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by muser8 417 days ago
This has to be the most inaccessible page I've seen in nearly 25 (30?) years.
3 comments

What is inaccessible about a bunch of text on a page? It's readable in any kind of viewer you want, and a screen reader or a braille display can parse it. Does "accessibility" now mean that you have to have a navbar at the top of the screen for some reason?
The fact that almost every single link on the page goes to a 404, times out, or says Forbidden, might have something to do with it.

Or the gigantic, seemingly meaningless URL.

I don't know what this page is, but it doesn't seem to exist in any kind of context of a larger website. How did anybody even find this in the first place?

Cool URLs don't change [1], and that page has had the same URL for 251 years

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

Ah yes, if link rot accumulates over time then that would certainly explain it. ;)
"Accessible," like so many words, means different things to different people.

You're saying this page seems inaccessible: how did anyone find this page? How is a person meant to access this stranded corner of the web?

They're saying this page has good accessibility: those with impaired vision, who use text to speech tools and the like, would not face difficulty with this simple HTML.

It's dumber than that. They're saying it is inaccessible because they don't like the URL.

That's like giving a product on Amazon one star in a review because you don't like the vendor's SKU code.

It looks fine in Safari reader mode. Pretty sure most other browsers have something similar.
The styling honestly is reminiscent of 90s webpages, so I wouldn't find it shocking if it is a couple decades old and just hasn't been updated.
Looking closer at the URL, I realize now it has "2002_09_10" in the path. Presumably it was created then and hasn't been fully rewritten since, so while not quite 25 years old, it seems that might be the reason it doesn't have any recent accessibility features.