[mltony]

Blind developer here.

So surprised to see so many negative comments here. Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed. Accessibility of websites is a real problem for blind people. And the thing is it is relatively easy to make your website accessible:

* Use simple HTML controls: all of them work great in all screenreaders. Only when custom behavior is implemented in javascript this might cause problems. * Test accessibility with keyboard. That fancy combobox that you wrote that expands with beautiful navigation cannot be opened from keyboard.

This ADA guidance actually doesn't even mention this. Sure, providing alt descriptions can be useful but it's almost never preventing me from using a website. But a combobox or a button that won't click is a real problem. But I hope this is just the first step in making Internet more blind-friendly.

[noobermin]

About four months ago, I used to cycle every week to the store, but an auto-immune disorder has me now disabled and I use a wheelchair. A lot of this annoying attitude honestly is people really feel like accessibility is for "other people" and many just lack empathy in general. But really, no one lives forever, no one is 25 forever hitting the bars every night, even abled bodied people grow old and their bodies change or like me, an illness or injury can strike without warning. At the very least if you cannot be empathetic to other people who are disabled just know that one day it could be you and you'll be thankful someone somewhere thought of accessibility. Today, the ramps I used to walk my bike up to the walkway under my apartment are now a godsend for the wheelchair and the stairs that I used to haul my bike up begrudgingly are now a curse.

This is a cringe analogy but may be, just may be this will help since this is hacker news: think of the "Master Foo and the Programming Prodigy" and how writing comments is for your "future self." Well, making things accessible is for your future elderly or injured self if you're able bodied today. If you can't do it for others out of mere empathy, at the very least do it for a potential version of yourself in the future!

[0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html

[toto444]

There is a category of non disabled people who benefit from wheelchair accesses : parents of newborns who have to push a buggy wherever they go. I find it interesting that this positive side effect is rarely mentioned in the discussions about this topic.

Edit : this is actually mentionned in other comments.

[ikiris]

They still are if you talk to small business owners. Vast majority of people want to completely ignore accommodation and absolutely hate being told to do the bare minimum for other people, especially when it costs them money or time. Many of them rail against how the "government" or some other boogeyman lawyer is after them and how they're the victim when they ignore the needs, and are then cajoled into meeting legal minimum requirements.

This site especially has a vocal block of libertarian leaning self centered priviliged tech workers who see an affront in doing anything for anyone other than themselves, even if it is in their own best interest.

[sterlind]

I have progressive mobility loss. one time I went down the stairs to a bar, assuming there'd be an elevator back up - it was a big building. Bartender just told me to fuck off. I had to crawl up the stairs on my hands and knees with a friend behind me, holding my walker and ready to catch me if I fell.

if the bartender had been apologetic I wouldn't have felt so furious, but his utter disdain had my blood boiling.

[WalterBright]

> it costs them money

The value calculus of something always seems to be heavily dependent on who gets the bill.

> even if it is in their own best interest.

I'm one of those people blessed with knowing what's best for other people, but I restrict my efforts to giving them unwanted advice. I don't care to force it on them.

[derekp7]

A guy my Dad knew had a business, and the parking lot could hold about 4 cars (his, and 3 customers), all right in front of the door. He couldn't blacktop the lot, because if he did he'd have to paint a designated accessible-only parking spot, which actually would take up two spots. So he had to leave it as a gravel lot, which made it harder for wheelchair access.

It isn't that he was against accommodations, it just didn't make sense for that location where each spot was right by the door.

[Jiro]

Generally, if you're asking person X to spend money they don't want to spend, claiming that it's in their own best interest, it probably isn't.

[syshum]

>> some other boogeyman lawyer is after them

or you know there really could be... There is entire sub-group of lawyers that are ADA Trolls, just like there are Patent Trolls, and Copyright Trolls. They exist not to make business more accessible, but to line their pockets and make business hard for everyone, these lawyers give the ADA regulations a bad name and it a real and actual problem.

>>Vast majority of people want to completely ignore accommodation and absolutely hate being told to do the bare minimum for other people

Ummm no. That is not actually true. the problem is often times the regulations are inflexible, and unaccommodating themselves businesses are often put in position where they simply can not comply for some reason or another to every letter of very regulation (of which are vast, vague, and complex)

Business owners also do not like to be continually threatened with heavy fines, and government violence in order to operate their business.

>This site especially has a vocal block of libertarian leaning self centered privileged tech workers

it is very sad that we have come to the point where only authoritarian control via threat of violence are to be seen as the "acceptable" solution to a social problem. At one point the liberal solution was anti-violence now it seems the only acceptable solution for vocal block of ill-liberal self centered privileged tech workers is to use the power of government violence to force their will upon others believing in their own moral certitude that their world view is the "correct" one, and anyone that disagrees has to be selfish immoral bigot or uncaring capitalist scum, or other such thing......

