What percentage of your users actually have JavaScript disabled? How small would the user base have to be before you decided they weren't worth this much effort?
True Story: I worked for a while on a website where users would upload and share tutorials on various topics. As the company behind it grew, it had the genius idea of selling print copies of their best tutorials. At some point, we were looking for a Python tutorial to publish. We select our favorite one, get in touch with the author and were genuinely delighted to find out that he was blind, accessing our app via screen reader.
He went on to publish a book (last I heard selling at over 10 000 units in less than a year topping Amazon's sales in its category). It was our app (the general focus on accessibility, independance from Js was a big part of it) that allowed this cool blind kid to publish a best sellers book. The odds of something like this happening, clearly, aren't very high, but when they do it's instant gratification for the developer who worked on making it accessible.
If you're too hung up on numbers and ROI, think of all the benefits the company got from the positive exposure it gathered from the press around the incident. In any case, unless the core of your app is in JS, it's always a good idea to provide alternatives.
Shouldn't we fix the screen readers, rather than fixing every website?
Any solution to any problems that begins with 'first change the world' is not a valid solution as the project will never get past that stage.
The world would be a much better place if the effort and money spent on making ramps was spent on wheelchair provisioning and development.
To work it into an analogy: What is the point of having good, easily available wheelchairs, if there are no ramps (or equivalently wheelchair accessibility means) for people to use?
Because the millions of dollars spent adding rubberized material to some-but-not-all street corners sounds-based UIs for some-but-not-all intersection lamps could easily buy those who need it a vehicle to climb stairs?
Also: perhaps you are forgetting a few very important benefits of those street corner ramps that have nothing to do with wheelchairs:
* People pushing strollers and carts now have an easier and safer way of getting out of the street.
* Old folks who can walk but not climb stairs very well can get across the street easier.
* Everyone has a non-0 probability of tripping as they cross the varied height curbs in cities - ramps reduces that significantly, saving society a lot of lawsuit and medical costs, this is a continuing benefit.
Not a benefit, but a solid argument:
* Since almost all of the money spent on putting these in is part of normal road/curb/sidewalk maintenance anyway, its probably not as expensive as you suggest, and since the tooling exists, why not do it right this time, rather than the old way?
* Since the government is building sidewalks, do you really want your government to actively exclude people from participating in basic "for everyone" stuff because of reasons like wheelchair bounding? I can understand if it is a result of choices they make (e.g. keep sex offenders out of parks), but telling someone "sorry life sucked for you, no more participation" is not a function of a democracy.
For example for restrooms, instead of a dime-sized button for soap, there can be an accessible button big as a palm that is easy to hit and light to push.
It seems like it's been a while since you read the HN guidelines. It might be good to read them again.
You and I will have to disagree on whether or not my 1 line of snark (respectfully labeled as such) in an otherwise civil and respectful reply about the practicalities of ramps constitutes incivility. I personally would say that in a conversation face to face, and very few people find me offensive (and many of those who choose to be insulted by my views not my conversational style).
Thanks for the correction. Do you know of anywhere I can learn more?
The instant the site fails the decision has been made.
If your site breaks without js you must at least realize that you will, at the very least, annoy the users who has actively disabled it.
Next, you would have to build a cookieless site, avoid Flash and other annoying videos, fly blind without tracking etc.
/NoScript user /I am the 1 percent
I can't think of a single reason why that would be a bad thing.
Good examples of some problems I've seen are Twitter taking several seconds to load content, even when the javascript is cached (somehow facebook does it fast enough). You even have a webpage like this "http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowsers...? that seems laggy when scrolling with js.