At my school there was a blind guy, he used Lynx to surf.
Once I looked how he was surfing / coding. And he was incredibly slow ... "Normal" people scan the page. He could not, he had to more or less "read" the whole page. I did not see much more, but it gave me the impression that surfing was a frustrating experience for him.
One of his friend told me that one thing that screwed him each time a was surfing was the "Javascript links". On lots of pages (well ... too much) instead of a regular HTML link there was a piece of Javascript code witch supposedly was opening a new window or do "something smart". These links did not work for him.
The worse part of the story is that the fall-back mechanism is pretty easy to do:
Maybe the situation has improved. But I guess that it did not improve that much. Writing a Web-browser is complex, therefor I believe that integrating accessibility features is difficult too.
And upgrading everybody's wheelchair is not easy in practice. So it is for screen-reader, and accessibility software. We still have IE 6 around! It is utopic to believe that every handicapped would upgrade in just a few years.
Of course we should not drop Javascript, but we should think about its impact. It is like adding a step in front of a building; it can be a real obstacle to some people.
The web would be a better place if we do so. Not only for our handicapped friends, but for us in the future. I don't want to give up surfing when I am old because I broke the web with fancy and non-essential features.
HTML is the web. Javascript enhance it. But Javascript is not the web.
Here is a good place to start:
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/
(Does not really speaks about javascript but it gives a lots of useful advises)
THANK YOU. :) I wish more people would stop and consider how they'd do what they're trying to do if they were geared towards an older audience. To an illiterate audience. To an audience of all deaf people. and so on. It would make such a big difference. I try to get a lot of my Mac friends to enable voiceover (the screenreader) and the screen curtain (makes your display black, a key combination you can't remember is less tempting than turning off the display) and test out their sites and apps. It's a completely different world sometimes.
And nowadays, I don't see people "reading" the whole page..they do the equivalent of scanning, I guess, by going through the whole page and skipping irrelevant things. And if that doesn't work, then searching. Still a frustrating experience.
When I'm making informational web sites, I typically work very hard to achieve a seamless degradation. I wrote my comment after working on a web app I'm developing. I sat there and tried to figure out how I could possibly make this thing accessible to a blind person and I don't think I can without creating an entirely different user interface just for them. The problem with my interface is I'm not just showing an information article that can read left-to-right top-to-bottom. It's more of a car dashboard.
As more and more applications hit the web, I don't think we'll be able to just say that HTML is the web. For better or for worse (there's a whole other argument for another day) we've entered a situation with web applications where there are several players: HTML+CSS+Javascript, Flash, Silverlight, etc. Unless somebody sits down and says "Ok everybody we really need to get a grip on creating an accessibility convention for HTML+CSS+Javascript applications" you're going to have the proprietary folks pushing accessibility as an advantage of their platform. And you know what? They'll be right.
Thanks for the link, I never heard of that website so I'll check it out. For what it's worth, I worked at a company that had some blind people test our sites when they were done nested tables and paid no attention to accessibility, and versions which (at least from a technical standpoint) implemented all the best practices. Frustratingly, they didn't seem to do much better. The content itself needed to be tailored to them because there was simply too much. Like you say, the web of today seems to be built for scanning large quantities of information. Just like you can't take an info-heavy website and throw it at a mobile device because people have different requirements and constraints when browsing from a mobile device, making a website accessible doesn't seem to be just an engineer problem but an editorial one too.
The problem is that people don't seem to take that kind of testing into consideration unless it really matters (e.g. section 508 for .gov websites).
Lastly, nested tables I don't think are THAT much of a problem. CSS can be useful in other ways - e.g. to display almost the same information in a completely different way that may benefit low vision people, or mobile users. It's some uses of ajax and the like that can be a problem, not so much a table based layout or something like that.
Once I looked how he was surfing / coding. And he was incredibly slow ... "Normal" people scan the page. He could not, he had to more or less "read" the whole page. I did not see much more, but it gave me the impression that surfing was a frustrating experience for him.
One of his friend told me that one thing that screwed him each time a was surfing was the "Javascript links". On lots of pages (well ... too much) instead of a regular HTML link there was a piece of Javascript code witch supposedly was opening a new window or do "something smart". These links did not work for him. The worse part of the story is that the fall-back mechanism is pretty easy to do:
<a href='page.html' onclick='return do_something_smart(this.href);'>
Maybe the situation has improved. But I guess that it did not improve that much. Writing a Web-browser is complex, therefor I believe that integrating accessibility features is difficult too. And upgrading everybody's wheelchair is not easy in practice. So it is for screen-reader, and accessibility software. We still have IE 6 around! It is utopic to believe that every handicapped would upgrade in just a few years.
Of course we should not drop Javascript, but we should think about its impact. It is like adding a step in front of a building; it can be a real obstacle to some people.
The web would be a better place if we do so. Not only for our handicapped friends, but for us in the future. I don't want to give up surfing when I am old because I broke the web with fancy and non-essential features.
HTML is the web. Javascript enhance it. But Javascript is not the web.
Here is a good place to start: http://diveintoaccessibility.org/ (Does not really speaks about javascript but it gives a lots of useful advises)