[DoreenMichele]

This is not limited to HN. In any group setting, arguing against a thing is frequently counterproductive.

Social settings are "attention economies." Piling on to the argument adds attention to the thing you nominally want less of, yet are fueling. I generally try to not add to such situations.

I used to say "Fighting against the fighting is still fighting." If I am going to wade in, ideally, I should do so without being combative about it.

I have been debating whether or not to send the comment about how this is not accessible for the blind to a group I co-own called Blind Dev Works. Not sure if it is relevant to the interests of others there. I'm visually impaired and generally interested in accessibility, but I'm not blind, nor really a developer (though I actually want to learn to code and I'm trying to do something about that).

I don't know if it would just be seen as salt in an open wound or an interesting discussion.

[ndarilek]

I don't think it'd be salt in a wound--or at least I wouldn't see it as such. I do wish someone smarter than I am could come up with an accessibility backend to map GUIs to accessible HTML interfaces. So just as QT apps push accessibility objects to Linux/Windows-native accessibility APIs, something could push either ARIA-enhanced <div>s to the browser, or could just output fully-accessible HTML. So instead of QT rendering to a canvas, it could render to another target that just happens to be HTML elements. Substitute any other GUI toolkit with an accessible object representation for QT in my previous paragraph to get a sense for the scope of the problem.

I've just never dived into how those particular APIs work mainly because, well, there are so many problems needing solutions, and I happen to be focusing on others. Surely I'm not the only one to have thought of this, though, and on the off-chance that I am, the best thing I can do is keep mentioning it until someone else decides it's worth trying. :)

[DoreenMichele]

Thanks. I've sent some links and excerpts from the discussion (to Blind Dev Works).

(Anyone on HN interested in joining Blind Dev Works is welcome to shoot me an email. I"m happy to send an invitation. It's a small, low traffic group.)