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by elderK 2564 days ago
As someone who has a pretty serious visual impairment, I find the attitude of so many of these comments really... disappointing.

You wouldn't believe how much effort people with poor vision have to go to, to consume the modern web.

You can't even take simple things for granted like being able to zoom. So many websites pollute their page with pointless navigation elements that block most of the content when the page is zoomed.

Or say pages that try to be elegant, centering everything with some margin. Sure, it looks "great" if no one zooms it. If you do, you wind up consuming the content in three or four word chunks...

Or even worse: Elements that have hardcoded minimum widths. When you zoom, nothing reflows and you wind up having tons of content "off screen."

At best, this is annoying because you have to constantly scroll horizontally.

At worst, you're screwed because for some bizarre reason, scroll bars never appear.

I'll wrap my rant up here but I'll leave this:

Do you really want the web to be like reality, where the needs of a few are so often ignored simply because of some trait?

"Oh, there are so few of them, why bother..." "Oh, they don't matter because <whatever>"

Sound familiar? I'm sure you can fill in the blanks.

The web gives us a unique opportunity to improve on the real world in so, so many ways.

Don't waste it.

3 comments

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I'd like to throttle the first person who ever decided that if the window width would not 'comfortably' accommodate their vision of the page, certain elements would just DISAPPEAR. Like GONE. When you have to zoom out to make hidden elements (not just hanging off the edge, as in never drawn) appear... someone has been naughty.

Just a week ago I wanted to factory-reset an old router before dumping it. Because my modern laptop doesn't have a LAN-connector, I used my old Eeepc with a 7" display.

Everything worked just fine until I was on the page where I was supposed to press the 'Confirm' button for the factory reset. It just wasn't anywhere and I was wondering what I was missing. So I started to dig into the framesets and finally found a frame where the code looked like there was that button.

Took me a while to find out how to press it (simply opening the frame in a separate window didn't work because there was some JS magic involved). The solution was to zoom out. So much fun when a task that was supposed to take 15 minutes takes 2 hours because someone built an over-the-top web-interface.

> my modern laptop doesn't have a LAN-connector

I thew a head banging spittle-fit when laptops no longer carried RS232 ports. Then my boss handed me a 'modern' laptop without an Ethernet port. The theme seems to be, let the things evolve forward with LSI/VLSI/ChipsetBuiltins until the port costs a mere 19 cents... then drop it... to save 19 cents.

But it's reactive! Clearly by zooming in the user wants a more minimal display with less elements, right?

/S

Do you have a link(s) that summarizes these points so devs that are ignorant of these needs can reference?
The most basic thing you can do is view your website without any CSS styling.

Then see what happens when you view it at 400%.

Then find yourself some software that mimics various visual impediments and give it a shot.

I wouldn't have any issue justifying spending reasonable time making webpages as accessible as possible (even with image replacement text, blind people are going to miss some of the info in the image), but I miss exact guides as to what that means. At present I can throw in some Aria tags, but I don't know when that is needed (can webreaders figure out that <article> means an article?) and I don't know when that is enough.

I am also not in the US, so I can't tell my boss to spend disproportionate amount of dev time on something that doesn't make money.