
3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former? - fionatg
http://www.fionatg.com/BlogPost/1005/3-of-users-browse-with-ie9-and-14-of-users
======
ColinDabritz
As a side note, designing well for disabilities often translates to better
design as well. Those alternate text labels and better layout for screen
readers can make your site easier for the googlebot to read. You can find
navigation and flow issues. Buttons that are hard to click are harder for
everyone to click, even if some can manage. Or those buttons are really hard
for everyone on tablets to hit because they are too small.

~~~
speg
This happens in the real world too, aka the sidewalk effect. The cutouts in
the sidewalk for wheelchairs are now used by everyone else too for their:
strollers, bikes, shopping carts, and anyone else who doesn't want to raise
their foot an extra couple of inches.

~~~
lmm
OTOH I've seen pedestrians almost-hit by an out-of-control car that would have
been stopped by a proper kerb but instead hit one of those ramps.

~~~
colanderman
I've seen multiple bicyclists almost hit by in-controls cars because they
couldn't ride safely on the sidewalks without those ramps.

(Yes, riding on sidewalks is technically illegal. There are many places where
it's much much safer and there are no pedestrians to bother.)

~~~
bunderbunder
In most cases you're more likely to be hit by a car if you're riding on the
sidewalk. Last numbers I suggest that your risk of being killed by a car is
about twice as high when you're on the sidewalk.

The reason is simple: Bikes move quickly, and bikes on the sidewalk are much
harder for motorists to see than bikes on the street. That makes it extremely
difficult - sometimes impossible - for drivers to see or anticipate when a
bike is about to cross a street, alley, or driveway. Meanwhile, cyclists are
relatively unaware of their surroundings compared to pedestrians, for the same
reason that motorists are: They're moving faster. These two factors can easily
combine to create a sudden use-of-space conflict that cyclists never win.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
That might the case for bikes on the pavement in general, but there are some
stretches of road where the road would be more dangerous.

------
joblessjunkie
I have poor vision.

This website uses a herd-to-read font and disables pinch-to-zoom (an essential
feature) on my iPad.

~~~
leorocky
This website is even difficult to read on a regular desktop browser (too wide,
downvoted comments increasingly impossible to read causing eye strain). I
recommend using your own content script with Chrome. This may not help on your
iPad but on Android you can use Firefox with your own userscript. It's the
only way I can tolerate it.

It would probably take a competent someone a few hours to fix the readability
issues of this site but they just never get around to it.

Edit:

Here's a link to what all comments look like for me, even if they're
downvoted:

[http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/v5zcn9n4vg4m3cn/2014-06-1...](http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/v5zcn9n4vg4m3cn/2014-06-12%20at%208.30%20AM%202x.png)

I also disabled scores and voting because I dislike that stuff.

This is the home page:

[http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/sicqor50smsl4hx/2014-06-1...](http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/sicqor50smsl4hx/2014-06-12%20at%208.35%20AM%202x.png)

~~~
shutupalready
joblessjunkie means the original article's site.

Pinch-to-zoom works fine on HackerNews on an iPad, and the HackerNews font is
nothing unusual.

Regarding HN being too wide, why don't you narrow your browser window?

Personally, I like the fact the traditional web design in which HN adjusts the
line to screen width rather than imposing a width.

~~~
claudius
Hm, I’d be happy with some max-width:50em or so on the actual text. Now if
only Firefox had a built-in way to apply custom user stylesheets to websites…

~~~
pmontra
It's not built-in but the Stylish extension does that.

~~~
sp332
Claudius is being sarcastic.
[http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css](http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css)

~~~
claudius
Sarcastic, yes, but mostly relating to Opera 12.x’s UserCSS features; I didn’t
actually know about userContent.css. Thanks for the pointer, although it seems
to be impossible to only apply it to certain sites?

~~~
sp332
@-moz-document url-prefix() or @-moz-document domain() ?
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/CSS/@document](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/CSS/@document)
[http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=286866](http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=286866)

~~~
claudius
Yay, thank you for the handholding, it actually seems to work quite nicely :-)

------
Tomte
Probably because those 3% are homogeneous, while the 9% decompose into lots
and lots of categories, all with specific needs, and all much smaller than 9%.

~~~
didgeoridoo
...although you can do a damn good job addressing most of them with a few
simple things:

-Write good, semantic HTML, and use alt tags correctly

-Don't overwrite browser defaults for scrolling, tabbing, etc (even if it's "hot design")

-Don't rely purely on color to convey information

-Use ARIA attributes where you can if you're building an application

Some harder stuff that is really still worth it:

-Send your media out for subtitling/transcription (remarkably inexpensive)

-Actually test your site with some disabled individuals, or at least have a go yourself with the NoCoffee Chrome extension to simulate certain visual difficulties

~~~
dominicgs
A terrible example of relying on colour includes the braille at some Melbourne
train stations[1]. It appears that someone directly translated the phrase
"Press green button" rather than using left or right.

