Fuck accessibility.

No WAIT, before you call me an asshole hear me out.

So when you use CSS grid to create layouts you're supposed to not use the features it has (reordering items) too much, and instead keep the HTML structured the way it's supposed to be read.
When you add a picture of a cat you're supposed to put a alt="Brown cat sitting on a chair" there.
Also you should test for all kinds of sight disabilities and use high contrast colors.

All that for likely <1% of your users.

What would be the alternative? HTML is a markup language, and not supposed to be directly read by humans. Invest the time ONCE for screenreaders to understand CSS positioning and read content in a sensible order. Use image recognition to describe pictures (with selectable levels of detail). Let the browser modify colors on the fly for better readability.

Don't spend time and money to solve a problem 100000 Times that could be solved once.

Fuck accessibility.

The answer is in your rant. You write the HTML properly. As a document like it’s 1996. That’s for everything. Crashing, indexing, screen readers, Alexa, Siri, whatever future stuff. Ok. Perfect. NOW you can change the visual layer with whatever you want. It’s sometimes a little tricky - but mostly it’s just like that. Proper HTML, and then you have a LOT of control on how you want to suggest that’s things look visually. Show us a CodePen that explains why this is a problem.

<1% of users, based on what? You think disabled people don't use computers/mobiles? If sites were MORE accessible then I think you'd find that disabled people would do more, buy more, etc.
The UK has 18% of the population that has at least one disability. Try telling sales people that by being less accessible they are cutting off nearly 20% of their market. They should be investing more effort into it!

- More semantic HTML? Totally. Good for SEO too

- Image recognition? I don't think even humans can do that perfectly... Have you never seen a picture and go WTF? alt is good for that. And imagine recognition uses up resources. The browsers are slow enough already, and not everyone has 4 GB of RAM.

- Let the browser modify the colors? Haha you're gonna get in trouble with marketing for this one. I guess with good semantic HTML this could be possible, but the general theme and experience would be lost. People with accessibility needs also deserve something amazing every time they visit a website. They also deserve our effort.

Heck, I sometimes use the accessibility features myself

"you know those entry points for wheelchairs on office buildings, parking lots etc? Well I don't use them, so fuck that, we don't need them so I am not going to put them!"

this is kinda what this rant sounds like to me

@sheriffderek Doing things properly actually helps everyone. It makes people think through things... it's not even really about the screen-readers or any one thing in particular.

However... aside anecdote - I know a clothing company that spent 20 million dollars to make their properties/sites all accessible after being called out... and in that case - I really think they should have just flown a personal shopper to every person who wanted help - and they would have been more helpful to the people.

And there is some super bleeding edge animation type stuff that just will not translate... but 99% of websites can just be "authored properly" - and this isn't a problem.

@AleCx04 no. But to me the current state of accessibility feels like if newspapers have to print everything in Arial 48 so people with bad eyesight don't have to wear glasses.

I just don't see why getting a screenreader to understand CSS instead of forcing every single page owner to spend more time is such an unpopular idea. Yes some problems might not be as easy to solve, but this part at least is doable in hours.

It would also be much better for the disabled cause then they could use a much higher percentage of sites easily.
With contrast it would be even easier.

@sheriffderek it's about efficiency. Its the same as with fucking cookie notices - a simple to use browser setting would be much better, less costly and work better.

@eval

Efficiency for who? You probably get paid by the hour, don't you.

I know many people who are young and have a hard time reading websites. It's not just "blind people" - but you've already proven you don't get it. But I have faith in you. You will. We're all allowed to rant. No judgment here.

@sheriffderek I do think that in certain cases, we need to work toward educating the screen-readers and the tools / vs. the medium: but to do that, we're going to need to be a bit* more eloquent. ; )

@eval Also... not to be picky... but HTML is 100% supposed to be read by humans. That's its main thing. It was created to be easy to write and read - by humans.

@sheriffderek you have no idea how much i care about simple, lean, readable websites. And yes for the developer getting paid by the hour it might not be a problem... For the one financing it it is one.

I don't want to lower standards, i just think that doing work once is better than doing it over and over again.

And the part about HTML being read by humans - I read and write Vue files mostly. And the structure there isn't necessarily logical: for example modals are typically at the end of the body for technical reasons.

@eval If you like logical organization, then maybe you'll like Ember more than Vue. Either way: Code is for humans.

@AleCx04 Well to be fair, a person in a wheelchair needs someone to drive them around (unless they have enough body control and an expensive modified car), and 99% of the time since they already have that other person they'll just ask them to run their errands, especially if they know the place will be crowded. With the widespread internet shopping and government everywhere going digital, that is becoming even more relevant each day.

I already use modified userstyles for dark, high contrast colors and increased letter spacing. In most cases the site turns out a mess and it takes me an hour to fix each and every box and text.
I think that spending up to an hour on every site I like is a reasonable price for my particular genes, which also happen to save me a lot on dental care and a bunch of other civilizational illnesses that I don't have.

