Hacker News Reader

There's a bunch of interest in doing this widely to a huge part of the web. Removing all (almost all) HTML/DOM & using WebGL or WebGPU, having the page load a big wasm rendering engine & doing all the interactivity through that.

The original Hixie (former editor of HTML5) manifesto/proposal even included using WebUSB to talk directly to input devices!!

Flutter/CanvasKit[1] & Ian Hixie[2] are actively pursuing/shipping this. There's a blog suggesting Jetpack Compose goes this route[3]. Seems like interest is going to keep growing. These folks say they are just doing it so developers can build "pixel perfect" apps, but oh, it also coincidentally means users have no control or say in the pixel's as they'd prefer them. Not everything written will necessarily be as Lawful Evil/impedeing-basic-human-use as what Amazon is up to here, but it'll be up to each org & each dev what pixels on the screen are interactable how.

One huge nightmare/opaque infernally damned shitworld.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34527980

[2] "Towards a Moderm Web Stack" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779746

Google did it to Docs also, with the same effect. They had even received letters from the Disability Services Offices at leading/large universities, including Stanford, asking them not to.

Ironically, my plugin still works on Docs...but only on comments. The body text is untouchable.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on docs.

I thought docs was working? At least in Mac's voice over on a laptop. There's also a menu setting to turn on more accessibility things. Not sure what that actually does though. But as of December VO could read the body text.

There are ways to have some accessibility support, but still break absolutely every extension an accessibility user might want to use (already know/enjoy), by not having HTML/DOM.

These efforts will, in some cases, have hacks & workarounds. The ARIA group is active building alternative imperative accessibility options for graphical systems. Every one of the folks involved ripping out the actual html web for their own developer-defined Canvas-powered stack realizes accessibility is a minimum legal requiremement. But it can still violate every norm & break every tool an accessobility user wants to use/has ever used, and tick this legal box. It can still be a nightmare hellscape for them. (It probably will be.)

And we get much accessibility by default from having DOM/HTML. It's quite possible that these "Modern" un-web apps have accessibility options in the framework, but that many developers botch up or dont spend the time to use these accessibility options, or they use them poorly. There's plenty of A11Y/ARIA concerns sites should consider on the current web, and fail to do great. But the baseline can be ok, & the user can refine the site/experience (since it's html/dom)!!!! Whether the baseline did-nothing experience stays the same/gets better/gets worse for users (assuming they happen to have compatible a11y tools, per above paragraphs) on these "Modern" un-web apps is very TBD, and I tend strongly towards believing it'll be worse. And it wont be as malleable.

So basically going back to Flash.. but even worse.. I didn't mind writing Actionscript.

Since the publishers aren't able to directly control the user's OS, it seems they're trying to bypass the OS in a way by doing everything in the GPU where it's extremely difficult to access it from the OS.

> it now displays images of text, instead of the text itself. This is of course a huge step backward in terms of accessibility,

Accessibility needs to be regulated. In UK accessibility is well regulated for public websites: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-p...

If we do not do the same for all websites then people with disabilities will be kicked out of a normal live.

> But how effective can this be?

As you point out it will not stop pirates.My guess is that they implement the feature, piracy goes down the week it is released, and everybody gets a bonus. In less than a month piracy is up again as they develop new tools, and people with disabilities lost access to it. But it is too late.

Accessibility in websites need some kind of evolutionary pressure to exists. Otherwise change after change it disappears. And the population that needs this features to have normal lives is not large enough to create an economic incentive.

> If we do not do the same for all websites then people with disabilities will be kicked out of a normal live.

Years ago, I worked for a university. We were implementing Netscape/iPlanet/Sun email for students. The webmail was not accessible. The director of our disability services office was blind, (she was both a full-time staff member and a part-time student) and she complained it was unusable for her. Sun told us “accessibility is coming in a future version”. What did we do? We gave her a shell account with Pine, and told her we’d offer the same to any other student who couldn’t use the webmail due to disability. She was happy with that outcome.

Similarly, suppose someone like Amazon provides a non-accessible privacy-resistant service, and then offers users with proof of disability an alternative service which is more accessible but less privacy-resistant - depending on the details and the jurisdiction, that might comply with disability discrimination laws.

So you think a person needs to be officially labeled as disabled before they're allowed to use screen readers?

Personally, that doesn't bode well for my deteriorating eyesight, which is still very far from disability, but already at a level where audiobooks are easier than real books.

Why does the ADA not let Berkeley publish free course videos without captioning them, but also let Amazon get away with that kind of behavior?

Lobbying.

Definitely publisher asked them to do this.

you'd think Amazon would have to at least pay lip service to accessibility, at the scale of that company. it's infuriating that they don't seem to care.

There's no money in accessibility. Drop accessibility, lose 1% users. Drop publisher x, lose 10% users. Easy decision.

if the ADA doesn't already cover this, we need to amend it to mandate accessibility. at least for businesses at Amazon's scale.

Roughly 15% of people are dyslexic. Kindle could actually sell substantially more books if they implemented dyslexia-friendly accessibility features.

In many cases, it’s not about the users you’ll lose, but the ones you’ll fail to gain.

Kindle supports native text to speech.

I have minor accessibility issues. Kindle has been a godsend: large text, extra spacing, heck I could view one word at a time if I wanted.

Complaining about the Cloud Reader when you have an accessibility superstar in the tablet seems a bit weird.

The Alexa app is great for having books read aloud. But many dyslexic readers don't want TTS — they want to read visually. And the app does have some accessibility settings (or rather, usability settings that are particularly helpful for dyslexic readers).

But there are many other types of assistive technologies out there, including some that are life-changing for all kinds of readers with disabilities. By making the platform inaccessible to browser extension, Amazon has created a situation where their in-house accessibility options are the only ones that can be used. For someone who has accumulated a library over a long period of time, on the understanding that the KCR supports browser extensions, it's pretty lousy to have the rug pulled out with no recourse.

There are some great people working on accessibility at Amazon, and I'm sure this is frustrating for them. But it's not unique that the accessibility team doesn't have as much power as another team — I see this at all sorts of companies, including pretty much all FAANG.

I suspect it’s because they want to promote the text to speech feature in Kindle Fire.

To play the-devil-intepreted-through-the-lens-of-poorly-constructed-web-apps advocate, they may have switched to rendering text in a canvas element (not saving and serving images of text) because... Web Developers. I've done it before (sorry).