[1] [http://wongm.com/2014/06/asking-vision-impaired-to-push-
gree...](http://wongm.com/2014/06/asking-vision-impaired-to-push-green-
button/)

~~~
greenyoda
And it's not just blind people who can't differentiate between red and green.
A significant percentage of the population has red-green color blindness.

~~~
dllthomas
Yes, but forgetting that is a less _glaring_ (and therefore less amusing)
error than writing "press the green button" in braille...

------
hluska
I don't agree that accessibility is a training issue and I certainly don't
agree that it would take a month to become familiar with accessibility
guidelines.

Rather, download a screen reader (for Windows I like Windows Eyes), learn to
use it, shut off your monitor and spend one hour trying to use the web. That
will give you all the context that you need. Once you're armed with this
experience, make navigating through your site with your screen reader part of
your regular QA process.

If you follow these steps you will:

\- craft sites that are significantly easier for people with visual
impairments to use.

\- build sites that are easier for search engines to crawl.

\- gain an understanding of WCAG that you can apply to everything you develop.

This method will not prevent usability nightmares like horrible font/icons,
but it will get you most of the way to WCAG.

~~~
lilsunnybee
So instead of having any sort of standards and accessibility best practices
taught and adopted industry-wide, that take into account a much larger
spectrum of disabilities, the programmers reading this should just go and
spend an unspecified amount of time using a screen reader from now on?

~~~
hluska
Definitely not, but as the OP wrote, you don't start at the HTML5 spec if you
want to learn to make web pages. Learning to use a screen reader and actually
testing sites with it is not only a very important skill to have, but it will
give developers more insight and perspective into accessibility. Standards can
fill in the gaps, but I believe you still need a 'wow' moment when you feel
completely lost on a website.

~~~
lilsunnybee
I misinterpreted your suggestion, and appreciate the clarification.

~~~
hluska
Thanks very much for your question. I didn't realize what a horrible job of
writing I did until I read your response!!

------
xbryanx
It's important to remind developers and clients in the United States that some
aspects of web accessibility are required by federal law:

[http://www.ada.gov/](http://www.ada.gov/)

Does the ADA apply to the web? Yes. This has been supported in court, when the
National Federation of the Blind successfully sued Target over their
e-commerce site:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_Bli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_Blind_v._Target_Corporation)

The ADA is a great example of important legislation that protects the rights
of a minority group that is regularly ignored by the market.

------
vegardx
Speaking as a colour-blind person (protanopia) I welcome this kind of thoughts
with open arms. There's actually not much you have to do in order to make a
website at least readable if you just have some basic concepts in mind when
designing.

The latest fad with soft pink and grey is really bad, almost unreadable for
me. Luckily, I can usually just select the text and get blue/white contrast,
which makes it more readable, but lately I've seen people override this too,
or simply just hijack the ability to select text. I could open it in a
screenreader or something similar, but usually I just close the tap and move
along. Just keep that in mind if you decide to override how the browser
behaves.

A funny side note, which was very clear on this website: When you're using pie
charts, also know that it's almost impossible for colour-blind people to read
them. The only two I could pick out was Chrome and IE11.

~~~
Groxx
As a person without color-blindness, but is interested in making it easier for
people with: there are a lot of different varieties of color blindness.
Obviously you can (and usually should) do things like "use different
brightnesses", but it seems to me that this is more solvable by e.g. an OS-
level color filter. Something that allows you to compress colors into the
range you can see.

Would that be even remotely useful? Are there major problems that I'm not
seeing? Is that why I don't see OSes with features like that?

~~~
vegardx
You can change contrast, brightness and such in most modern OSes, but I'd
rather have people take it into account and choose colours wisely. The problem
for most colour-blind people is contrast, not the colours them self.

I can't speak for all colour-blind people, but generally OSes have been really
good at it, the problem is usually inside the browser window. And making
everything look like a unicorn had puked rainbows all over your screen, while
making it very readable, is not comfortable.

------
jiggy2011
I imagine the main reason is that catering to disabilities is much much more
expensive when you consider the variety of disabilities that there are and how
much they differ in severity and how they will affect different individuals in
different ways.

I also guess that people with more severe disabilities are less likely to
control large corporate or personal budgets than the general population and
those that do are either very good at working around their disability of
simply have others to who do it for them.