If I lived in a country with universal free healthcare I'd probably be upset because my advantages are mitigated but my one disadvantage isn't.
Because the situation isn't solved at all. Accessibility to most means half decent aria support and high contrast colors, but what is all that good for if I can cover three consecutive letters with a needle on the screen?
What we would need to really solve this issue is standardised html and userstyle support. That way I could set up my colors and fonts, some other guy could have their screenreader, and the third could navigate with one toe stepping through the standard menu items placed in the standard location. Frankly, it would be great. Till then, supercharging screenreaders will only make webdevs even more reckless with their HTML.

Entitled much?

Seriously that's all I get out of this post so far.

"I'm not disabled in anyway, so fuck everyone that is"

I personally am not disabled, I have no issues with a screen that I can't get by with glasses, and don't need a screen reader however:

low contrast colours fuck everyone over.

text to speech not being able to recognise text blocks in their correct order, well there goes any coherent meaning of your content.

Screen readers not able to identify input fields, there goes a sale to a competitor.

In the grand scheme of things, the 1% of users who use the site may not seem much for a site with 1000 users a month.

Scale that up to a million users a month, scale again to a billion, that 1% isn't a small number anymore.

That's a lot of $$$ you throw out the window because "I'm not a blind mofo"

Now, I don't go out of my way to far to handle accessibility, but I made it a habit to keep those users in mind and run the main pages through webaim and correct any of the major issues at a minimum though.

https://wave.webaim.org/

@hitko that's like saying that you can let other people live 99% of your life

@electrineer On the contrary, it's all about the fact that a person in a wheelchair CAN'T just drive to the store, pop in, grab a few things, and drive away. They need someone to drive them around, help them out of the car, help them reach products on upper shelves, help them back in the car when they're done... It's about the fact that even with dedicated parking spots, ramps, lifts, etc., a person in a wheelchair just won't go a place they don't absolutely have or want to because even getting in and out of their own car adds a significant amount of extra time to the task and they know how inefficient that is.

@hitko
"they can't just pop into the store"

I raise you a wheelchair driver conversion:

http://wheelchairdriver.com/images-...

🥱

@C0D4 no, not entitled. It's not like i don't care about them, i just think that the time would be better spent once on tools than 1000s of times on sites.
Simple example: lighthouse hates it when you disable zoom. I see how zoom can be useful, but for most sites it just breaks the experience because you accidentally zoom in when double tapping.
So i propose we don't get screamed at for disabling it, and people that rwally want it for whatever reason should be able to enable it in their Browser globally.

Anything that can't be done in the tools from a technical point of view im happy doing, i just think many things could.

@hitko that's simply not true. People who use wheelchair is not a homogenous group. Some of them are even athletes. The society should not force everyone to be passive as that lowers quality of life and creates more costs in the long run. Everyone should be allowed to live just as active a life as they want to live and are able to live.

Accessible infrastructure makes life more accessible for everyone, not just people in wheelchairs.

I think what @homo-lorens says sums my annoyence up nicely: you can't please everyone anyways. If the 1% is important, isn't the 0.1% aswell? And the 0.01%?

If we want a red button on green Background for whatever reason, it makes no sense to not do this because of red/green blindness. Cause there are MANY color blindness types, and adheering to best practices for all leaves you with black on white or vice versa.

However it's REALLY easy for the browser of said Person to apply huerotate on button press, or even automatically detect elements that would contrast for normal seeing people and don't for this user. That's not rocket science. To me it feels like the whole IE problem all over again where money is spent and the experience degraded for everyone, just to please a few that could better their Situation by downloading a real browser.

And you'll NEVER convince sites with 100 users/mo to spend much on accessibility. So the current state of making it the devs responsibility actually causes more pain for said users.

@eval or better frameworks 😝

@eo2875 yes. Im not against semantic HTML either, and if a framework author has to do a bit of work to make the components as accessible as possible that's ok, and i'd do the same if i wrote a framework/component library.

Accessibility isnt even hard to code for, just run your site with Javascript and CSS disabled and see if it's readable and you can navigate at least most of it... 🤷‍♂️

Having a solid DOM base to work from also improves the performance of your site by not requiring the rendering engine to do a bunch of CSS shuffling and DOM manipution at run time.

@kwilliams right. There are a lot of ways to interpret this rant, but mostly I read it as “I just want to ignore all the standards and code sloppy and push off the interpreting of my sloppy code to screen reader software devs.”

@hitko “Well to be fair, a person in a wheelchair needs someone to drive them around (unless they have enough body control and an expensive modified car)...”

Funny, that’s where sidewalks and more public transportation really help (though you do also have to make those accessible, bc if you don’t have frequent ramps the sidewalks are useless to people with mobility vehicles, and last I checked wheelchairs aren’t all that good at climbing steps). Where I live we have some of that covered, but it’s still kind of a back‐of‐the‐mind thing, only thought about when it’s of profit or when someone of sufficient profile calls it out. Luckily the latest few generations of rolling stock have level boarding, and I assume it’ll be our standard going forward.