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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

  "Accessibility failures are near-universal."

Why does it seem like Accessibility is always an after thought? It is usually so easy to do while a site is built. We just don't think about it until someone complains?

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Almost nobody is testing their website with a screen reader so they don't think of it as part of the user experience. In fact, I think most developers are only vaguely aware of what web accessibility actually is for and how it affects users.

I'm curious about how many test with a screen reader even among those who do claim to care about accessibility. Most advice online around accessibility is about using alt attributes and semantic html tags or whatever, not testing your site with accessibility tools.

Probably not much. Personally I think it's worthwhile because it becomes obvious exactly how broken the user experience is and makes it more motivating to fix (for me). It's pretty obvius what the problem is when all your buttons are just called "button", for example. But there is a learning curve for using a screen reader.

Ironically the site does not support `:prefers-color-scheme`.

prefers-color-scheme is not an accessibility feature. The idea that dark mode matters for accessibility is a meme.

Dark mode is bad for people with astigmatic halation.

Light mode, I've read, is worse for people with cataracts.

Visual accessibility doesn't just apply to the totally blind. There's a reason things like WCAG exist.

I can't reply to the reply, but if I've been mislead, can someone persuade me to see dark mode text clearly? It would help a lot.

Being able to read a website at night without blinding yourself is a part of accessibility.

Because 0.5% of the world population is blind and it costs much more than an extra 0.5% to make a website accessible?

Everytime this question is asked I wonder if people are genuinely not understanding that. It's just not financially worth it.

I'm not defending this position, but it's just glaringly obvious.

Accessibility is about way more than just people who are blind.

(a) accessibility is about all disabilities, not being blind

(b) overall “significant” disability levels are more like 16% [1]

(d) accessibility is a legal requirement for many systems in many regions. Even if you’re not engaging with a region with a legal requirement yet, do you want to have to build from scratch when you do?

[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/disability

prefers-color-scheme has shipped for something like 7 years now and not even all of the major sites I frequent which already have a dark theme toggle support it yet. Obviously accessibility is more important than a dark theme (though it can be part of an accessibility story), but if it takes a minute to ship prefers-color-scheme on those existing themed sites and it's been so many years you get the idea of how little it's about when something is easy or not.

The problem with prefers-color-scheme is that it doesn't indicate an actual user preference since the default is not "no preference" (which used to exist as a possible value in at least FF before it was intentionally removed) but rather whatever the OS/browser picked. So any website that wants to choose a "default" appearance but still provide choice to users who actually care cannot use this mechanism at all.

It can use this mechanism, it just has to default to not using it. E.g. look at LinkedIn.

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