It's also possible that making a site easier to use for somebody with one
disability might have the effect of making it worse for a person with a
different disability.

~~~
Zelphyr
I'm sure it is quite expensive but then again, as we a web developer, my job
is easily made 50% more difficult (thus VERY expensive) when I have to support
IE.

The problem as I see it--and to your point--is that I work on enterprise web
apps and my Fortune 500 customers have never said a word about accessibility
for some reason. I'm sure they honor their Americans with Disabilities Act
obligations and build ramps into their buildings. Do they then not care about
employees (or customers and vendors for that matter) once they're at their
desks?

------
roberthahn
With this one weird trick, you can make the web better for up to 20% of your
visitors! Let me tell you for free!

    
    
        Please caption your videos, or make transcripts available.
    

Did you get that?

    
    
        Please caption your videos, or make transcripts available.
    

Yes: 20% of people over the age of 12 have some degree of hearing loss[1].
That's 6% more (two IE9 marketshares!) than the total of vision and mobility
disabilities. And if you caption, it's easy for you to see if you did it
right!

[1] Google "percentage of people with hearing loss" to see multiple sources
converging on this number

~~~
Semiapies
Also helps with search, and it will often save time to let people in general
skim a transcript instead of watching a video to see if really covers the
subject they need to know about.

~~~
roberthahn
Precisely. What I'm asking for would benefit a lot more people than the 20%
I'm calling out.

------
methodover
I work at a small startup with a somewhat large user base (1M weekly users or
so) and every time I bring up accessibility issues I get shot down. Just the
other day I was told "You talk more about accessibility than anyone I've ever
met."

Well, yeah, because apparently no one fucking cares. Including you. (I said
this not out-loud, to be clear.)

Thing is, making accessible sites is usually not super difficult. It's mostly
just about making sure your site follows semantic HTML standards and you're
not doing funky javascripty bullshit that a screen reader can't figure out.
(e.g., hover-over states on elements that pop up important help information,
etc.)

~~~
lilsunnybee
It would have been soo awesome if you had said that! :-D

~~~
lilsunnybee
Though advocating for fellow human beings who are treated all the time either
like they're this giant burden, or like they don't exist, is pretty fucking
awesome too. :-)

------
__xtrimsky
Well to be honest I can test my code in IE9 to see if it works. But I have no
idea how a disabled person is experiencing my website, I do put all the "alt"
attributes etc...but it's hard to imagine it.

~~~
smackfu
Yes, that's a real issue. I've had to add JAWS Screen Reader support to an
app, and even after you shell out for the thousand dollar license, it's very
difficult for a casual user to use it in the same way that an actual blind
user does. Ideally you test with an actual impaired user, but they have real
jobs and don't want to spend all their time testing your apps.

~~~
DanBC
There's a gap in the market for usability testing. This would mean that things
are not just validated against specs but checked in real world use.

There are probably many groups already doing this stuff. Perhaps they just
need better organisation or SEO?

------
tendom
I write sites for a government, and I most certainly write code to standards,
then to aria, and finally pick apart any IE weirdness. This has been quite the
fight over the years, but if we want to be considered professionals and called
engineers, then we follow standards, and when an employer says "I want you to
ignore standards because we don't need it" you have to say no, I'll do this
right, or you can find someone else to do it. If we all did this from the
start, we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.

~~~
lilsunnybee
That's wonderful! Both brave and very professional! :-)

~~~
tendom
Thank you, you made my day. Though in truth, I'm not very brave, I'm single,
without wife, girlfriend, or kids, or anyone really depending upon me. And I
work for government because I got tired of making rich men richer. I'm an
idealist, and an idiot in truth. But thank you.

~~~
lilsunnybee
In a better world principled people wouldn't have to feel like idiots. Glad to
make your day! :-)

------
evunveot
If you want to get started with WAI-ARIA and don't want to read hundreds of
pages of documentation, these two references are very helpful:

[http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-
aria/roles#role_definitions](http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-
aria/roles#role_definitions)

[http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-aria-in-
html-20131003/#recommen...](http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-aria-in-
html-20131003/#recommendations-table)

Then you can test with the screenreader NVDA (if you have access to Windows or
a Windows VM):

[http://www.nvaccess.org/](http://www.nvaccess.org/)

I'm no expert, but the process of using ARIA in HTML feels very much like
trying to employ "semantic" HTML5 tags, except that ARIA provides a much
richer vocabulary. It can be good inline documentation, too: when you come
back later and wonder, "What is this div for?", seeing a role="presentation"
attribute is a handy thing.

It starts to feel like ARIA takes over the responsibility of semantics and
HTML becomes just a scaffold, even moreso than it has been in its relationship
with CSS (tags that serve no purpose except as hooks for styling). Which I
appreciate, because "semantic HTML" has always felt limited, awkward and a bit
pointless, apart from the small part of the effort that has known SEO
implications (h1 elements and so forth).

------
eknkc
I hate the font choice of this article.

~~~
fionatg
I think its a love/hate thing with my site theme. I've had a lot of comments
that it looks fantastic. I think I'll have to increase the font size at least.

