[coolandsmartrr]

There seems to be more focus on accessibility in Microsoft products since Satya took over as CEO. For instance, now there's a section dubbed "Accessibility" in the bottom bar in MS Office.

[userbinator]

It's box-ticking accessibility, not truely increasing accessibility. Ask yourself how much of the MS site is usable in a text-only browser, or even one that merely has JS turned off.

[doublepg23]

Do disabled people usually use text-only browsers or turn off JS? That seems orthogonal to being disabled.

[userbinator]

That's why I'm saying it's box-ticking. Simple HTML is more accessible to everyone. That includes those with screenreaders and other content extraction/reformatting tools.

[slimsag]

My understanding is all modern screenreaders (NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, etc.) handle JS websites perfectly fine and modern accessibility standards in JS are much more than box-ticking.

I'm a fan of simple HTML, too-but I don't believe it has any real impact on accessibility over JS with accessibility in mind. If there are specific cases where that is not true, I'd love to know them

[userbinator]

If you think it's confusing to have a page change while you're reading it with your eyes, imagine what that would do to someone who can't see and relies on a screenreader telling them.

[robin_reala]

Right, but that’s why you have aria-live regions and politeness levels. All things considered, a simpler page is typically more accessible but:

- a simpler page is typically more usable as well, and

- sometimes you have inherent complexity that it’s also possible to make accessible

[pjerem]

JS issues with accessibility is not inherent to the JS compatibility itself with the browser.

It’s much more that JS tends to make your page being modified in unexpected ways. If all you have is a voice reading the page, you may be submerged by information each time the dom changes and you may have a hard time understanding what is the context of the element which changed.

[yreg]

You can still make it perfectly accessible screen-reader-wise/WCAG-wise.

Pointing out to actual accessibility issues would have been a much better argument than generic complaining about the website requiring JS.

[pxc]

Blind users definitely lean heavily on the text-only dimension of the web.

[kevingadd]

The last time I opened the Accessibility tab in powerpoint, it was full of reminders to add alt text for images and other things like that. It seems meaningful. Is all of that stuff meaningless?

[dr_kiszonka]

Office has some useful accessibility features but there are obvious features missing. For example, Word will read aloud documents, which is great. There is a shortcut to bring up relevant controls but I couldn't find a shortcut to resume reading after I edited the text. There also doesn't seem to be a way for it to read comments. Ultimately, you need to use a screen reader.