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Comment by frobware | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, the web is an accessibility nightmare. If that changes, then sure, I could move too. But there's a lot that modern versions of iOS get right regarding accessibility, stuff that I wish google/android would do too.

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I am not a professional web developer, but I used LAMP to make a decent size website using standards conformant XHTML/CSS without table hacks with PHP and MySQL for forms when I was in high school. I wrote the markup by hand, so I made certain to place content first so that 56k modems would load it quickly and web browsers for the the blind would not read navigation bars before the actual content. At the time, I assumed that JavaScript was not always available because people eithet either turned it off to eliminate the Javascript engine as an an exploit vector or were using browsers that did not support it because they were blind.

Consequently, I considered requiring JavaScript for a webpage to load properly to be bad practice. Even if I assume JavaScript is everywhere, I have yet to hear of how one would make things dependent on it accessible to the blind. I know that people will make webpages that require it regardless of whether the blind can view them or not, but I still feel that is bad practice.

Modern screen reader software looks at the output of the DOM. It isn't manually parsing raw HTML straight from the server (it's possible 10 or 15 years ago this was the case). So however the browser got that particular text on the screen (directly from a server, or rendered on the client via XHR requests) this is an abstraction most screen reading software doesn't involve itself in.

with the latest webdev trends it is extremely unlikely this will improve any time soon. There was a time (~10-15) years ago when separation of concenrs and accessibility did matter, now it is just a js frameworks bloodbath.

Some "frameworks" put a ton of work into accessibility.

The Polymer team's entire element catalog is accessible with ARIA integration done with assistance from Chrome's dedicated accessibility engineers. We even provide reusable abstractions that make writing your own accessible elements easier, like iron-a11y-announcer and iron-a11y-keys.

Accessibility was a big topic at our last Polymer Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6yLWihykVA

Thanks for the link - was really interesting, particularly the introduction which explains why accessibility is so important and the number of people that it touches.

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