[mltony]

Blind developer here. Even though web technology might move fast, things move slowly in the world of accessibility.

You're saying it's too hard to catch up with the latest technology - I wouldn't agree with this in the context of accessibility. What happens in practice is that a frontend developer develops for example a fancy combobox that needs to be clicked on with a mouse without thinking twice. And that combo box stays on the website for years. Now suppose that's a website to book flights. I go there and I spend half an hour trying to click that damn combobox with a keyboard and still it wouldn't allow me to select anything. Well too bad, it turns out I cannot fly XXX airlines. Or I'd have to wait for my sighted assistant who comes once a week to deal with these websites.

And what if I told you that half of websites on the internet are like this - that is not accessible or extremely ahrd to use? I have to avoid certain online stores, certain airlines, certain hotels because of that. Finally I work in faang company and so many internal web tools here are not accessible. I found my way around, but I have seen blind people being fired for not being able to perform while every other tool that is required for you to use doesn't work with your screenreader and nobody cares to fix that?

And what's the price to fix it? Educate developers to use simple combobox instead of fancy one? Try to test it with keyboard? Are blind people really asking for too much?

And also regarding getting sued - I have no idea what kind of lawyers can sue for this, I have never heard of actual blind people being able to sue someone because the website was not accessible. If that was the case I would be able to sue half of Internet including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so many more. I suspect certain lawyers are taking advantage of the system - e.g. there was this american life episode years ago about a lawyer who is specializing on suing hotels that claim to provide acomodations for disabled people -wheel chair users - and they don't satisfy ADA requirements or something. I suspect this Domino pizza lawsuit was initiated by similar type of ADA troll lawyer. Don't compare blind people to troll lawyers!

[542458]

I mostly agree… but one thing:

> And what's the price to fix it?

I’m currently doing accessibility work with an in-house web framework of reasonable complexity. 90% of the accessibility issues are relatively straightforwards. Things like keyboard usability are easy to explain to devs and behave fairly consistently across browsers.

But the last 10%… things like “what should happen to focus when you open a modal?” get messier fast (the ARIA docs give several different behaviours for several different scenarios, which means every dev who wants to open a modal needs to understand enough to correctly select the behaviour for their circumstance), especially since different screen readers can behave in different ways when encountering the same content. The cost to investigate and properly solve these can be nontrivial.

That’s not to excuse people who don’t even try for that first 80-90% of the low hanging fruit… but please forgive the designers and devs who fall short of the last 10%!

[Eduard]

The last 10 percent are hard. Welcome to software development.

[black_puppydog]

As a perfectly-sighted user: please don't use modals, they're basically always very frustrating.

[lolinder]

OP's point is that most websites, in their experience, fail to get the easy 90%. If what you've got left is a few focus issues, it sounds to me like OP can at least accomplish their task.

[lolinder]

> Blind developer here.

HN users' tendency to opine about things they know nothing about is really aggravating here. You and a few other blind users come in and share your experience, only to be told by a bunch of people who have never used a screen reader in their lives that you're wrong. How weird.

Just know that a lot of us who don't comment are taking notes of what you say. :)