
Top accessibility complaints from people with disabilities - sstriegs
https://axesslab.com/accessibility-according-to-pwd/
======
falcolas
What bothers me more than people designing inaccessable sites is their excuse
of "well, why put extra money and effort into catering to such a small segment
of the population?"

Videos released without captions are OK, because "they're free!" Websites
without Aria tags are OK, because "screen readers just need to get better."
Low contrast fonts are OK, because "my design won't work with different font
colors."

Everyone who doesn't die in their prime of life will eventually be disabled in
some fashion; but so few people really seem to realize this (or care).

EDIT: Good question - do I practice what I preach? Yes, I do. I'm in an SRE
position, and a few of our developers are hard of hearing, so I caption the
training videos I make, without asking if they need them. No blind folks, but
I make sure to use reasonable styles and page layouts to support fading
eyesight. I don't set up Aria tags myself, because I don't have any users who
need them at the moment.

None of my external or OS contributions are to UI related projects, so nothing
of note there.

~~~
Kenji
Accessibility costs a lot of money and it's a perfectly valid observation that
one can skimp on it for profit. You may call it immoral, I call it
mathematics.

~~~
Arcsech
"Accessibility costs money" is a popular thing to say, but I'm not convinced
that needs to be true. Okay, fine, captioning/transcribing videos I'll give
you, but many of the other issues on this page can be addressed for a web page
just by not breaking the defaults.

By default, links are underlined. For text content, many major browsers
(Firefox and mobile Safari for sure) include a "reader mode" or similar where
the user can adjust their own contrast - as long as you don't break your HTML
and prevent the reader mode from working. Web pages are black and while by
default, so anything with lots of bright colors is something you have to do
intentionally. Animations are also something you have to add intentionally.

It really seems like just by not breaking the defaults (I.e., no work at all)
your web page should do a decent (not perfect) job of being accessible. But
we're so obsessed with making things shiny and swooshy that we've lost sight
of that.

~~~
SilasX
>"Accessibility costs money" is a popular thing to say, but I'm not convinced
that needs to be true. Okay, fine, captioning/transcribing videos I'll give
you,

Even that one is overstated. Sure, taking some _existing_ video, and treating
it as the only representation of the content, and then trying to transcribe it
-- that's expensive.

But virtually every such video (esp. lectures) intended for conveying
information is going to correspond to some text equivalent, and they can just
post that in a place that's easy to find. Not only is it cheap, many users who
_can_ hear will prefer that version.

I think it's just a widespread attitude problem (for lack of a more refined
diagnosis). It's not just big institutions, but discussion forums where some
users will stubbornly link a video as their only citation, and won't even take
the time to summarize the key point they think it's substantiating.

~~~
PeterisP
Can you elaborate why do you assume that such videos are likely to have a text
equivalent?

You bring up lectures as example - I certainly don't have transcripts of
lectures I've given, and neither do most professors/lecturers/whatever that I
know; a few of them have most of their talk content in their slides but that's
a horrible practice that distracts from effective lecture or presentation; in
general all the non-audio material is intended to be a _supplement_ to the
talk and either are not meaningful without it (e.g. illustrations) or are not
representative of the talk (e.g. a textbook chapter that's mostly about the
same topic, but different). The recorded audio ( _if_ it'd be recorded) would
literally be the only copy of the content of that lecture in existence.

The same applies for many other genres of video content. Most videos aren't
scripted, and thus no script exists; heck, even videos that are clearly well
prepared, staged and filmed with multiple takes (e.g. many of "youtube
creators") generally don't have a script beforehand, the textual content is
improvised on the spot and doesn't exist in written form unless it gets
transcribed.

Interviews and podcasts are other good examples - as you say, many users who
can hear would prefer to read it, I certainly would, but the obvious reality
is that the textual version of those things _does not exist_ unless it gets
made, and making it takes much more time than recording the interview or
podcast in the first place.

~~~
SilasX
I was specifically referring to videos intended for conveying information, not
entertainment. If professionally done, it has a script. If a college lecture,
it has a corresponding textbook exposition. And you've seriously never written
up any equivalent to any lecture content? It's all extemporaneous, all the
time, and you can't spare the one time to write it down?

