Hacker News Reader

Comment by frank2 | Hacker News Reader

If I were blind, I would try to do as much of my interaction with the web as possible in "edbrowse", a browser designed and written by a blind programmer:

https://edbrowse.org/

Although it is common for people to refer to vim as a command-line program, edbrowse is a command-line program in a stricter sense: the user types a line of text, then hits return, then the computer prints zero or more lines of text, then the user types a line of text, etc. (vim is a rewrite of an earlier program named vi, which is short for "visual", a name chosen to emphasize the fact that it departs from the strictly line-oriented interface of earlier Unix editors.)

View on HN

I am blind, have never tried Edbrowse, but it sounds utterly tedious. A Mainstream browser is the only option if you actually want to get things done. I use Firefox with the NVDA screen reader. It is often repeated that command line programs are naturally more accessible to blind people, but it simply isn't true in many cases. Most blind people I know prefer accessible GUIs to command line programs. Think of something as simple as ls - you have to read the file names with the screen reader's review commands, then if you don't know the exact spelling of the file you want you have to get the screen reader to spell it one letter at a time. You then have to type the command plus file name, and the only thing that helps is tab completion. In a GUI, you read the list of files with the arrow keys, stop on the one you want and press enter to open it or ctrl+c to copy or what ever. It is far less keystrokes to perform the same task.

You write, "You then have to type the command plus file name, and the only thing that helps is tab completion."

I can see your point because for many years I used cd, ls, mv, etc, to do all my file management and all of my browsing around my local file system. When I switched to software (Emacs's Dired subsystem) that let me specify the file to be acted upon without my needing to type the name of the file, it was a distinct improvement. (I usually use the page-up and page-down keys to find the page containing the file name I want, then use the mouse to specify the file.)

Thanks for your reply.

> If I were blind, I would try to do as much of my interaction with the web as possible in "edbrowse", a browser designed and written by a blind programmer:

I beg you, please don't test your website for accessibility by using edbrowse.

It's not that you are against a website's being tested with edbrowse; it just that you don't want that to be a substitute for testing using a screen reader and a mainstream browser. Do I have that right?

> it just that you don't want that to be a substitute for testing using a screen reader and a mainstream browser. Do I have that right?

For sure. If your website does work in edbrowse, it may imply that you have a decent chance of making it accessible because it doesn't use a ton of dynamic interactions or page updates etc. But it doesn't guarantee it. You could still have issues with heading hierarchy, communication of control state and other factors. In some cases, edbrowse may even lull someone into a false sense of security, because it simply can't present certain aspects of your page. But when displayed in a mainstream browser, they may be inaccessible.

In a nutshell, it's unlikely that you can draw any meaningful conclusions after testing with edbrowse, be they about the accessibility of the page or the typical experience of a blind user on the web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com