Liberal solutions instead would be using other incentives to persuade people to voluntary solutions

[tomohawk]

The ADA is enforced by civil lawsuits. You can make a lot of money going around finding "violations" and suing over them. In the heyday of compliance for restaurants, a fair number of iconic restaurants in our area were put out of business by these lawsuits because they were in old buildings where it was just not possible to make accommodations. No rooms for ramps. No way to put in elevators. You get the idea.

This action may result in some benefits for those who need it, but the main beneficiaries will be law firms.

[Hnrobert42]

Is that true? I thought ADA compliance is like building code compliance. It is only enforced during changes. I would guess a lot the restaurants failed because lots of restaurants fail.

[heavyset_go]

> Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed

They were. AM talk radio hosts would whine about that one for years.

[nfw2]

It is easy to make a basic web form, e-commerce site, or blog post accessible. But the web is largely becoming a space for arbitrarily-complex, fully-interactive applications. Today's web is full of products with:

- complex information architecture, with nuanced relationships between nodes communicated by position, spacing, boundaries and other visual cues

- real-time data updates that transform the document in arbitrarily complex ways

- screens where nearly every square inch is actionable, and these actions transform the document in arbitrarily complex ways

- controls that are not simply a button or text link, but regions full of structured content embedded within them.

- screens that respond to inputs in real-time in arbitrary complex ways

- rich graphics that eschew the traditional document model, with its established accessibility guidelines, altogether

To make such an application accessible requires:

1.) auditing all the visual cues, writing supplementary text if necessary, and adding the ARIA properties to communicate these cues

2.) communicating all document transformation to the user, either by navigating focus to the new content, or communicated to the user some other way. In the case of real-time updates, this also can't obstruct the normal usage of the site.

This is certainly possible at a small scale, but very hard to do consistently by an organization if engineers and designers on each product team don't have a solid understanding of how screen-readers work or the ARIA spec. It is also hard to have any quality control on this without having someone actually test every product on a screen reader.

Unfortunately, few engineers (and even fewer designers) have this expertise. Many years ago, I did a 12-week, 70-hour-a-week web development bootcamp, and, of those 800+ hours, exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes were spent on web accessibility. To be honest, I doubt the instructors even knew anything on the subject.

Sure, it would be easier to build an accessibility web by just simplifying product requirements. But I have had little-to-no success doing this as an IC engineer.

[ximm]

Turning an existing application into a accessible one is a huge issue, but only if it was built without accessibility in mind.

That is a bit like saying "todays applications do all sorts of potentially dangerous operations and need to be integrated with social media etc. Making all that secure is certainly possible at a small scale, but very hard to do consistently by an organization if engineers and designers on each product team don't have a solid understanding of IT security work or the OWASP top 10. It is also hard to have any quality control on this without having someone actually pen-testing every product."

Yes, accessibility is work. But not optional. If you build non-accessible websites you are just bad at your job.

[pavlov]

I agree with you. But we’ve had decades to get better at accessibility, and yet it’s practically mostly worse today than with desktop apps in 1999.

A forcing function is needed. Those wheelchair ramps didn’t get built because architects and real estate developers thought it was fun and interesting.

[lhorie]

> Test accessibility with keyboard

One very simple step a dev can take is to just `tab` over their pages and check that important elements (links, buttons, etc) receive focus. Especially if they toggle something on the page via JS. If something doesn't, replace the div soup w/ a focusable element like `<a href="javascript:;"></a>`

For those saying accessibility is hard, doing just this one thing can make a big difference.

[Benjammer]

You don't even really need to replace the divs, just add tabIndex="0" on the things that should be focusable/tab-able.

[ximm]

Bonus points: if you realize that you get annoyed from having to tab through the navigation every time, add a skip link at the beginning of the page.

[ConcernedCoder]

> Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed.

Not as far as I know, nobody I knew was hating on any disabled people, but laziness, procrastination, and the cost of accomodations was enough to prevent quite a few businesses from accomodating the disabled ( with ramps and such ) until they were legally forced to do it under penalty of law... And even today only businesses considered "public accommodations" are required to comply... that's it really not hate, just laziness.

[the_optimist]

How much of the nation’s wealth has been invested in this, and where has it not been invested? Make sure you count lawsuits, paperwork, planning, construction, maintenance, and enforcement. And try not to respond without pointing out something more wasteful, rather than something productive. Let’s pretend you took that money and invested it in advanced education for young black women in Chicago instead. What did we forgo?

[dawnerd]

I've always wondered but never really investigated... do screen readers handle css-only drop downs well? We've always avoided it and instead used javascript to toggle aria attributes which seems very backwards.

[runarberg]

I think it depends on the implantation. I think it is more important that your drop down is keyboard accessible. I usually expand my menus with ":focus-within" as well as ":hover" and make sure that one element which is always visible is also focusable. That way you can tab to it and the menu expands.

[fortylove]

Thanks for your perspective here. Surprised at the pushback as well, on HN of all places.

[ikiris]

Why are you surprised at the pushback?

[asah]

Hey I'm curious: how's MS teams? Slack? Discord? Zulip (chat.zulip.org)?

[sixothree]

Yes. The ADA in the 1990s got huge push back from right wing America where it was widely and publicly derided.