~~~
PeterisP
We don't have a tradition of teaching from a _particular_ textbook (some
universities do, some don't) so generally a lecture would include pointers
towards chapters in multiple _different_ textbooks, none of which match the
contents of the lecture exactly (i.e. they're supplementary material, extra
reading); and even if some lecture was based on a particular textbook, _that_
text (unlike the lecture video/transcript) would be something that couldn't
ever be published with a video because of copyright issues.

For my own teaching, no, I don't write up a "script" beforehand, I prepare
content and plan for the topics and key points that I intend to cover in this
lecture (and the next one, if we go quicker than expected), but the actual
content heavily depends on how the students react, what they are
(mis)understanding, what are the questions, etc. I don't consider well-
scripted lectures a good thing, the lecturers that I know who are more into
"reading off a script" give quite weak lectures IMHO.

Preparing in-depth textual material would seem a waste of effort as students
would get the same content in the lecture. I wouldn't use it for other
students since I'd anyway never give the same lecture twice - research is
progressing fast, so my 2016 content is dated now and this year's content will
definitely have to be rewritten (and the course restructured) next year.
Admittedly, that's context-dependant - my situation is uncommon, there's a
_lot_ of teaching that involves lecturing the same introductory topic for many
years off of a classic textbook to multiple larger audiences, and in that
context your arguments would definitely apply.

But that's actually all offtopic.

The main issue is that _none of this is equivalent to the transcript._ Nothing
of what you propose would make the video accessible to a deaf person. A
textbook chapter or the lecture materials are _alternatives_ to the video, it
helps making do _without_ the video, but doesn't make accessible the part of
video where the lecturer is writing something interesting on the blackboard
and explaining something that you can't hear.

~~~
SilasX
I think you're the one who's demonstrating an atypical case here; most
lectures aren't presenting on some rapidly changing topic, and even if they
are, there is some Wikipedia text that is kept up to date.

>The main issue is that none of this is equivalent to the transcript. Nothing
of what you propose would make the video accessible to a deaf person. A
textbook chapter or the lecture materials are alternatives to the video, it
helps making do without the video, but doesn't make accessible the part of
video where the lecturer is writing something interesting on the blackboard
and explaining something that you can't hear.

That's overstating it. The relevant metric is, if some deaf (or video-hating
like me) person wants to learn the material, _do they have a useful option_?
The fact that you can't make _that specific video_ useful isn't relevant. Even
pointing to some text that hits the same key points is major step up, and is
trivial to do, and yet most refuse to do, just like most refuse to provide the
_one_ insight that they're making me watch a three minute video to hear.

------
prezjordan
Glad to see the lines blurred even more. Accessible design isn't about
changing things to check off items of a list - your users' ability lie on a
spectrum, and our job is to make sure we aren't ignoring vast sections of that
spectrum.

When trying to sell people on Shade[0] I like to explain that good contrast
isn't just for people with a visual impairment, but important for folks on old
monitors, classroom projects, or even looking at their phone in direct
sunlight.

Mega props for Safia[1] for posing this question, the responses in here are
super eye-opening.

[0]: [http://halogensoftworks.com/shade/](http://halogensoftworks.com/shade/)

[1]: [https://twitter.com/captainsafia](https://twitter.com/captainsafia)

------
ofek
I have Spinal Muscular Atrophy and due to weakness can only use a mouse + on-
screen keyboard.

My biggest gripe is sites that load with focus on an element that doesn't
allow me to scroll down via the down arrow. This forces me to click the middle
of the page to continue navigation via OSK.

Bad:
[https://circleci.com/gh/wbond/asn1crypto](https://circleci.com/gh/wbond/asn1crypto)
(can't even page down)
[https://pypi.python.org/pypi](https://pypi.python.org/pypi) (new pypi might
change this)

Good: [https://www.youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com)
[https://www.quora.com](https://www.quora.com)

~~~
sosuke
This sounds like an excellent opportunity to make an extension for Chrome or
addon for Firefox to clear, reset, or set focus on load.

------
komali2
>Many replies, especially from people with dyslexia or cognitive impairments,
were about large chunks of text.