~~~
Gracana
I actually like the font... but I'm not surprised that a lot of people don't.

~~~
claar
For me, my eyes can't easily scan the text in this font, making it much slower
to read.

It's a very frustrating experience when I'm interested in the article itself,
but it's literally fighting me as I try to get information from it.

------
jakub_g
If you want your site to be accesible, there are a number of things that are a
good way to get started:

1\. Contrast. Don't use gray text on gray background [1]

2\. Keyboard accessibility. Avoid adding onclick handlers on elements that are
not an <a> / <input> / <button> [2]; use tabindex to make certain page element
focusable and CSS's :active, :focus pseudoselectors (adding border, outline,
changing background color etc.) to clearly indicate where's the focus for the
keyboard users so they can navigate the page easily.

3\. Avoid quickly-disappearing menus and everything that requires precise
mouse pointing (elderly people tend to have problems with that) and can't be
triggered from keyboard.

There are lots of websites failing at those basic things. When you fix that,
you can start going further and making site further accessible for certain
minorities.

[1] [http://contrastrebellion.com/](http://contrastrebellion.com/) [2]
[http://jakub-g.github.io/accessibility/onclick/](http://jakub-g.github.io/accessibility/onclick/)

------
thefreeman
Where are those numbers from? 3% seems really low. I would guess the IE8
(being the highest version that can run on XP) population is much higher then
that, but IE9 was chosen to make the number look better.

~~~
ceejayoz
Our stats show 2.3% IE8 users. We handle sites for major, general-market
brands, so it's not skewed as it would be on a tech startup or something.

~~~
eli
Our Energy/Utility industry news site has: 12% IE8 11% IE9

People should always run their own numbers. It can vary quite a bit from the
internet-wide average.

~~~
thefreeman
Pretty off topic, but why would anyone ever stay on IE9? It means you are on >
XP which means you should be able to upgrade to at least 10 I believe, if not
11. Is it just a lack of permissions to upgrade the browser combined with lazy
administrators?

~~~
eli
I don't know. Nearly all the IE9 users are on Win7.

If I had to guess, it's simply because upgrades are such a hassle in heavily
regulated industries. (Above and beyond the typical hassles of an upgrade in
any large enterprise.) I see similar numbers in Healthcare, for example, but
not Education or Construction.

I keep meaning to do a blog post about the tech trends in different
industries.

------
jordanlev
For those that are interested in learning more about building accessible
sites, I found this tutorial to be quite helpful:
[http://alistapart.com/article/accessibility-the-missing-
ingr...](http://alistapart.com/article/accessibility-the-missing-ingredient)

I agree with the OP that the reason most developers don't build accessible
sites is because they don't use the accessibility tools and hence have no
understanding of how they actually work and the experience they provide for
their users. Reading the List Apart article I linked to was rather eye-opening
to me (no pun intended) because I didn't realize that I could just use a
Chrome plugin or my iPhone's voice-over as a screen reader to actually
experience it myself. I am now wishing I could go back and change a lot of
html structure on sites I've built in the past to make it easier to navigate
via screenreaders!

------
coherentpony
Couple of things.

First, these two groups may or may not be mutually exclusive. Catering for the
former may take care of some of the latter too.

Second, this question is actually very easy to answer. Catering to
disabilities makes almost no money. Catering to IE9 gets the customers that
forgot or don't know how to upgrade. That's a wash when it comes to
advertising.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not playing devil's advocate. I do my best to
cater to people with poor vision for anything I write. That includes anything
I use colour for. I'm simply answering the question as if I were the CEO of a
company, where my goal is to make as much money as possible, and not care
about anything else.

~~~
lilsunnybee
Too bad companies aren't people and can't have morals... oh except they're run
by people, so that just means the CEOs running these companies are greedy
unprincipled douchebags.

------
seanbehan
Show me a virtual machine that I can test with, that puts me in the shoes of a
user w/ a disability, and I'll develop with accessibility in mind.

But the inability to replicate the experience in full, I think , inhibits
catering to that demographic.

~~~
krschultz
That's a strawman.

Making a web site or mobile application accessible is about making it
parseable to the accessibility application that the user with disability has
installed on their machine. A text to speech app needs to be able to access
all the content. Put the right tags on fields. Add alt tags on images.

On Android, the Lint tool actually calls these things out. I have no idea what
it feels like to use a screen reader, but I spent the time to actually put in
those tags to enable it for the users of the app. It doesn't take long.

~~~
nailer
> Show me a virtual machine that I can test with

>> Making a web site or mobile application accessible is about making it
parseable to the accessibility application that the user with disability has
installed on their machine.

