enable me to read the fine print in technical manuals, so point taken. I also like the point about independence, and access to archived/legacy content.

Perhaps in the future online information will be pushed in formats like rss and our client device will do far more rendering? We will all access content in a way that suits us?

justinph• 15 years ago

More people need to be like this guy and complain when sites are not accessible. It might make my bosses and clients actually care when I want to take time to make a site accessible. I can make noise about an issue, but nothing brings it to the forefront like an angry letter from a user.

larsberg2• 15 years ago

That experience with acceessibility may be true for many websites, but certainly isn't the case for Microsoft products (and I assume websites but do not know for sure). I was on the Visual Studio Environment team, and we put an incredible amount of effort into making sure everything was accessibile. This meant not only screen readers, but also solid support for high-contrast or large font size OS modes (used by people who are not blind but have extremely limited vision). I spent many hours with my machine configured in super-low resolutions and large font+contrast mode or trying to use the product with only headphones and keyboard (monitor off).

I'm disappointed to hear that this person got such negative feedback from the companies they contacted. It probably sounds cheesy, but I fixed quite a few bugs related to accessibility and to this day I get a happy feeling remembering the feedback we got from the customers for whom this support was critical to their ability to earn a living as a software developer.

davux• 15 years ago

I just wanted to say thanks. :) As a person with low vision (and a heavy VS user), I'm grateful that there was so much attention to detail in the development of VS with respect to accessibility.

I don't know if it has to do with US government ADA requirements or not, but I'm glad that across the board Microsoft tends to build accessible software.

aaronbrethorst5• 15 years ago

> I don't know if it has to do with US government ADA requirements or not, but I'm glad that across the board Microsoft tends to build accessible software.

For Visual Studio 2005, at least, this certainly didn't hurt, but we also had an incredibly dedicated and passionate group of people working on this issue, putting together brown bags educating developer division on MSAA and building accessible software, bringing in the creators of JAWS, logging bugs against every nook and cranny of the product, etc. etc.

I wish I could remember the names of everyone who was involved in this, but Sara Ford was instrumental. I'm glad I got to be a part of the whole thing, even though my contributions were focused on project management-type stuff.

larsberg2• 15 years ago

Thank you! And just so you know, this comment made my weekend.

The ADA requirements are pretty minimal -- it just has to "work." All the work we did to, for example, make the reader's navigation order sensible within the tree views for the solution explorer and class browser was because we wanted it to be good.

And because Sara Ford would just open another bug if we didn't fix it right, as mentioned in one other comment :-)

dporan• 15 years ago

Hats off to Microsoft's Greg Lowney, who, in the early '90s -- working pretty much by himself -- pioneered this corporate focus on accessibility. A great example of intrapreneurship within a big company.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1998/10-22lowney...

evanlong• 15 years ago

+1 I was on VS as well for a while and this is very true. Accessibility, and localization were a big deal because they were a relatively small investment and opened up big markets: other countries and U.S. Government.

adgar• 15 years ago

I find it antagonistic on the OP's part to call this response "hostile": “we know it’s inaccessible, but we are not fixing it”. That's not hostile, it's honest. What more could you ask for than honesty?

If they had responded “we know it’s inaccessible, but we are not fixing it, because people with disabilities are a drain on society and should be put down”, that would be hostile.

Also: “it would be too hard,” (universally incorrect) is just not true. Unless his standard is "nothing is too hard for this noble cause."

Natsu2• 15 years ago

To be fair, a significant number of his complaints could have been solved by turning JPEGs into text or adding labels to a few buttons. In several cases, he gave them the exact fix required and they still refused or ignored him.

> What more could you ask for than honesty?

An attempt to fix the problem or raise the issue with someone that can.

ZipCordManiac2• 15 years ago

Why should they change their design for one person ? Maybe websites should start having one version for people with sight and one all text version for the blind. I think it's kind of dumb to make it so people can't use images embedded with text. What about art or multimedia sites ?

selven2• 15 years ago

Philosophical question - why do people with disabilities have the right to higher priority than everyone else? Let's say you've calculated that there are 4000 blind people who might be interested in your website, but 11000 Spanish speakers, 9000 Korean speakers and 7000 Portuguese speakers. If someone comes to complain about accessibility for the blind, won't it be perfectly reasonable to answer (in more polite terms) "no, we won't handle you, we're going to do a Spanish translation first, then implement UTF-8 so we can do a Korean translation, then do the Portuguese translation, and only then maybe get to you"?

abecedarius• 15 years ago

The Spanish speakers might be only a niche in the case of this one website, but they don't face being a niche practically everywhere they turn. I'm not going to weigh in on how that difference should affect how you deal with accessibility, but it's a real one.

ZipCordManiac2• 15 years ago

I learned one thing from this post - Wow, blind people are pissed off.

In the past I've made a few websites where the owner required images incorporated into the menu. I've spoken to owners about accessibility, countless times, but more often then not I end up having to do some retarded flash intro coupled with a graphic heavy menu. Owners don't care, they want it to match their vision, and of course they don't want to pay extra to have everything made accessible to the blind as they are probably some percentage of a point of their customer base.

ThaddeusQuay2• 15 years ago

HN could use some attention to accessibility. In Chrome, I have to press CTRL+ four times to make the text easy to read, but then I get the horizontal scroll bar, which makes reading tedious, especially on articles with many comments, such as this one. I have the Readability plugin, but it doesn't work on HN.

codo• 15 years ago

I've asked for similar help in the past here: http://ilnodisaarcodu.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/95/

Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

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