>Huge paragraphs. A page on Wikipedia often consists of many long paragraphs
with long sentences. I lose my place within seconds.

I have often felt like a lot of web content writers and editors could benefit
from reading books like Stephen King's _On Writing_. Wikipedia in particular
is often criminally unreadable when you get to deep-topic articles that are
generally only seen by experts in that field. Which makes sense, but I would
hope an expert could "dumb it down" for an encyclopedia.

Breaking something down into paragraphs with stupid-easy topic sentences
doesn't just help out laymen, it also makes your content just more readable
and navigable in general. Plus it's perfect for the web, you can stick an in-
page anchor tag there and have a table of contents at the top of your page.

------
Kenji
_i 'm curious to know: if you have a disability, what's the hardest thing
about browsing the web?_

First thing that comes to mind: CAPTCHA. Not all of them have an audio option.
If you're blind, you're out of luck. Not to mention, CAPTCHAs these days are
so difficult that I feel like robots will soon surpass us at recognizing these
oddly distorted characters and words.

Interestingly, the article only mentions CAPTCHAs at the bottom. I wish there
was more innovation and theory about CAPTCHAs, I'm personally very fascinated
by them, but it's a very difficult topic that is rarely treated rigorously.
How do you quantify "hard to recognize for robots" etc.

~~~
cbhl
> CAPTCHAs these days are so difficult that I feel like robots will soon
> surpass us at recognizing

They already do. That's why they introduced No Captcha[0] in 2014, and
Invisible Captcha[1] earlier this year.

[0] [https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-
introd...](https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing-
no-captcha.html)

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/googles-recaptcha-
an...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/googles-recaptcha-announces-
invisible-background-captchas/)

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on reCaptcha.

~~~
firebird84
Even "No Captcha" is rather annoying as I'm almost ALWAYS asked for additional
input. The checkbox alone never does it for me. Why do I seem so bot-ish?

~~~
sliverstorm
You _are_ a bot. You just haven't become self-aware yet.

~~~
still_grokking
Says someone who's only a part of a simulation...

------
DubiousPusher
As a visually impaired person, I can honestly say one of the best things is
when accessibility is built into application frameworks.

It's not perfect but it gets you 90% of the way there in a lot of apps that
wouldn't implement the features otherwise.

For example, most apps that are built with Microsoft frameworks automatically
support high contrast and narrator.

The super awesome part about this for me is if accessibility is built in at
the framework level I can develop start to finish with the accessibility
features enabled. I don't have to struggle with an inaccessible app until the
features are"in".

------
tikhonj
One thing I realized about writing maintainable code applies just as well to
designing accessible interfaces: the right habits get you 80% of the way,
_with no real cost beyond developing the habits_. Getting into the right
habits is an O(1) investment that pays off by making _everything_ you produce
more accessible.

Adding alt tags to images, using high contrast colors for text, writing clean,
well-structured markup... all these things don't take significant time on top
of your normal work as long as you do them right away. They also have
additional benefits like making the site easier to parse for search engines.

~~~
steveax
Yep, the 80%-90% level is pretty easily met by doing those along with using
the native controls (buttons, links, etc.) properly. When your designers hand
you a custom interactive widget, you can add a good chunk (50%-100% extra
effort) to your estimate to make it accessible.

I struggle getting designers to consider how a thing is supposed to work
without a mouse for instance.

~~~
test1235
a lot of designers I've worked with don't come from a web development
background - they typically come from print design. They know how to make
things look good, but when it comes to user interaction, or web specific
functionality they don't know that they have to deal with much, much more than
what you can see in the first instance.

You can't just design something and have it look good, you need to consider
what happens in x, y, z scenario, and if you don't have experience, you don't
even know those things even exist.

------
Abishek_Muthian
I'm a dwarf with disability in limbs, my biggest concern has been navigation
in smartphones/apps; especially since they are growing in size. Fortunately I
have good engineering experience and was able to customise my devices
(android: pie controls) according to my needs. I wonder whether the reason we
didn't see much tweets in the post for people with limb disabilities are
because they weren't able to access twitter in the first place.

