> However, being a blind person, I guess I have to accept that Google doesn't care anymore.
Jumping from "this isn't working on my incredibly niche browser" to "Google don't care about blind people" is completely ridiculous.
Jumping from "this isn't working on my incredibly niche browser" to "Google don't care about blind people" is completely ridiculous.
They don't do it because they are more preoccupied with extracting data about their users than they are about accessibility, and yes, this includes blind people. There is not way around it.
It is perfectly legal to be selfish, but let's not bullshit ourselves about what is really going on...
(Extreme apologies for any implied equivalence between myself and the blind.)
It has solutions, like Google voicing out the contents, instead of doing a webpage that is so scrappable that screenreaders can parse it.
They seem to have captchas down to an art in every other context...
The real solution is to find a business model, or a way to organize society, that does not depend on us building nonsensical prisons or restrictions for each other. It's almost as if surveillance capitalism is not the final answer...
Accessibility is "just" a side effect in their EEE war on users.
(FWIW I work at Google, but not on the search team. I might go looking at internal discussions to see if this is being looked at at all)
[0]: Couldn't find a quick source on this
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/google-ongoing-project-d...
It should also be noted that it seems that this is a bug with Lynx, not Google.
There's this is you care to read it: https://www.google.com/accessibility/
But that's not the point.
Google seems to be heavy users of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A... which offers a lot more power and flexibility towards accessibility compared to plain text by enabling accessibility to full featured web interfaces instead of basic versions.
See other methods https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/accessi...
There are no standards that say that e.g. your page can't be all dependent on JS.
In other words, Google could be 100% standards compliant, and not work in Lynx.
The same with standards, and you are misunderstanding on purpose.
If Google chooses to not support simple HTML, then they are choosing to not support countless accessibility tools, and they know it. Some blind people will have a more miserable life because Google attained a de facto monopoly, but does not recognize some of the moral obligations that people like me feel should come with such a position. "With great power comes great responsibility", or maybe not.
(edit: Someone below notes that lynx appears to incorrectly parse valid HTML5 on the google homepage, so it sounds like Lynx's lack of updates are hurting here).
No, that's not true at all and is unfortunately a common anti-pattern. Accessibility is supposed to be done by using standard HTML elements and attributes. ARIA is there to extend / fill in the blanks and to fix things when people deviate from the norm. For instance, if you have a button, you should almost always use the standard HTML <button> and only use some other element type with an ARIA role=button if it's unavoidable. And <button role=button> is redundant. Best practice is still to use the semantics defined by HTML, as it always was.
While I get what you mean, the use of the term "standards" just conflates an orthogonal issue.
You can be 100% standards compliant and not readable on Lynx, or 100% standards compliant and readable on Lynx.
Relying on JS is not some niche obscure corner or some bypass of the standards as per the English/Greek analogy. It's basically the norm for most SPAs today.
The problem is that the standards are not compliant with Lynx (or rather that Lynx is not compliant with the standards).
What you want is not Google to use the standards, but to use the part of the standard that is about simple, not JS dependent, HTML.
If you want to be upset, be upset with Lynx for falling behind. Or don't be upset and switch to JAWS, BRLTTY, Orca, etc. But the idea that anyone is supposed to support every possible browser is just silly.
What does that even mean? What standards it complies with? Is there a compliance test suite or report somewhere? Because there definitely are bunch of standards it does not comply with.