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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

> An HTML file with no CSS and no JavaScript is accessible by default.

This is not true. What about color contrast? What about alt text for images? These problems (and many others) can occur in plain html pages.

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Color contrast between a default background #FFF and foreground text of #000 is pretty much the gold standard.

That’s true! But the author didn’t talk about just sticking to the defaults. He made it seem like it was as simple as not using CSS and JS. In reality, it’s more complicated, like you pointed out.

> This is not true. What about color contrast? What about alt text for images? These problems (and many others) can occur in plain html pages.

Another example: one must use <span lang="XX"> tags on foreign words and phrases sprinkled in a text, otherwise screenreaders can choke on them.

The default blue link color is also accessible by default, w/ a contrast to white of 9.3: https://color.review/check/0000EE-FFFFFF

If there's no CSS then there is no color. It's up to the user's browser how to display it, what fonts to use, and what colors.

If you don't apply styling, the browser defaults for color contrast are often sufficient.

But it isn’t as though the problem is “using CSS” — it’s doing the stuff that people currently use CSS to do. Using html to do that same stuff is no better from an accessibility perspective, which is what the quote seems to imply.

Note: I’m all for web accessibility and I work in this space. I think it’s important for advocates to not overstate the case for the simplicity of compliance, which is what I think happened here.

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