I must credit smart watches (Android wear/ Apple Watch) here, I'm sure it
helps a great deal for people with disabilities. Accessibility is one good
reason for not to let smart watches die. I'm planning to write a blog post on
this context soon.

------
makecheck
Simply put, things that are better for someone who _needs_ accessibility are
also better for _everyone else_.

Maybe I want to watch something while muted. Maybe I just don't WANT your site
screwing with my font size. Maybe it is a lot easier to tab between things
than using the mouse. The list goes on.

~~~
vacri
> _Simply put_

But in the real world, this isn't always the case. The article itself is a
great example. It uses giant fonts and lots of whitespace, which is good for
people with poor eyesight, but it leads to a choppy, hard to follow article.
It also forces you to use navigation to follow a chain of thought.

~~~
makecheck
I said "needs _accessibility_ ", not "needs large font". Accessibility means
that if someone needs to set the font to size 100, they _can_ and the system
won't break because of it (e.g. text won't be cut off with no way to see what
was lost). It doesn't mean that the default choice is some kind of lowest
common denominator that is weird for everybody.

The only exception where defaults must be pessimistic are the settings menus
themselves. For instance, a button that increases font size must be large
enough for anyone to see; a button that changes language cannot be only
labelled with the text of a foreign language.

------
SimonPStevens
Question for all the people claiming basic accessibility is low effort...

Following your low effort implementations of basic accessibility have you
actually tested your website/app with a screen reader or other accessibility
tool? Or have you just used some semantic markup, scattered a few aria tags
and called it a day?

I have worked on a mobile phone app where the client dictated certain
accessibility requirements up front. I can tell you right now if you aren't
testing in a screenreader then you haven't achieved basic accessibility. And
from my experience, once you start testing with a screenreader you will
quickly discover that all those assumptions you have about "all you've got to
do is add a few alt tags, pick sensible font colours and use semantic
structure" fly right out the window.

Every single app screen we did had an additional test pass by a tester who
would use the screen via accessibility tools. The app as a whole had several
accessibility test passes during the dev cycle. Both of these test stages
would always throw up new bugs that would often require significant rework to
get working right with the accessibility tools.

I'll grant that my experience here is in mobile apps, and I accept that the
available accessibility tools for mobile are limited and perhaps that was part
of our challenge. And maybe the ecosystem is more mature for websites and
desktop apps. So this is a genuine question for those claiming it's low
effort. Have you actually tested it?

If you haven't actually tested it, perhaps your websites/apps are part of the
problem, you just don't know it.

I personally think developing for accessibility is a good thing, and I always
do it when I can. I try to follow best practises for accessibility even if the
current project owners don't mandate it. But at some point you can't just
follow best practise and hope it works, you've got to commit to testing it,
and then commit to raising bugs against it, and triaging them through the bug
process, and at some point you'll be at a standup 2 days before a release with
10 bugs on the board, 6 of them accessibility bugs, and only time to fix 4.
Guess which ones are going to make it into the release.

If my experience follows for other domains, to claim that it has zero or
minimal cost is ludicrous. Developing and testing for working accessibility
comes with significant cost and therefore of course it's a business decision.

~~~
robin_reala
VoiceOver is built into iOS and Talkback into Androins. These tools are free
and already available in your environment of choice! If as a developer you
can’t even spend the 5 minutes to turn it on and run your new feature through
it then you’re abdicating responsibility to the point that you’re failing at
your job.

~~~
SimonPStevens
You've entirely missed the point of my post, it makes no difference if the
tools are built in or how quick they are to activate. Have you personally
actually tried turning these tools on and testing your app?

My point is that I believe that all the people claiming it's easy are only
doing the 'best practise' implementation (which I agree, is easy and doesn't
add much time) but without actually testing that it all works smoothly they
haven't finished and are just part of the problem.

