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Comment by mltony | Hacker News Reader

I work in a big IT company and often times internal tools are not very accessible. Sometimes when I talk to their respective maintainers, they are willing to help me, but they don't know what is accessibility and what is screenreader. Is there a good document on how to make web sites accessible that I can show them?

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Consider installing a screenreader and the Lynx web browser so you can demonstrate what it’s like to access internal apps/websites with those tools. It might help to record your experience so people can watch the demo at their convenience.

Lynx... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29?wprov...

What does lynx have to do with anything? No blind person I know browses the internet without JS, and every major screen reader supports it.

You're absolutely right. Aside from a few stubborn hold-outs, the blind people I know stopped browsing with Lynx, or Links or w3m, in the early 2000s at the latest.

I have no experience at all with screen readers. Is there a modern FOSS screen reader that would help give an idea of what a visually impaired user would realistically experience?

The most popular FOSS screen reader by a very, very large margin is NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org). It is Windows specific, though.

There's also the Orca screen reader for GNOME. And I believe TalkBack for Android and ChromeVox for Chrome OS are both open source.

If you don't care so much about open source, as I said elsewhere on the thread, Mac has VoiceOver built in (Command+F5 to enable), and Windows has Narrator (Control+Windows+Enter to enable on recent versions).

Disclosure: I'm a dev on the Narrator team at Microsoft, but I'm posting on my own behalf here.

@Zeldman tweeted this screen reader survey, which includes free/non-free options plus lots of usage data... https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/

Edit: source tweet is https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/1180100942131277824

Not blind, but an HN and lynx story. I sometimes use lynx these days because Canadian telecoms have shitty mobile bandwidth plans.

Lynx would always think I was making an NNTP connection to news.ycombinator.com unless I put in the HTTP://

Slipped me up every time.

We had a "professionalism" class in my CS undergrad program. A day using the web with a screen reader would do wonders, I think, for awareness of the issue.

I'm extending a standing offer to come in and give a guest lecture on accessibility, focusing on blind and low-vision users, for any university or high school in the Seattle metro area, free of charge. I've done this a few times already. My presentation would have a mix of concepts, demos (both good and bad), and practical advice. My email is in my profile if anyone is interested.

Have you done this or could you do this as a video or audio that’s posted online and available to anyone? That’d help thousands of people.

If you have any links to your lectures online, please share them. It could perhaps be a “Tell HN” post here (I’m not entirely sure if that’d violate the guidelines).

The W3C preliminary check is a great document to get you to at least usable:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/

Google have a good course on web accessibility which includes doing a little basic coding, looking at ARIA specs and such. I'll dig out the link when I'm back later.

Are CLI tools inherently accessible?

I guess 99.9% are. However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza or buy your weekly load of groceries with a CLI tool :-) If you want to interact with the rest of the world, you will likely need to use the web...

I often use w3m.

Have you tried Emacs?

Emacs is a GUI tool using curses (or similar). That it runs on a terminal doesn't make it a cli app in any of the regular sense...

Huh. This makes me wonder how many blind people prefer using ed.

Since 23 years now :-)

> However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza [..] with a CLI tool :-)

You’d be surprised. ;) Here’s a classic from 2004:

https://www.slashdot.org/story/45782

(That specific tool probably no longer works, but Domino’s still has an API for ordering pizza… although apparently the new one isn’t officially supported.)

I’d guess not necessarily.

Writing a command for a cli tool is probably reasonably accessible to blind people.

But if I think of a typical workflow with unix tools (less, grep, awk, sed, sort, cut, etc), I feel like it involves a lot of glancing at the shape of a big page of results and deciding what to do. I wonder if this is harder/impossible for blind people? Maybe one just gets better at a different workflow involving eg lots of head, tail, grep -o, and less less.

I also would guess that tab-completion isn’t super accessible but maybe I’m completely wrong.

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