
What we found when we tested tools on the world’s least-accessible webpage - robin_reala
https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2017/02/24/what-we-found-when-we-tested-tools-on-the-worlds-least-accessible-webpage/
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jandrese
That page was way more accessable than plenty of sites I have seen. I mean
content shows up even if you don't have Javascript enabled or Flash installed.
That alone puts it way ahead of a huge number of websites.

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beaconstudios
is javascript-free content such an important issue for accessibility? Do
screen-readers not work on javascript-generated websites?

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mkozlows
No, "works without Javascript" is way outdated advice that has nothing to do
with accessibility in the modern world. The whole point of ARIA is to make
dynamic, JS-driven web UIs accessible.

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BickNowstrom
But websites that don't bother to make their websites accessible without
JavaScript have a bad track record for implementing ARIA (correctly).

Good accessible design has benefits for everyone, not only the disabled. For
instance, that half of the web breaks when you turn off JavaScript, turned
into a security issue when Tor Browser enabled it by default (to not confuse
their users with a broken web).

Progressive enhancement and accessibility go hand-in-hand. If not for
accessibility reasons, then develop websites with accessible JavaScript for
security, SEO/automated access, or progressive enhancement reasons.

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TorKlingberg
It is strangely unnerving to read a blog post formatted in the Standard UK
Government Website Template. There is nothing wrong with it, but I keep
expecting a stern message about paying my taxes.

~~~
majewsky
It looks very professional, though.

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amptorn
Gov.uk and other websites have usability requirements beyond most people's
worst nightmares because unlike the social media platform _du jour_ , people
do not have the option of just not using the website. Even if you want to file
your tax return using a paper form or over the form, you need to request the
form or find out the phone number somehow, which means visiting the site. And
for many, the web is the most accessible way to do what they need to do.

So this means not supporting IE8 flat-out isn't an option. Not supporting
blind users is not an option. Not supporting 95-year-old users is not an
option. Bells and whistles, distractingly flashy designs, _any_ use of
JavaScript without a fallback.

Weirdly, the result is a very clean, professional, usable website. It's
amazing!

~~~
kristianc
This - and also before GDS, each of the different government departments had
their own stack, their own design standards, and their own verification
systems. This would even apply to the hundreds of different local authorities.
GDS has done an amazing job cleaning up the mess, and open sourcing a lot of
it, within a government culture that is very resistant to change.

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steven777400
This was a useful article. We're starting to have the accessibility discussion
for our externally facing sites/applications, driven in part by new state
requirements for assessing and ensuring accessibility.

There's often the knee-jerk "can't we just have a tool approve or identify
problems?" because no one wants to allocate or train staff. So it's useful to
have evidence that trained analysis in addition to automated tools is
appropriate to enable compliance.

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sverige
Hmmm. Maybe my bank's website is just a government experiment to test
accessibility.

~~~
amorphid
I like my credit union's website. It looks and feels like a website straight
out of 2001, and it makes no attempt to be clever or slick in anyway. It's
also very usable.

My other account at MegaBank is a very modern, slick, and somewhat annoying to
use. It's so slick, that when I click on a dropdown, the dropdown choices
appear in a modal in the middle of the screen, without greying out the rest of
the screen. I had to click on the dropdown about 4 times before I realized the
data was being displayed somewhere else. It was actually quite usable before
they got all frontend-y on me.

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lokedhs
The page has an example of “Wide page forces users to scroll horizontally”.

    
    
        Hacker News, which is otherwise very friendly to limited browsers (such as mobile browsers) really suffers from this in certain cases, like this one.
    

Test case here: [https://alphagov.github.io/accessibility-tool-
audit/tests/pa...](https://alphagov.github.io/accessibility-tool-
audit/tests/page-layout-wide-page-forces-users-to-scroll-horizontally.html)

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random_rr
This is a good article, and this is going to be really nitpicky... but please,
use the word 'failures', not 'fails'. For my sake :)

> to create a web-page full of accessibility fails.

> At the moment it contains a total of 143 fails grouped into 19 categories.

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DanBC
On a tangent, but because they read HN sometimes: please can the ESA phone
number (0345 608 8545) be made easier to find?

It's not currently on the site anywhere (as far as I can tell).

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robin_reala
I the number into the search and landed on [https://www.gov.uk/employment-
support-allowance/what-youll-g...](https://www.gov.uk/employment-support-
allowance/what-youll-get) . It’s on there, but pretty small. If you look at
the bottom of GOV.UK pages you’ll see an ‘Is there anything wrong with this
page?’ link which is monitored, so maybe submit feedback through there?

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TheSockStealer
This begs the question if using one tool is not sufficient, is using a
specific selection of tools each with their own strengths, will give a better
result?

~~~
mkozlows
No. Many of the things that automated tools can't find are simply impossible
to judge in an automated way. Alt text being appropriate for images, for
instance, is something that has to be verified by a human (or an AI that's
indistinguishable from one).

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scott_s
Hmmm. Facebook is already automatically adding alt text to uploaded images
([http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/5/11364914/facebook-
automatic...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/5/11364914/facebook-automatic-
alt-tags-blind-visually-impared)). I think it's within reason to do a
comparison of that generated text with the real text, and come up with a score
of how likely it is to be representative.

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LeanderK
i think accessibility (to a certain degree) might be a application of ML (for
example: relations between text based on the layout). Or a quick summary of
the page.

I just don't know how to obtain the data needed for training :). Might just be
too hard, idk.

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johan_larson
I has hoping they had found some incredibly inaccessible webpage in the wild.
Instead they built one. :(

Boo! Hiss! Click-bait!

