Hacker News Reader

Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

> The first mistake the developer made, was that he wanted to create a different user experience between keyboard and mouse.

No, they wanted to make them the same. It's just to give a blind person the same experience as a seeing person requires different things because they operate differently for obvious reasons. For example, a blind person can't see when an animation has finished. They expect that menu to be available once they've triggered it. However, seeing people see the dropdown appearing and then go to use it once it's ready.

> Don't try to be smart when it comes to accessibility.

In all seriousness, considering the state of accessibility as is, I think going outside the box isn't trying to be smart. It's actually being smart. The BBC frontend team is probably at the forefront of making high-traffic websites extremely usable.

View on HN

> a blind person can't see when an animation has finished. They expect that menu to be available once they've triggered it. However, seeing people see the dropdown appearing and then go to use it once it's ready.

A blind person can and should get cues from their assistive technologies that an item is is being loaded and is shown, either using announcements or aria tags that provide this information to the user.

While its fine to expect that something is available immediately, that's rarely a realistic expectation, whether you're blind or not.

If you remove the can, I would agree.

> For example, a blind person can't see when an animation has finished. They expect that menu to be available once they've triggered it. However, seeing people see the dropdown appearing and then go to use it once it's ready.

For my two-cents, the BBC was simply trying too much to be "cutesy". Don't animate anything, because the silly animation on mouse click simply makes the website feel slower overall. Just open the menu as fast as the user's browser will open it.

That wouldn't change anything. They want the first element of the menu to be focused when "clicked" from a keyboard but not from a mouse. The animation doesn't affect that.

> Don't animate anything

Animation helps to correlate screen elements. Without animation it actually takes longer to establish the mental relationship between the action and the result.

We as developers think we like zero animation. Probably not least because animation is harder for us to implement than just view(state).

But it's very easy to create cases where the UX sucks because things happen instantly especially as inherent complexity of the app increases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com