He wants access to a VM (or many VMs) with the accessibility application that
the user with disability has installed

That doesn't sound like a straw man at all.

~~~
krschultz
"But the inability to replicate the experience in full, I think , inhibits
catering to that demographic."

That makes me think of trying to see what it feels like to be inaccessible
user, I'm picturing a VM that makes the screen fuzzy or something.

If all you want is a VM with the tools installed - that's pretty simple. I
imagine every developer can make a VM with an OS in it, and there are plenty
of free accessibility tools available for the OS of your choice:
[http://usabilitygeek.com/10-free-screen-reader-blind-
visuall...](http://usabilitygeek.com/10-free-screen-reader-blind-visually-
impaired-users/)

------
peterwwillis
> So why do we think it is perfectly acceptable to spend time ensuring that
> our websites work in IE9, but not that you can navigate them with a
> keyboard?

Lack of empathy, basically. There's very little financial or technical
incentive to supporting disabled users. People just don't give enough of a
shit to help people who have a hard time using technology. Sadly it's going to
take a strong push from an advocacy group for disabled users to be taken
seriously, just like they were necessary to get ramps and rails as required
for all businesses.

~~~
GFischer
I advised my political party (here in Uruguay) on a bill to mandate
accesibility throughout government websites, and we submitted it to
Parliament.

Sadly it "died", it wasn't deemed important enough to be voted on and so
languishes in a drawer or cabinet somewhere.

------
bunchjesse
I'm really glad to see accessibility on hacker news this morning!

There was a talk at WWDC about improving accessibility and usability in web
apps if anyone is interested in learning more:
[https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/#516](https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/#516)

------
bitJericho
Why wouldn't you use the spec to learn HTML5? Of course I use books and
samples, but I also use the spec quite a bit.

------
dep_b
Because IE9 is the first browser by Microsoft that supports standards sort of
reliable like more than 70% of the other browsers out in the wild. So we
support it because doesn't take much effort to support it. The choice IE9 or
better is because of the quality of that browser, not because we care a lot
about the actual marketshare.

Furthermore I always try to optimize the "dry" HTML and use semantic HTML not
because of the blind and disabled but because I like my documents be read by
non-humans that apparently are blind and deaf and have bad JavaScript support
in their browsers to boot.

Don't do it for the disabled. Do it for the blind and deaf unstoppable
corporate robots.

~~~
Isofarro
Accessibility is more than just Perceivability - a characteristic robots would
appreciate. Accessibility includes Operability and Usability, these are more
human focused, and less robot focused principles.

What's the point of having a perceivable interface without it being usable or
operable? See this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885113](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885113)
\-- for accessibility tips that have no relevance to spiders/bots, but is
fundamental to accessibility.

That's where this "robots are like blind/deaf people" argument falls down.

Accessibility is about removing barriers for humans, with human related
disabilities. That making those changes also makes content more consumable by
a spider or crawler is a positive side-effect. A great positive side-effect,
but not the primary aim.

------
Friedduck
According to WHO only about 4% have a visual impairment of any kind, and how
exactly would one design for a dexterity impairment? Simpler to navigate
menus?

And as wfjackson notes below, the browser statistics appear to also be in
question.

Finally, I'm sure that someone would contest the claim, but it's far more
difficult to design for blindness than browser idiosyncrasies. The entire UX
has to be re-thought down to the last detail. When you consider the myriad
interactions that could occur and the difficulty of building & testing for a
small audience, it's no wonder that it's still the status quo.

------
joedevon
Great post Fiona! I wrote a similar post ~3 years ago here:
[http://mysqltalk.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/challenge-
accessib...](http://mysqltalk.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/challenge-
accessibility-know-how-needs-to-go-mainstream-with-developers-now/) which
turned into GAAD, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a few months later.
[http://globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/](http://globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/)

I could never have imagined how huge the movement can grow, and I hope you
help us celebrate it next year.

------
bsimpson
For those who are going to I/O next week, there are over a dozen sessions on
Accessibility:

[https://www.google.com/events/io/schedule](https://www.google.com/events/io/schedule)

------
smackfu
I don't know that I agree that looking at this from a market share perspective
is useful. If only 1% of your audience uses screen readers, should you use
that fact to decide it's not worth supporting them?

~~~
netcraft
What other metrics would you propose to use? (genuinely curious)

~~~
smackfu
Yes, it's a tough decision what to support. My point is that the percentages
of disabled users are often far below what would make financial sense to
support, but often there is a need or legal requirement to support them
regardless.

~~~
Isofarro
"My point is that the percentages of disabled users are often far below what
would make financial sense to support"

Yet every dollar spent focused on web accessibility further improves the
usability of the site for your entire audience too.

I rebuilt the Legal & General's online home insurance purchase flow. That
resulted in a doubling of the number of people completing an online purchase.

[http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/legal-and-general-case-
study](http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/legal-and-general-case-study)

There's a before/after graph in my presentation:
[http://isolani.co.uk/presentations/wsg/](http://isolani.co.uk/presentations/wsg/)

------
btbuildem
> I'd like to start this post with a disclaimer: I don't know much about
> creating accessible websites.