My point is that from my direct personal experience with similar tools, it
does not take 5 minutes. It takes weeks of additional testing and bug fixes to
get a large app working smoothly with accessibility tools, after you've
followed the best practise for the initial implementation.

~~~
robin_reala
Yes, I test in VoiceOver and Talkback (although for websites, not apps to be
fair). But I dispute the assertion that it takes weeks. It takes a small
amount of time _per feature_ to test, and certainly no more than testing on
multiple versions of the OS or multiple screen sizes.

If on the other hand you’re throwing untested features over the wall to a QA
team, then yes, it’ll be inefficient. That’s the nature of the beast.

------
kozak
Video captions are also very important for non-native English speakers (or
better say, those who cannot really SPEAK this language) because it's often
hard for them to discern English words by ear.

------
notadoc
Fonts are a big issue, but it's not just the web. Two things I hear frequent
complaints about are:

\- low contrast overly thin and small iOS fonts

\- low contrast overly thin very small Mac fonts

This includes myself but I've had this conversation with multiple other
people. My eyesight isn't bad enough to require reading glasses but it's not
perfect, and the microfonts throughout Apple software gives me eyestrain
quickly.

It seems like the glaring white UI and microscopic gray fonts in iOS 7 and OSX
Yosemite onward were designed for other designers, and not for users or
usability.

~~~
matthewmacleod
It’s worth pointing out though that iOS has extensive options for enhancing
accessibility, like increasing font size and contrast, reducing transparency,
removing animations, and so on. To me, this seems like a reasonable
compromise.

~~~
gnicholas
Unfortunately, many many apps ignore these settings wholesale. I actually did
a survey of news apps to see which ones offered any text accessibility options
at all (or respected the OS level settings). The results are not good,
especially among tech company news readers.

[https://hackernoon.com/the-importance-of-text-
accessibility-...](https://hackernoon.com/the-importance-of-text-
accessibility-in-news-apps-45ac8cca2e9a)

------
gwbas1c
I often browse in bed, and I just can't listen to a video. Other times, I
slowly read web page between compiles and don't want to listen to a video. I
almost always prefer the transcript.

I also find small fonts difficult because many times I sit farther back to
give my "perfect" young eyes a rest. Small fonts are difficult.

I block ads to avoid distracting animations and sounds, and I have no
cognitive impairments.

It seems like these guidelines are important: the web isn't an art project,
it's a communication medium.

------
bsder
I'm _NOT_ disabled, and I hate videos without a transcript.

Most videos suck. Giving me a transcript lets me read everything _quickly_ and
determine if the video is worth spending an hour on.

------
gnicholas
I'm surprised not to see images-of-text being called out here. This is a huge
issue on Twitter, since people work around the character limit by using images
with lots of text. I've even seen this done on #a11y twitter chats, amazingly.

~~~
robin_reala
Twitter lets you add alt text to images, no problem there. Just people are
lazy...

~~~
gnicholas
Yeah, never see those used! Do you know if they can be added after the tweet
is posted? Or if the text is used in search results?

~~~
robin_reala
Ah, no idea, I just use my default client (Echofon) to do it when I post an
image.

------
madiathomas
Majority of people wouldn't mind making their sites accessible for the
disabled if they had necessary skills to do so. Problem is that almost every
Web Designer, know close to nothing about designing websites for
accessibility. In fact, most Website Designers can't even make a website to be
usable by people with no disability. Focus is on making websites to look
fancy.

Another thing I have noticed is that a chapter about usability of websites is
treated as an extra. Usually at the end of the book as additional reading.
Maybe we need to regulate the industry and make it impossible for people to
start practicing without proper training. There are codes of conduct that a
lawyer, accountant or doctor has to abide to, but there is none for a Website
Designer. No implications whatsoever for not making websites to be accessible.
They end up blindly ignoring accessibility because they weren't trained to do
it.

Fining companies won't help because 99% of the companies are headed by people
who don't need to know if the website is accessible to the blind or not. They
just trust the designer to do a good job. The only time they will know they
are supposed to make their website to be accessible is when they are getting
sued. Problem is that regulation will greatly reduce number of practitioners
and greatly increase the cost of website development.

------
waqf
> _It’s really easy to test, just view your site in greyscale._

This is misinformation: some common forms of color-blindness (protan) affect
perceived luminance.

Use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Yes, they are constraining.
You'll quickly realize that the easiest way to comply is not to rely on color
to convey information.

