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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

When I was doing web dev I'd always test with Links as one of my accessibility checks. Presumably that's common?

I can't tell if you're serious (about it being common - not that you use it), but I've never heard of anyone doing it and I'd bet less than 0.1% of web devs do this.

And as a good friend of a blind person, this is a tragic shame.

Does your friend use Links (or lynx/others)? I thought most visually impaired people use a normal browser combined with a screen reader (NVDA or Voiceover).

Of course, designing with accessibility in mind is important, but I would argue supporting Links isn't.

But if your site supports Links then it’s almost definitely going to work with screen readers and vice versa.

That’s not at all true. Links doesn’t care if a text field is properly labeled and a screen reader user with a modern browser can happily use a site built using a front-end framework if the developer has taken proper steps (e.g. focus management on “page” transitions, used ARIA live regions to announce dynamic changes).

I did it.

Many sites are not even tested on firefox

It was always hard to gauge for me how much other professionals do, presumably all professionals tests on Chrome, Edge, IE, Safari, Firefox as a minimum? It's so easy nowadays with web services to say least check first view?

Most apps are interactive now and are hard to test on multiple platforms (ie it takes time). Even youtube has some performance issues on different browsers.

YouTube is made by a browser maker, ie. it has a motive to make non-Chrome browsers look worse. Eg. when chromium-based Edge came out, YT served it an old version of itself for no apparent reason.

Within the past week, I wanted to check out how YouTube handles graceful degradation when browsed with something like NetSurf. Spoiler alert: it just doesn't. It wasn't that long ago that such a cavalier attitude would have been unacceptable, if not unthinkable. See https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6.

I can't understand this.

I use firefox as my daily driver, but I still test in chrome and links.

I also need to test on IE (since our biggest client uses it) so I have to spin up a Windows 10 VM and test it that way. Absolutely worth the time, time spent increases exponentially if a bug is found later in the process.

> I also need to test on IE

How unpleasant. Have you found that the W10 VM takes way more disk space then seems reasonable? I had to fire one up the other day, and between the VM image and the VM it took 50ish gigs of space iirc.

Many sites are seemingly not tested at all. I recently tried to open a concert site and couldn't get any details on a concert, because their PDF viewer was buggy; I tried on both Firefox and chrome using three different computers, as well as my phone. I wish you could just use the browser's built-in PDF viewer in an iframe (or better yet, don't use PDFs in the browser)

You can just embed the browsers pdf viewer... It doesn't work on mobile browsers generally, but with some hacking you can get it to fall back to a download link.

I get the feeling on some sites that the end goal was to have a site, not necessarily a working one.

I check some sites I build in `links2` for accessibility from both a latency and capability perspective. It's rather interesting to see things from a blind person's perspective, though for many companies I'd imagine the cost not worth the revenue.

It'd be interesting to do a market research study on what the impaired population for a given vertical is, and put some data-driven arguments behind adding support for accessibility.

Honestly, doing that would probably improve the UX for people with normal eyesight as well, because it'd force you to think about document layout and component interaction carefully.

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