As your font choice and general blog layout seem to indicate, yes.

------
jl6
Are there stats on whether having a disability makes you more or less likely
to make a purchase in a given product category? E.g. does having a disability
correlate with not having a job, which correlates with having less disposable
income, which correlates with making fewer purchases?

Or does a disability correlate with going out less which might correlate with
spending more time and money online?

~~~
lilsunnybee
It shouldn't matter douchebag.

------
legacy2013
I've been wondering about this for a while. For my thesis project in college,
my class created a web app for a school for the blind and visually impaired.
We were greenhorns when it came to creating a production ready system, but we
were able to meet the standards for usability by implementing them while the
project was going, not as an after thought.

------
tempodox
Indeed, the question in the title has long been overdue.

And, yes, bad — no, really __BAD __readability of web sites seems to be quite
standard these days (including HN). And, on top of that, the worst offenders
block the zooming functionality in mobile browsers. Mankind never had a
shortage of torture specialists.

------
broseph
It's interesting to see so many developers demanding an easier way to test
whether a website is accessible.

> Show me a virtual machine that I can test with, that puts me in the shoes of
> a user w/ a disability, and I'll develop with accessibility in mind.

> Well to be honest I can test my code in IE9 to see if it works. But I have
> no idea how a disabled person is experiencing my website, I do put all the
> "alt" attributes etc...but it's hard to imagine it.

Turn off your monitor. Turn your laptop brightness all the way down. That's
what it's like to use your website while blind. Basic screenreaders for the
web cost zero dollars and could not be easier to install [0]. A screenreader
for Mac OS [1] costs zero dollars and is already installed on your machine.

Stop pretending that these tools are mysterious. You or someone you know might
have no choice but to become an expert screenreader user tomorrow. Have a
little bit of compassion.

[0] [http://www.chromevox.com/](http://www.chromevox.com/)

[1]
[https://www.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/](https://www.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/)

------
bitbandit
I am guessing that 14% = color blind + users with cataract + various other
visual impairments.

You usually can't have a design that makes all of them happy at once.

For example, high contrast UI themes often leave large white areas on the
screen that users with glaucoma find blinding, but other users like a lot.

~~~
JackFr
I'd like to see the original survey. 14% sounds awful high.

[http://www.nei.nih.gov/CanWeSee/](http://www.nei.nih.gov/CanWeSee/)

[http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/2C.html](http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/2C.html)

------
vanadium
I prefer just hitting WebAIM's periodic surveys and using those metrics
instead.
[http://webaim.org/blog/survey-5-results/](http://webaim.org/blog/survey-5-results/)

------
thathonkey
Great all the comments are ignoring the (pretty damn interesting) point made
in the article and rather just attacking the aesthetic of the blog. Way to go
HN!

------
yawgmoth
The fact that her site uses a hard-to-read font has nothing to do with her
point. The merits of each should be considered individually.

~~~
lilsunnybee
But then how is anyone supposed to feel smug and unthreatened if they can't
laugh at and disqualify her argument over some irrelevent bullshit?

------
hkdobrev
OK, the topic is great. So could anyone write a decent article about it and
post it to HN?

------
JohnHaugeland
I think the question is flawed.

1) We don't cater to IE9, which is at 5.11% according to stat counter. IE9 is
a bad choice point for this - it's the first IE that had auto-update. Everyone
left. We're catering to IE8+; 8 is currently at 6.5%.

2) You don't count the version; you count the version and all its successors.
That is, we're not catering to 8, we're catering to 8+. 8+ is at almost 35%
and is still the dominant aggregate browser.

3) Where does 14% come from? This says 6.8%, or roughly half what's claimed,
in the same neighborhood as the browsers mentioned:
[http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1417-Accessibilit...](http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1417-Accessibilit..).

4) You can't cater to disabled users. They're not one thing. What you do for
the colorblind isn't the same as what you do for the blind, which isn't the
same as what you do for people who have specialty control systems, which isn't
the same as what you do for micro-screens, which isn't the same as what you do
for people who have motor control circumstances, et cetera.

5) The web solution for this is WAI-Aria, which began in mid-2012, and became
a candidate recommendation three months ago.

6) Microsoft has been requiring WAI-Aria for store apps since late 2012.

7) Most people have never heard of WAI-Aria.

8) As far as I know, no single group of disabled users reaches 1% of the
userbase.

9) Supporting old browsers is way, way easier than supporting disabled users.
Old browsers mean installing a shim and fighting a couple bugs, and that level
of effort leaves people writing angry blog posts for five years. Supporting
disabled users means learning how (there's basically no tutorials, but ample
angry blog posts with bad statistics) then finding someone who has the
equipment to test it on, then learning that you have to re-order everything on
the entire site because the reader software can't be told that the source
order isn't the reading order, then adding several properties to every single
tag on every single page, then having no way to audit.

10) Many of us /do/ cater to the disabled. Your site has no aria markup at
all, is peppered with empty iframes (which will wreak havoc on older readers,)
and is covered in images that have no reader equivalents. You are actually
substantially less disability friendly than the average webpage.

11) Even people with full sight find a font and color scheme like that very
difficult to read.

12) In short, because like you, most small web authors are more comfortable
writing about the problem than being part of the solution.

