Hacker News Reader

Comment by da_big_ghey | Hacker News Reader

Why is everyone concern with accessability on small gui tool? Someone make a cool project and always hackernews with the question on how it serve this very small demographic.

View on HN

I think I get what you mean: the percentage of people who access the web using a screenreader is not huge. That doesn't mean we should discount it, it's just common courtesy and it's a legal requirement in many circumstances.

But if you take one step back, the demographic is not very small at all! It includes everyone who is a bit older and maybe can't see as well as when they were 23, so they like to increase the contrast a bit. I myself am not very far above 23 and I read hackernews zoomed in to 130%, it's just more readable. Many people have an easier time using a computer by for example making buttons larger so that a mouse can click them faster. There are more examples.

And last but not least: Writing functional UI tests for applications is enabled, in a good chunk by accessibility capabilites built into the gui toolkit. My job would be much harder if that wasn't baked in to most UIs.

So, while I agree with you: let people have fun playing with technology and create new things without having to implement everything from the beginning, I don't think it is fair to just dismiss accessibility concerns like that.

A large percentage of users benefit from good accessibility features. These don't just include screen readers, but things like being able to change colors and font sizes (manually, or to pre-sets designed to help people with deteriorating vision or colorblindness, et c.)

Most people's vision and hearing go to hell at some point. Practically all older people can benefit from a11y features—whether they know they're there, and know how to enable them, is another matter.

Hell, I use display scaling to make everything large on my TV and everything tiny on my laptop.

Folks ask because everybody really really really wishes there was a GUI tool that made accessibility concerns easy. And so when they ask, they are asking: Is this finally "The One"??

And why do folks care about accessibility so much? Because it instantly makes everybody's life easier, and prevents you from needing to reinvent the wheel for a whole host of features.

I don't have any disabilities, but I love it when accessibility is done right anyway. Examples:

- I browse the web at 175%

- I prefer keyboard navigation whenever possible

- I like knowing what something is about to do before it does it, even if I'm not hovering my mouse (see "keyboard navigation", or "touch screen input")

- My connection is often unreliable, and I like knowing what images are supposed to be and, for that matter, being able to simply read text content (which some websites manage to break)

- tools with good accessibility, whether on the web or native, are almost always easier for me to write automations for, because they "follow the rules" and thus have reliable hooks for automation

Those are just a few of the reasons as a person who doesn't need accessibility tools, that I am always eager to know how well a GUI tool handles accessibility questions.

> - I browse the web at 175%

are you sure you don't have any disabilities? (j/k :)

We're asking because that is often a legal requirement for production use.

Because many of us make use of accessibility options, and so it's relevant to whether or not a project is of interest to us.

Well, it's a somewhat important and key feature for these kinds of projects. It's not much different than asking "does it support checkboxes" or "how does it handle scaling?"

Accessibility is probably a good way to discern is gui usable for a particular use where one needs accessibility. It's an interesting feature to have for many. I don't ever read it as a way to disparage the gui (guis after all are quite hard to implement - any experimentation no matter how playfull is probably more than welcome in this space).

The point of accessibility is not minorities, but taking all users in various circumstances into account. Sometimes you may yourself be on a device where images do not show and you need alt text, or where you need to resize fonts to be able to read text.

Totally, I am a dyslexic and frequent user of my systems text-to-speech vocaliser as well as a big proponent of immediate mode graphics. Every single time this topic comes up people who often neither use accessibility features nor program immediate mode graphics make this point as a cheap put down. Sure this is a downside of the paradigm, just like a hovering dropdown menus is hard to always do right in immediate mode layouts. In both cases there are ways this can be mitigated. This point has been made so many times that I got my cheap comeback ready: Here is a blog post by the web agency of the W3C giggle explaining why they had to create there own CMS system because existing solutions don't have good support for accessibility giggle: https://w3c.studio24.net/updates/on-not-choosing-wordpress/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com