WARNING: strong opinions, e.g. flames, follow. Don't bother reading if you're easily offended.
At the rate we're going, most websites will never be easily navigated by blind people. How do I know? Easy ...
My eyesight isn't as great as it was when I was younger. So I like to set my "Minimum font size" in Firefox to 18 pt. (Yes I know they're not technically considered "points" any more). That single simple change fucks up a lot of the web! Just that, nothing more. And it's something that any web designer could trivially test for.
And yet they don't bother! Why? Probably because they're mostly self-centered 20-something hipster douchebags, who can't even imagine there's someone with worse eyesight than they have. Or maybe their sense of "aesthetics" trumps any consideration of "accessibility". In other words: "Fuck off if you're too old to comfortably read 10 pt type. We don't need your kind on our website".
Worse, there are a few sites, such as Bloomberg, that somehow manage to trick Firefox into not rendering their fonts at a minimum 18 pt, but instead render substantially smaller. That's right, some hipster web designer at Bloomberg went out of his way to make sure the text displayed is small. He's probably quite proud of this.
Firefox does works OK on 99% of the web in terms of font size. Unfortunately, stuff breaks in other ways. E.g. when a large minimum font is selected, text often simply disappears off to the right of a page. So then a search box is just not displayed at all, because it's off to the right of the page. Or text just disappears off the bottom of a block. Probably something to do with fixed widths, I don't know I'm not an HTML guy.
Chrome apparently has a large contingent of hipster douchebags working on it. Apparently the concept of "18 pt" is too technical for their genius IQ brains. So they just have simpler font size selections such as Small, Medium, and Large. Unfortunately not granular enough when compared to Safari or Firefox. And Chrome is also far worse than Firefox in displaying pages in tiny type, even when Font size is set to Large.
Still, lots of sites do it right. E.g. Hacker News is no problem. A very simple layout and very readable. (Now if they would only fix that expired link problem).
I repeat, I'm bitching about something that is trivial, a mere inconvenience, compared to what the blind encounter. And yet I run into many web sites and browsers that can't even get that little bit right. So what hope is there for the blind? No nope, none at all!
IME it's not the "20-something hipster douchebags" (nice stereotype you've got going there) who make websites like this. It's the experienced print designers, who are too set in their ways to work any other way than "I want the site to look exactly like this picture". I doubt it was some proud hipster web designer who made the text at Bloomberg stay small; more likely it was a frustrated developer who has no choice but to follow the orders of their Senior Designer who doesn't understand this newfangled web business (but thinks they do).
In my experience it isn't the web developer / designer who makes this decision. It is either a) their boss, who grew up in a world of print or b) the client.
I have had both happen to me, more often than not the client. I have had a client phone me up before saying "this doesn't look like it did before" and eventually I find out they have their font size enlarged so that boxes don't line up the same way they did before, or scroll bars are present that weren't before, but still completely usable. I explain this to them, and their answer is simply "fix it". Even though they themselves are using an increased font size to help them read, they want to force their dream aesthetic on everyone who visits their site, usability be damned.
As a totally blind developer I have to disagree. Maybe it's a bit easier for me since I don't need to worry about font sizes but I'd say 95% or more of the web is accessible if you are good with screen reading software.
As another totally blind developer I'm going to have to either assume that you are not experiencing much of the web, or that you are simply lying.
95% of the web is accessible if you know how to use a screen reader?
How about ...
Google Docs, Google Analytics, Adwords, Github Gists, anything with SVG in it, all the unlabeled flash, all the unicode icons which don't speak, all the unlabeled links, all the unfilled alt text tags...
Every single infographic,
all the popup menus or modal dialogs or popovers which pop up at the top or bottom of the screen reader's virtual buffers instead of gaining focus when you invoke them,
...
And then you have the stupid stuff. The JS library Github uses for tool tips renames the title attribute of links to original-title, which completely blows away the semantic meaning and means no screen reader is going to read it... But the clever author of the library got the right visuals so that certainly doesn't matter...
Google Instant invites me to turn off Google Instant, to work better with screen readers... Instead of simply making Google Instant work better with screen readers. This is an oft-repeated strategy -- can't spend an hour to make your content accessible for the blind? Give the blind a lesser version of your product and call it a day.
I'm quite frankly terrified when I hear people on this and other forums go on about how the web is eating the desktop, because the web as it currently stands is a dreadfully inaccessible place.
We must use different parts of the web then. I don’t use google docs, and if you really want an online word processor use the web version of Microsoft Word since they have made the effort to make it accessible. While it is not a good experience I was just able to create a gist, see
https://gist.github.com/jareds/8832236
Most of what I use the web for is online shopping, reading news, and technical documentation. This is generally accessible although I do agree that web apps like Gmail leave a lot to be desired. That is why I use Mail on OSX or the mail app on my iPhone. The popups are annoying but usable. If something doesn’t behave as expected then you should check the bottom of the page to see if something new appeared. I realize I am not an average blind computer user but in my case I will stand by my 95% comment. My 95% may be a lot higher than the average blind user though.
> I'd say 95% or more of the web is accessible if you are good with screen reading software.
True, however 80% or more of the blind users I've seen are not good with there screenreading software at all. Many people don't even know how to use navigation by heading for example... sad but true.
Have you tried using zoom, instead of changing the minimum font size? It would be reset for every different site you visit (at least on FF, not sure about other browsers) but from my experience scaling the whole site up instead of just the text doesn't break websites as much.
Hahahahaha, zoom. Since I installed the 13.04 version of ubuntu on my MBP retina, I get the pleasure of cruising the web at 200%. Half the sites out there break.
I do use Chrome's. It does work way better than FF, but you'd be surprised at how much text out there is loaded with third party JS or flash and doesn't "grow" with the the zoom.
