I sometimes wonder how HN’s audience is shaped by the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people. I suspect it is one part of the site’s tilt toward the younger crowd
> the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people
Can you expand? I naively thought that a site with markup as simple as HN's (zooming is flawless and it even works without JavaScript) would be very accessible to visually-impaired people.
I should have worded this a little differently. I don’t know how accessible it is to someone who is actually blind or uses a screen reader. For all I know it’s great for them.
I do know the tiny text and low contrast make it hard to use for someone like me with older eyes. This is especially true on mobile, where the text refuses to resize in accordance to my phone’s large font settings.
I would not characterize the [dead] comments (which are #ddd) as "a typical comment". They're designed to be hard to read. If I turn off showdead (which I believe is an opt-in setting), it looks like the lightest comments are #9c9c9c, which is a 2.5 ratio (and of course are also comments which are intended to be less prominent).
I'd assumed anyone with visual impairment—but not outright blindness requiring a screen-reader—was using custom stylesheet stuff pretty much constantly all over the web. Controlling the appearance of sites client-site used to be a basic browser feature. I know that's receded into the background, but is something similar (either some accessibility feature, or a plugin) not the norm for those who need them? If not, that sucks, because control used to be so firmly on the client-side for those things and that was a good thing.
Maybe this is my inexperience with front-end design keeping a11y in mind: what about HN is inaccessible for visually impaired people? It is mostly plain-text so it is easy to resize. There is some low-contrast text but that can be adjusted in CSS with user styles. I haven't tried a screen reader but I imagine that it would work reasonably well. All not to mention that there are HN RSS feeds, so the content can be consumed in any way that a person might want.
I'm no expert, but the comment threading and indentation using table cells and spacer gifs doesn't seem like it would be straightforward for a screen reader.
Agreed, making the divs article tags or adding an article role would help, but personally, as a blind user, i don't care as much, the content is interesting enough that it's not a big deal. You can deduce the tree structure anyway, at least most of the time.
That reminds me of people who "learn it all on YouTube."
Maybe it's the best option for some people. Not for me, but I do love an audible book.
In conclusion, I think these other mediums simply lack the iterations that we've put into text over the centuries, leaving text as the clear winner in my book.
YouTube is great for things where the directions for the specific activity you want might not include "basic" things someone who knows it well wouldn't think to list in written instructions, or some little technique or movement they do automatically and don't even think about. I love it for house and car DIY stuff, for that reason and also because it makes it clear which parts will be a pain-in-the-ass, and how much, to help me gauge whether I want to do it, or hire it done.
It's also great for technique with tools in the kitchen—not learning recipes so much, but learning the right way to process a certain vegetable really fast, or exactly what a proper whipping motion for eggs ought to look like, or how a pro moves the pan on and off the flame while cooking this dish, exactly what it looks like when they deem a certain cooking technique "done", all of that.
As someone who isn't visually impaired I have little to go by or background to judge, but HN strikes me as not being particularly inaccessible, given its minimal UI and very little reliance on non-textual elements, in particular compared to most social media sites.
What in particular would you wish to have improved?
I mean, the site scales really well with browser size, default font size etc. I'd argue the real inaccessibility is lack of images, and general "boring" vibe that puts off entire demographics who post the type of content that might not be welcome here.
I think a large number of people are unaware that you can scale web pages up with Ctrl -, Ctrl +, particularly older people who complain that "text is too small".
I'm not even old (mid-20s), but I scale the site to 150%. HN is honestly one of the worst sites I have used with regards to default scaling across resolutions.
OTOH the simplicity of the site allows for very easy browser-based scaling, which means I only really think about how bad the text size is once per machine.
Can you expand? I naively thought that a site with markup as simple as HN's (zooming is flawless and it even works without JavaScript) would be very accessible to visually-impaired people.