Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwb | Hacker News Reader

There are types of software for which I’d largely agree with you. Websites are not one of them: it takes effort or incompetence to make them slow and inaccessible.

View on HN

Like 99.998% of software problems are due to incompetence. What’s your point? That government software is somehow immune to this problem or something?

You seem to agree with me, but refuse to admit it because you wish the world was different. I do too, but it’s pretty irrelevant.

My point is that websites are particularly amenable to being cheaply built in a fast and accessible way. I would say classes of, say, macOS apps are similar. Government certainly should be insulated from at least the market pressures that push websites into being slow and inaccessible. Competence is more a roll of the dice, I’ll grant you, but I’m not as pessimistic as you on that.

If we were talking about JS or Python or something, I’d agree with you. Most people just don’t have expert-tier knowledge of pure HTML, and even if they do, they’re slower to develop. I could get a feature out today to 99.9% of my desperate users, or I could get it out to 99.99% by waiting another two weeks. It just makes no sense. It has nothing to do with pessimism and everything to do with economics.

Sorry, I don’t buy it. There’s nothing “expert-tier” about plain accessible HTML, and with LLMs, there’s even less excuse. I’m not primarily a frontend web engineer and I can manage it.

Yes, I’m certain you can “manage it” despite not considering things like screen readers, page layout reversals, mobile responsiveness, working with legacy codebases that are 30 years old (when was the last time YOU had to update a site that simply must shut down every night for processing?), etc.

Everything looks easier from the outside. Maybe we should focus on getting private corps to provide a small amount of accessibility before forcing onerous requirements on our already-underpaid civil servants?

We're talking about governmental document-like websites with relatively simple forms here, not your particular legacy web app, there is no excuse for not getting them right. Gov.UK did. Plain HTML, used in a straight-forward way that is very clear from the approachable documentation on, say, MDN, is already responsive, readily consumable by screen readers, and works with any backend that already exists. If you have to fix a mess left by someone else you have my sympathy - I've been there too. But the original post is appealing to people who have a choice between plain, standard-use HTML, and any alternatives. And yes, I'm all for much harsher penalties for private companies that produce inaccessible web sites/apps too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com