You might wanna try Opera 12. It's going the way of the dodo, but it has always had the best zoom of all browsers. In my experience there are only some few video applets that don't zoom properly because they render in exact pixels.
Battery is great. I've actually been running this for about a year now. But I'm a hacker. Getting 13.04 to run when it was only Jan 2013 was a challenge. Also, installing Mavericks OSX on the dual boot partition fucked my ubuntu boot loader, so now I resort to booting with alt-option held down. Also, I had to rebuild gnome or something. I can't remember. It took me almost a day. Also, I don't have sound in Ubuntu, but that is a 13.04 problem since the HDMI output is on the same something something as the normal audio out.
Like I said, not for the beginner. Then again, what else am I supposed to use? Mac has by far the best hardware and OSX is a giant piece of crap for power users.
I would try mint linux, but I'm too afraid of being stuck without support.
I've thought of making a small side company that only sells rMBPs with dual boot ubuntu at a 200 dollar markup. I'd pay that, but maybe I'm not your normal computer user.
Yes, zoom is great in OS X. I admit I haven't tried it in Firefox, I will now.
Whenever I encounter a site that doesn't render properly with large fonts, I simply turn off the minimum font size in Firefox and use the OS X Accessibility keyboard shortcuts to zoom in. This works well, but it's annoying to have to keep switching around like that. E.g. it would be nice to have faster access to the Firefox submenu that controls minimum font size.
I find if I'm tired, I need to increase the zoom to read text, so a quick mouse wheel while holding Ctrl and then a Ctrl-0 when finished and it's like it never happened
As someone who browses the web on Firefox, with Open Dyslexic font, NoSquint for text AND page zoom, "Allow Websites to chose their own background colors" disabled[1], and vimperator, thank you. Most webpages are at least semi-broken (including wikipedia, which doesn't zoom the article correctly, making the sidebars gigantic), and some are entirely unusable (requiring a secondary browser).
[1] lets me forceblack on grey text, but for some reason makes 50% of web images disappear (background url= on a div?) and most sprite icons/buttons disappear.
This lack of consideration by many websites for my slight visual impairment is a pet peeve of mine, so I was deliberately stereotyping the developers. I'm sure the reality is much more nuanced. E.g.
a) the web layout software they're using doesn't work well with larger fonts. Nobody can realistically design today's websites by manually writing all the HTML, so when the tools have limitations, then the website has limitations.
or b) the designer has a lot on his plate. He needs to do ten things, and nine of them should have been finished last week. He's only got enough time to get things 95% right, not enough time to worry about every single border case.
or c) as mentioned in other comments, the designer is being rigidly constrained by management expectations of minute details of site appearance. Those constraints at default font size are incompatible with perfect rendering at larger font sizes.
I'm sorry if you were offended by my colorful choice of words. One of the nice things about Hacker News is it's generally a high-content low-noise place where people don't flame or troll.
Stop thinking of web sites as hypertext documents, and think of them as apps. The solution is to have OS-level scaling that works, or at worst, futz with the video drivers or buy larger hardware. Most desktop apps (at least in Windows) break when you change font sizes, too.
while we're on a rant about tiny fonts: iphone browser. Almost every day I'm trying to work around a site that only is navigable when the text is zoomed way way out so that everything is like 4pt. So frustrating.
Website accessibility for visually impaired people might be considered to be on a "spectrum". E.g. if totally blind people are a "10" in terms of problems, and perfect vision is "0", then I'm perhaps a "1". And yet things are already annoying for me. So what about those people who develop age related macular degeneration? This is not an uncommon problem for older people, e.g. it's something my own mother had.
Eventually those people will move from "1" to "2" to "3" to "4" etc. in terms of impairment. But if websites already start to break at "1", then what hope do people with real problems have?
At the rate we're going, most websites will never be easily navigated by blind people. How do I know? Easy ...
My eyesight isn't as great as it was when I was younger. So I like to set my "Minimum font size" in Firefox to 18 pt. (Yes I know they're not technically considered "points" any more). That single simple change fucks up a lot of the web! Just that, nothing more. And it's something that any web designer could trivially test for.
And yet they don't bother! Why? Probably because they're mostly self-centered 20-something hipster douchebags, who can't even imagine there's someone with worse eyesight than they have. Or maybe their sense of "aesthetics" trumps any consideration of "accessibility". In other words: "Fuck off if you're too old to comfortably read 10 pt type. We don't need your kind on our website".
Worse, there are a few sites, such as Bloomberg, that somehow manage to trick Firefox into not rendering their fonts at a minimum 18 pt, but instead render substantially smaller. That's right, some hipster web designer at Bloomberg went out of his way to make sure the text displayed is small. He's probably quite proud of this.
Firefox does works OK on 99% of the web in terms of font size. Unfortunately, stuff breaks in other ways. E.g. when a large minimum font is selected, text often simply disappears off to the right of a page. So then a search box is just not displayed at all, because it's off to the right of the page. Or text just disappears off the bottom of a block. Probably something to do with fixed widths, I don't know I'm not an HTML guy.
Chrome apparently has a large contingent of hipster douchebags working on it. Apparently the concept of "18 pt" is too technical for their genius IQ brains. So they just have simpler font size selections such as Small, Medium, and Large. Unfortunately not granular enough when compared to Safari or Firefox. And Chrome is also far worse than Firefox in displaying pages in tiny type, even when Font size is set to Large.
Still, lots of sites do it right. E.g. Hacker News is no problem. A very simple layout and very readable. (Now if they would only fix that expired link problem).
I repeat, I'm bitching about something that is trivial, a mere inconvenience, compared to what the blind encounter. And yet I run into many web sites and browsers that can't even get that little bit right. So what hope is there for the blind? No nope, none at all!