------
danmeade
The U.K Home Office has put together a pretty neat resource to help with
accessibility across the varying needs of web users, they've put together a
bunch of posters which clearly outline the Do's and Do not's, all in one handy
Github repo
[https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/posters/tree/master/accessib...](https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/posters/tree/master/accessibility)

------
randcraw
It's not just the web. I've long been frustrated by the legibility of tiny
fonts on laptops with even medium-res screens. Now that Apple has introduced
an even higher-res 5K display on the iMac, I find it almost impossible to read
some system menus and popups.

When did it become OK for Apple's long-vaunted UI become so user unfriendly?
Jef Raskin must be rolling over in his grave. This is definitely NOT
"computing for the rest of us".

~~~
vultour
My eyesight is completely OK, but I crank up the font size everywhere. Both
Reddit and HN are at 150% magnification, every time I see them on a new device
I'm surprised people feel comfortable reading such small text.

~~~
sandov
This. I've been recently wondering if I either sit too far away from the
monitor (~60 cm) or my screen has too much pixel density (1080p / 21.5
inches), Because my vision is almost perfect and I can barely read the text on
HN without zooming in.

------
x0
ADHD here. Glad I read this article, it's vindicating to see other ADHD people
complaining about animations and autoplay. My God, if there's any autoplaying
anything, I cannot read your article. I cannot.

I even had to hide the friends thing in Spotify (the right sidebar that
updates what your friends are listening to) by dragging the window slightly
off the screen. (Recently found out that you can disable it in Settings which
is great)

------
foota
Would it be difficult to make a program that sits in the audio stack (probably
on Windows) and tries to run voice recognition on everything coming over the
line and then renders anything that sounds like speech at the bottom of the
screen?

~~~
Garfgon
Yes. Youtube tries (tried?) to autocaption videos, and the results were
infamously bad.

------
Bakary
Doesn't asking this question on Twitter affect the result, as some people with
disabilities might not be able to access that service in the first place?

------
tejohnso
Seems like captioning is a huge issue. Isn't there an audio equivalent of a
screen reader?

~~~
PeterisP
Not really. I mean, there _are_ such things, but the technology isn't good
enough (yet?).

Text-to-speech generally works well, it produces good results almost always.
If you try hard (or really need to), you can understand even if it tries to
"speak" the text assuming the wrong language.

Speech-to-text works somewhat well under certain conditions (e.g. known
speaker to which the system is adapted, known domain of text, no accents, no
background noise, etc), and even then it gets quite a few errors; if you're
just running it on random youtube videos, the results often are _totally_ off.

------
Cumulonimbus
This is an interesting area, with lots of opinion on implementations. It gets
messy, and quick.

So it's normally part of the ADA to make things accessible. But with building,
one can retrofit an older building that wasn't accessible with a certain
percentage, and still avoid ADA compliance. I had that discussion in an
architecture class, how to strictly comply with the law, whilst still skirting
around it. The ADA as far as I know also applies to online as well, but the
percentage change of a building doesn't really have an analogue with online.

The justification was purely money - disabled people work lower wage jobs, and
aren't worth the money spent in upgrading a facility. It's disgusting logic,
but there you have it.

I also think of DRM. It prevents end users from fair use (and also carte
blanch copying).. Yet it also prevents converting the audio track to text with
something like Sphinx. And with the deaf/hard of hearing, many sites prevent
downloading and transcribing automatically. Youtube is trying with automatic
transcription, and it certainly is a start. It's still hard, given the amount
of sounds that are non-spoken that CC incorporates (sound of drums far away)
(eerie music with footsteps).

And as mjevans said, what about an individual who releases content and doesn't
have the resources to do ADA compliance? Is the correct answer is to ban said
content? That seems to go in a really wrong direction as well. But we saw this
earlier with (I forget which university) whom deleted all their videos
primarily because they were dumped free online, without closed captioning.
Instead, we all lost.

