[derefr]

Mind you, neither the numeric indices for navigation, nor the lack of pictures, is really a stumbling block for the two user-types who most heavily contributed to / constrained the design — that being 1. blind people using screen readers who wanted to access a BBS-like service providing news, weather, etc., that would consider their access needs; and 2. deaf people who were accessing a given company’s teletext system under the expectation of it serving as the visual equivalent of said company’s IVR phone tree.

(In fact, consider how well teletext UX works as an efficient, navigable information-dense directory system for both blind and deaf and motor-impaired users, all inherently such that you just design once for the constraints of the system, and you get “the right thing.” There’s a reason governments latched onto it: it really works for everybody!)

The Web in theory is a successor to teletext in serving these needs… but it was really only the Gopher / HTML1 Web that was an inherent improvement. As soon as we started nudging content around with semantically-meaningless tables and divs to look better, the Web started to not work so good for users with these interaction difficulties.

[seabass-labrax]

That's true, but teletext isn't theoretically more constrained than the Web is. There's nothing stopping, for instance, teletext operators from producing pixelated animations or scrolling text effects, just as there's nothing stopping Web developers from adding accessibility-hostile layouts.

In Britain, teletext hasn't been available for over ten years now, but at the same time, a department called the Government Digital Services do an excellent job of making public websites accessible - complete with ARIA labels, semantic elements, all of that sort of thing. I'd easily acknowledge that teletext was ahead of its time, but I don't lament its replacement with the Web.