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Comment by doodpants | Hacker News Reader

It seems that the Clay website (https://www.nicbarker.com/clay) can't be scrolled via keyboard.

It's worse than that. The site isn't accessible at all. I can't get my screenreader to make heads or tails of it.

That's because all the text is inside <div> elements, so there is no hierarchy for a screenreader to latch on to: https://imgur.com/a/D78Tbgk

...And the three nav links are made via empty, transparent <a> containers absolutely positioned over <div> text. Focusing, therefore, has nothing to read.

N.b both left- and right-clicking activates these anchors, because navigation is implemented as a delegated `mousedown` event on the document.

Keep in mind that Clay is a layouting library, the rendering as HTML, as OP mentions elsewhere, is just a demo.

That's true... But... The fact is, I can't read the page. Can't tell what the project is, because I can't read the page.

The demo should at least have a noscript tag, to tell me why I can't read the page.

Sorry, maybe I should have phrased this differently: Of course that should be fixed! (I have spent the last half year or so fixing a11y issues on a highly frequented website, mainly thanks to the EU Accessibility Act, so I'm starting to get a feeling for how awful non-accessible websites must be.)

What I meant to say was: The lack of a11y doesn't seem to be a deficiency of the library itself but rather of a hastily written demo application/renderer.

If they're using a screen reader, there's a very good chance they cannot see your image.

My surrounding description serves as alt text! More directly: that is a depiction of the flat hierarchy of the page, which also shows empty text anchors.

It doesn't render anything for me in Firefox, just a blank white page. After a moment, a message shows up: "This page is slowing down Firefox. To speed up your browser, stop this page."

yeah, i have the same problem. it's been hanging for almost an hour for me now. probably an infinite-loop bug rather than a working but slow algorithm?

Same thing (blank page) for me in Chrome/Vanadium on a Pixel 8.

EDIT: It does work in Firefox for Android!

yeah, for me it renders on Firefox but is sluggish compared to Chrome.

Author here, thanks for pointing that out - I'll implement it now.

I've fixed it up :)

still getting a blank page, browser is "links".

Lots of other issues also such as page up/page down on keyboard not working and mouse scroll wheel is very slow(it behaves as if acceleration is turned off).

Yeah the scrolling is handled by Clay rather than being native (everything has position: absolute and there's almost no nesting). It's very cool but I don't know if I'd want to ever use it for a website. Native apps though, might be worth trying out.

As if native apps do not need to be accessible

Most games, for instance, do not offer accessible user interfaces on any level.

Which is bad.

Speaking of games, one of the most accessible I've ever run across was Gears 5.

It allows you to add ping to various obstacles, has both TTS and STT, and so on and... I could actually play it, whilst blind [1]. I could play a shooter, and not suck, without my sight.

A lot of what they did with the engine was really simple, but I so wish that there was a wider adoption of those kinds of techniques.

[1] My blindness comes and goes. Some days I have 0% vision, other days 75%.

Arrow keys work for me.

MacOS 11 Firefox 129

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