~~~
Isofarro
" 1) We don't cater to IE9, which is at 5.11% according to stat counter. IE9
is a bad choice point for this - it's the first IE that had auto-update.
Everyone left. We're catering to IE8+; 8 is currently at 6.5%."

Why bother? in a few months it will be 5.5%. Next year it will be 1%. Why
invest any time or attention to a browser whose market share is low and
continue downwards into nothingness?

Do nothing. The IE8 problem will work itself out naturally.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz9810Y7ZRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz9810Y7ZRw)

"2) You don't count the version; you count the version and all its successors.
That is, we're not catering to 8, we're catering to 8+. 8+ is at almost 35%
and is still the dominant aggregate browser."

That's just a sleight-of-hand obfuscation. If 9+ is 30%, why quibble over the
extra 5% (and only dropping over time) that IE8 will offer. It's a diminishing
return adding an older browser to the browser support list.

"5) The web solution for this is WAI-Aria, which began in mid-2012, and became
a candidate recommendation three months ago."

No, WAI-ARIA became a Recommendation in March, not a Candidate Recommendation.
The distinction between the two is two independent implementations.

"8) As far as I know, no single group of disabled users reaches 1% of the user
base."

* Colourblindness (8% of Caucasian Men) * Dyslexia

"9) ... Your site has no aria markup at all"

The non-presence of ARIA does not make a site inaccessible.

"12) In short, because like you, most small web authors are more comfortable
writing about the problem than being part of the solution."

Unfortunately, you are presenting the opposite side of the problem. So you
have a little more knowledge about accessibility issues than the OP - but not
enough to pass a quick scrutiny.

Perhaps, what is needed is for you and I to stop being part of the problem of
disseminating half-truths, and spend that time quietly doing our jobs
properly, and showing the results of these. Invest the time to teach someone
else how to build accessible websites, and encourage them to also share what
they know.

In all fairness, the poster of the blogpost has a fighting chance of improving
her skills. She is worth teaching, for the scales of dogma have fallen from
her eyes, and she is enlightened.

~~~
JohnHaugeland
> 1) Why bother?

Because the stakes are high enough that 5% validates the engineering effort.

.

> 2) If 9+ is 30%, why quibble over the extra 5%

Same answer.

.

> 5) The distinction between the two is two independent implementations.

I didn't know that. Thank you for the information. :)

.

> 8 #1) Colourblindness (8% of Caucasian Men)

Jesus, really?

Luckily, my sites tend to be monochrome, so I get trapdoored on this.

.

> 8 #2) Dyslexia

I wouldn't even know where to begin making a website be dyslexia-sensitive. I
don't know anyone affected and don't even know what's important there. Is
there a resource about this?

.

> 9) The non-presence of ARIA does not make a site inaccessible.

In a question about why we invest no effort in accessibility, it is germane to
point out the level of effort you have placed into accessibility.

And, respectfully, that markup.

.

> Unfortunately, you are presenting the opposite side of the problem.

I'm just explaining why it isn't gotten right.

.

> So you have a little more knowledge about accessibility issues than the OP -
> but not enough to pass a quick scrutiny.

Yeah, that was my point. My belief is that this limitation that you have
correctly observed in me is the defacto case for nearly all web developers. I
think it's just something most of us don't know.

Like, write a poignant guide or a learn you some consideration or something.
Give people something to read, rather than to point out that they haven't read
anything, you know what I mean?

.

> Perhaps, what is needed is for you and I to stop being part of the problem
> of disseminating half-truths

I don't believe that I have done this. I did make an error in naming the kind
of recommendation though.

.

> spend that time quietly doing our jobs properly

I think that I actually do this. The world is full of a lot of hard, unfair
choices, many of them outside my hands. I do my best to support as many people
as I can within my time and budget constraints.

Perhaps we disagree on the choices, however.

.

> Invest the time to teach someone else how to build accessible websites

Yes, that was my point. Easy to say; too hard, apparently, for either of us to
do.

------
samuirai
related: Great thoughts about "WHAT ACCESSIBILITY HAS TO DO WITH SECURITY" by
Anna Shubina:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phwEoiqLTM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phwEoiqLTM)

------
germs12
Because our managers use IE9.

------
aidenn0
Because people with disabilities are used to not gettting what they want.