And as a developer, how do I determine _how_ to write something that's
disability friendly? It seems that flat text HTML with pictures and little/no
JS seem to be the way. With pictures, include a alt text with a general
description. With a video, include a transcript. Make sure the website will
work effectively with Lynx because screen scrapers will tab through when
reading.... But can I be sure that the above is correct? One thing I'm sure
of, is that I'm missing a great deal of stuff. Red/Green or Blue/Yellow
colorblindness, reduced vision, font issues (dyslexic fonts), Captcha handicap
issues, and plenty more. How can I guarantee that I'm not just complying with
the law, but makes my site usable? As far as I can tell, make a good attempt
and wait for a lawsuit.

Then again, coming back to what was told of us in class - its an ugly
"formula", but the disabled don't offer much in the way of economic gain, so
why is there a reason to cater to them? (No, it's not what I believe, but a
hard set of rules that people like Architects consider with regards to pricing
with clients. I see no reason why this financial rubric isn't also considered
online.)

~~~
bluGill
For a building I've always questioned if we should make it accessible, for
safety reasons. When a building starts on fire and if you are in a wheelchair
you are much more likely to die: no using the elevators, you can't use the
stairs or the fire escape.

In my opinion we should require that all buildings be accessible on the ground
floor(s). Those who medically cannot handle stairs should be given priority to
the ground floor. (this includes any store that might want to sell to
handicapped)

Of course wheelchairs are only one type of accessibility. Deaf and/or blind
people can be expected to need some accommodation as well, but their needs are
much different (and cheaper!) than the wheelchair bound.

~~~
mjevans
In all well designed public buildings the emergency stairwells are actually
isolated air-spaces (when the doors are shut). Their ventilation systems
should draw from a location likely to be free of smoke and they should be at a
higher pressure than every possible entry point so that they are positive
pressure.

In such setups the /landings/ are life safety zones where those in wheel
chairs can wait until rescue arrives to literally carry them down the
stairwell (a stair sled might be a good for the rescuers).

It seems that internationally (recently the UK) laws and building codes are
not as strict.

------
TheAceOfHearts
I usually prefer text over video, and the point that audio-only content isn't
accessible makes for a very compelling argument to always provide a text
version. So, in addition to wider reach, it makes it easier to consume the
content at a pace you're comfortable with, as well as return later and easily
reference specific parts.

For the motion problem, Safari actually introduced a solution a few months
ago: the prefers-reduced-motion media query [0]. Hopefully other browsers will
follow along and add support. Relevant issues per browser: Firefox [1], Chrome
[2], Edge [3]. It doesn't look like any vendor has signaled interest, though.

I don't understand the wall of text point. Sometimes a topic requires a lot of
nuanced points and clarifications, which might require long sentences and
paragraph. I'm all for making content as approachable as possible, but I don't
know if you can reasonably apply it to everything? I think seeing a few
examples would probably help me understand.

For the small font size problem, browsers provide a solution! In Safari you
can specify a minimum font size in Preferences > Advanced > Accessibility >
[x] Never use font sizes smaller than [number]. Firefox also support a minimum
font size [4], although the option is a bit hidden.

Too lazy to comment on the remaining points, but this was a really insightful
post. I think we need more content like this to help us understand these
problems. I'd guess most cases of poor accessibility are due to a general lack
of awareness on the part of the development team.

My experience has been that making web apps accessible can be very
challenging. There's not much good documentation or examples available, so as
soon as you try implementing something more complicated than a traditional
website, things start to break down.

In the previous paragraph I was going to reference existing w3c docs to
explain my point, so I looked up their latest docs only to find that they've
made some huge improvements! Check out the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices draft
[5]. It looks like now every single widget has simple docs and multiple
examples. Even if I haven't implemented any widgets with this, just by
skimming through, it looks much more promising than any of the previous docs
I've seen.]

[0] [https://webkit.org/blog/7551/responsive-design-for-
motion/](https://webkit.org/blog/7551/responsive-design-for-motion/)

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1365045](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1365045)

[2]
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=722548](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=722548)

[3] [https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-
dev...](https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-
developer/suggestions/19291531-add-support-for-css-prefers-reduced-motion-
media-f)

[4] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/font-size-and-zoom-
incr...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/font-size-and-zoom-increase-
size-of-web-pages)

[5] [https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/](https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-
aria-practices/)

