[dschuessler]

This is fun and I understand it's a joke.

But since so many people do not understand the importance of HTML for accessibility, I feel the need to stress that this page may be a horrible experience for non-sighted people.

To sighted people, obscure unicode characters may look like text in a different font, but do they for screen readers? The same goes for ASCII art and the tables on this page.

Do all the fun stuff! But please draw the right conclusions for real-world projects.

[rezonant]

I only clicked this story because I was worried someone was just using canvas and JS and ignoring the fact that it's entirely invisible to accessibility features. I heard there is ongoing work to introduce a direct accessibility tree API, but for now the DOM is required.

Instead it's much adieu about nothing since you could simply serve a text file.

That being said, <plaintext> is a nifty historical footnote I didn't know about, so that's cool.

Side note, a lot of people aren't aware that businesses in the US can be sued for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for non-accessible websites.

[fsckboy]

much ado about nothing.

BTW, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing was a pun on "noting" and entailed the passing of notes. I believe "nothing" was pronounced more like "noting" at the time.

and now without much ado I will say goodbye for this comment. Adieu.

[edent]

Oh my sweet summer child! That may have been what your puritanical teachers taught you, but the truth is far more fun!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/8313901/T...

Shakespeare often punned about such "country matters".

[deafpolygon]

Evil website. After about 10 seconds of reading, it gets replaced by a paywall.

[falqun]

https://web.archive.org/web/20230426211700/https://www.teleg...

[bmacho]

That's the whole, a single paragraph

[bmacho]

They probably want to keep it alive, and provide you content as their day job.

[deafpolygon]

Fair. Paywall up front then - don't tease me.

[rezonant]

oh whoops

[lhamil64]

Thanks for pointing this out. I'm visually impaired but don't tend to need a screen reader that often. But the times I do want/need to use one, I inevitably find things that are just awful. For fun, I tried turning on TalkBack on my phone and this demo site was completely inaccessible (TalkBack didn't pick up anything other than the archive.org controls). Maybe part of that is it being on archive.org, but I suspect it's due to the lack of any real HTML.

[rascul]

Here's a direct link without the frame stuff if you want to try that:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230719135333if_/http://no-ht.m...

[rezonant]

I'm curious how Talkback/Narrator handles this same content, but as a standard text file. I suspect it's still bad, but something about the weird HTML shenanigans being played might be messing up the screen readers.

[nurettin]

Do you have a way of uploading the page to gpt4? Perhaps it can annotate the contents for you by looking at the visuals.

[acomjean]

To be fair, the post which tells you “you don’t need html” is html. Which either is whimsical or a little odd.

I can see ascii art being a nightmare for screen readers.

[herewulf]

It's also extremely laggy on my phone browser. Go figure.

[est]

> importance of HTML for accessibility

Can we simply say, Javascript driven SPA was a bad fad

[janosdebugs]

I'm curious why? I built a JS-driven website and did extensive testing with the screen readers available to me (phone, etc). Adding a few aria properties seemed to work wonders. I think the problem isn't the SPA concept but rather that people don't bother testing. However, a horrible screen reader experience can be achieved without an SPA too and many do.

[est]

a well designed JS-driven website is OK, but I've seen too many "learn-react-in-30min" style unnessesary SPA that barely works and buggy bullshit.

To name a few:

- hard-coded buttons disguised as a hyperlink

- customized textbox/dropdown disallow copy-paste

- poorly defined broken URLs and important pages without a proper URL

[peebeebee]

the first two are just as easily replicated with MPA too.

[wryanzimmerman]

JavaScript driven SPA is fine as long as everyone remembers that the entire and only point at the end of the day is to create HTML.