Comment by ndarilek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndarilek | Hacker News Reader

I hope this means the developer tools themselves will actually become accessible. As a blind web developer running Linux and Orca, bunches of things have been broken for a very long time, to the point where I'm considering switching to ChromeOS and running Linux in chroots/containers just to get a better set of web development tools. I'm glad that they're empowering developers to create accessible websites, but if blind/disabled developers were empowered to develop on equal footing, then that'd be another way to achieve the same goal.

As one example, I can't navigate the network inspector via keyboard in any meaningful way. Firebug used to have this nailed, to the point where you could even enable an accessibility mode (though arguably accessibility mode should have just been the only mode.) And yes, I'd happily file issues for this and half a dozen other things, but at some point I actually have to do my job, and in this case that might mean jumping ship to a browser that seems more accessible.

Marco Zehe is an Accessibility QA Engineer at Mozilla, he is blind, and he writes on his own site. Two years ago, he wrote a post, "The Firefox developer tools Inspector Panel is becoming accessible" [0]. I don't know how things have progressed since then and I wonder if there are problems particular to Firefox on Linux and Orca, as opposed to other combinations like Firefox for Windows with JAWS or NVDA.

[0] https://www.marcozehe.de/2016/05/24/the-firefox-developer-to...

I think this point is extremely important. Often in the rush to "help" those who need improved accessibility we deny the very people we're trying to "help" the ability to fix things for themselves. (And they often do a better job of it too, since they're invested in a good outcome.)

Documentation, too. Most of MDN, ironically including this article, violates Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Unfortunately, we live in a highly competitive/growth demanding times where companies chose to invest resources only on areas where they see good returns. This means that for-profit companies, like google, in long run would do far less than non-profit companies, like firefox,for special need audience.

Wasn't their comment saying that just the opposite was happening? That for-profit Google was better at this than non-profit Mozilla?

For-profit companies can also make a profit off a special need audience, if not directly then through good PR and not getting sued. So I'm not sure that Firefox will really have better accessibility in the long run.

Why is that unfortunate? If a company lack financial incentive to build something, means not many people want it, or the little that do don't want it enough

Or the ones that do want it enough don't have the means and the tools to de-marginalize themselves.

In this caae, I hope you're seeing the (sad and obvious) irony.

Even if all disabled people would have been poor, if there was enough of them, then relevant solutions would have emerged (similar to how cheap food came to be).

Disablities are unfortunate and sometimes sad. However, the way the market works is not. There are limited resources, and they are being distributed where the demand is highest.

Apple spent plenty of years doing what they felt was right, and not chase the highest demand.

On that example alone, I feel you're being short sighted.

Put another way, you're under the impression this is about people with special needs. Not at all. This is about people with special needs AND the people who believe they deserve the same "fair chance" the rest of us get. Not all of use are self-absorbed.

p.s. re: "similar to how cheap food came to be"

Seeing how this got us obesity and all the diseases that go with it, I'm not so sure you're model / mindset is the one that's ideal. Perhaps it's time to think more holistically?

I'm not visually impaired, but have run into the exact same issue of missing keyboard shortcuts for dev tools. There are some, but they seem pretty random. I thought devs would work more with shortcuts, but apparently not.

However, the network inspector in Firefox opens with Ctrl+Shift+E for me (Ubuntu with Unity).

Right, but opening from the keyboard is only a tiny fraction of what is needed. If I tab around on the display, I get a bunch of buttons that are likely column headers (I.e. "Status", "Transferred", etc.) but I never reach a list of actual requests through which I can arrow. I press Space on a button labeled "Start performance analysis" which immediately plunks focus into a text field from which I can't seem to escape. The entire developer tools interface is littered with these sorts of inconsistencies.

The HTML inspector is similar. I can pull up a tree of elements, but sometimes I can expand tree levels from the keyboard and sometimes I can't. I've taken to using the context menu to copy an element's inner HTML into a text editor, then inspecting it that way. Often, clicking Inspect Element from the context menu doesn't open the inspector with keyboard focus on the element I'm inspecting, either, which is a massive pain when I'm trying to tell a developer what is needed to make a site accessible. So, IOW, I can't even file actionable bug reports for web apps without putting forth lots of effort to even identify the element that is at fault.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com