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Comment by syrrim | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm misunderstanding, this seems to be a totally correlational result. That is, they found that websites with increased accessibility tend to also be more usable. This is easily explained by assuming that developers who care about usability also tend to care about accessibility. It is more difficult to explain in a directly causative way, since many accessibility features, such as aria attributes, are completely invisible to non-disabled users.

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There are definitely some core accessibility features that are great for non-disabled users, though, for example having text descriptions for images (it always irritated me that alt-text didn't automatically generate a tooltip, though I sort of understand why)

It's great to be able to mouse over images in Tweetdeck and (if the poster provided it) have the alt-text pop up in a tooltip so I can scan it to see if it's worth the time to open the image, and it's great to have textual descriptions of toolbar icons.

Huh, you're right, it doesn't anymore. It used to though.

I suppose it makes sense now that the web has gone from primarily being a document platform that's sometimes used to create simple applications to primarily being an application platform.

It's the title attribute on an image element that generates the tooltip. Did alt do that previously or was it always title?

MDN says not to put the same text in title and alt, as some screenreaders will read both.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Im...

IIRC very early on browsers would turn alt into tooltips, and then that functionality was split out into title. I understand why but I'm still bitter about it since they don't want you to use both.

I agree, however they did also run an experiment manipulating the same site (keeping design and layout equal and changing contrast levels). You can see two screenshots on page 616

There's also a 3rd category of users, the bots, and crawlers/scrapers can greatly benefit from some of those invisible accessibility features...

While this may be true we build (non-API) sites for humans. Just because bad actors may exploit tools for differently abled people doesn't mean it's OK to exclude the innocent to reduce ones costs.

No one suggested that, and not all bots are evil - there's still a number of useful web spiders that webmasters can benefit from, it's not just googlebot out there...

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