~~~
pestaa
So it makes perfect sense to continue not giving them what they want?

~~~
aidenn0
The question was "Why do only cater to the former?" not whether or not it
makes sense to do so. In fact the very question strongly implies that it
doesn't make sense.

Non disabled persons using older browsers are used to things "just working"
for them, so they have a lot of energy to expend being pissed off when things
don't work.

Disabled persons are confronted with lots of things not "just working" for
them, so the energy of being pissed off gets more spread out.

In the general case, this causes a positive feedback loop where minor issues
for people without major problems get fixed, while more significant issues for
people with even worse problems don't get fixed.

------
obvious_throw
Because "a disability" is extremely broad, and covers such things as back
injuries, diabetic neuropathy, and mental illnesses. I would expect that
percentage to come down considerably when factoring specific disabilities that
actually impede browsing.

------
robot_
xScope provides a great tool for testing common vision impairments. What I'd
love is a well written overview for keyboard accessibility within websites.

------
SeniorDev
it concerns me that you think you can call yourself a senior web developer
without even once reading the w3c specification, because that would be crazy

------
daktanis
Unpopular Opinion Puffin: I like the font on her site...

------
optymizer
I find this font ridiculously hard to read. I clicked the back button after
the first paragraph.

It's also hard to take the author's opinion on web-design seriously when they
make such decisions for their own site.

~~~
daktanis
I think we live in a time of pretentious graphic designers (not saying you
are, saying its a huge trend) who all think they "have it right", which is way
all modern websites are looking very samey.

It's a personal blog, it's not comic sans, so how bad can it be?

------
emehrkay
Do you have to write specific code for Safari users?

------
fnbr
Wow, that's a terrible font, especially for an article talking about catering
to those with disabilities. I found it hard to read, and I have perfect
vision.

~~~
lilsunnybee
Nothing to say about the article just the fucking font its printed in?

------
azinman2
That font is giving me a disability

------
Nanzikambe
IE9 isn't a disability? Colour me shocked

Apologies in advance for the poor (attempt at) humour, I don't mean to
trivialise a real issue, only to ridicule IE9 users.

In all seriousness it's due to the complexity of catering for certain
disabilities each of which require entirely different technical solutions, and
some of which depending upon OS and various devices can be seamlessly provided
for.

I would say a better question here is why isn't there more standardisation on
the technology and approach to better serve the needs of people with a
disability.

It's not a purely technological issue either, I've never seen a tender for
website or application development with any provision for it. And I've seen a
fair few.

~~~
bitbandit
IMO we are seeing that form sells more than function. MAC and Win 8 are a
prime suspect.

I am seeing UIs that look nice but are difficult to use for a fully able user,
let alone a user with some kind of disability.

~~~
tjl
It's Mac, not MAC.

I don't use Windows so I can't comment on that, but OS X has a lot of support
for disabled users. First, VoiceOver is a built-in screen reader and there are
a variety of other options to adjust the contrast, cursor size, amongst other
things. There's support for visual alerts, mono audio, and subtitles. One can
also use switches to control the system if you have them connected.

Basically, Apple spends a lot of effort to make their products accessible. I
know that iPhones are popular in the blind community as the VoiceOver support
makes it easy to use.

I've found that OS X is far more usable now than the 10.1-10.4 years. So,
while the form has improved, so has the function.

------
pyrrhotech
worrying about either is financially dumb until you already have millions of
customers and economy of scale calls for it*

*there are exceptions for some industries

------
autokad
"3% browse with IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the
former? So why do we think it is perfectly acceptable to spend time ensuring
that our websites work in IE9, but not that you can navigate them with a
keyboard?"

if she is so concerned about making websites accessible for those with
impairments, why in the heck did she choose that font?!?

2nd, you are really twisting things. first you take ALL people with
disabilities (term used generously), and use that to justify websites having
to comply with an issue that effects less than 1% of the population. the vast
majority of disabilities falls under visual impairment, and all websites
should strive to make them readable.

Then you do the complete opposite to IE. you disregard all the IE versions and
focus on just one. in short, you lumped all disabilities to validate your
point about one specific part of it and bifurcated the IE market to make it
seem smaller to prove your point.

~~~
unreal37
The original Microsoft research paper she pulls the number "14%" from uses
questions like "do you have a visual impairment?" to determine disability. So
if you wear glasses or contacts, you're disabled apparently.

~~~
autokad
agree, and trying to act like the internet is unusable by 14% of the
population (all because they have a disability and those programmers and
designers are ignoring their plight) raises red flags. over 1/10 people?
really?

she claimed she doesn't know much about the process. which makes me wonder why
write an article critiquing it then. but i can attest, making web pages
usable/readable/etc to as many people as possible is always a huge part of the
process.

