On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 05:38:24AM -0700, JD Austin wrote:
> It's probably good that you pointed that out Steve. I've never been a
> graphic designer but I've done a lot of websites in my time. One of my 'big
> beefs' with a lot of websites is that they make no effort whatsoever to be
> usable with simpler browser technologies.
> In a few cases I've sat down with someone and fired up lynx (or links) to
> show someone what a blind person probably 'sees' on their site and more
> importantly to them (usually and unfortunately) what Google will see when
> they try to index their site. That is REALLLY entertaining when it is an
> all-flash site which neither lynx or Google can read :)
Yes, text browsers are a good least common denominator though I'm sure
web developers don't wanna be forced to restrict themselves to this
lower functionality. I also feel the text browsers need to step up
some of their compatibility too. I like elinks a lot for my text
browsing activities but its javascript support is quite poor in my
estimation. But they still have their place; I can read blogs and
other simple pages with it and elinks loads much faster than
firefox:).
> I've always suspected that sites that relied too heavily on JavaScript don't
> work well or at all for people that are blind. My non-scientific test for
> most sites is to try to buy their product or get a critical piece of
> information using only a text based browser like lynx or links. MANY times
> it is that dumb piece of 'on click' code that is doing input validation that
> is the gatekeeper prevented me from completing the sale or from changing
> from one page to another. I haven't tried that on an ajax / 'web2.0' site
> but suspect I'd be SOL trying to use them. How advanced are the screen
> readers/etc now days?
Like I said before, the javascript is non existant in many text
browsers; I don't think lynx supports javascript at all and elinks, a
distant cousin of links, has some javascript but more often than not,
I can't depend on it and I run into a lot of "harmless" buttons which
won't do anything at all in elinks but are essential to complete a
transaction. In the text area, many of us use Speakup, a set of
kernel modules to provide a talking kernel and others use emacspeak, a
facility to make emacs self voicing and then use w3 or w3m to web
browsing. I doubt either of those support javascript. Now on the
gnome side, Orca has been developed and is still growing as a screen
reader but is plenty mature enough to make regular use of it. When
used with Firefox, most pages render pretty well and I've been to
several ajax and other javascript pages with little difficulty.
Personally as a blind person,, javascript doesn't bother me all that much
from the a11y point of view. In fact in some ways, I think Orca the
free and open source screen reader for the graphical desktop in Linux,
can outperform the web access offered by many Windows screen readers
that people will pay a thousand dollars for.
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