morning reading

[jazzfish]

Data: "Every time during that 7 days I ran into a particular kind of inaccessibility, I wrote to the owner/relevant authority and asked them to fix it. I aimed for short, factual, informative request letters." ... with the results you might expect if you took two minutes to think about it. Useful to have for shooting down the "disabled people need to just ask for accommodations, then they’d be given them" theory.

Researchers discover original bacteria of the Black Death: "Our next goal is to sequence the entire DNA." I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong with this plan.

Mr. Nobody: How Children Use Metaphor to Get to Sleep, Cope, Grieve and Grow: as the title says. Wow.

Actual content later.

Comments

[rbandrews]

I saw that article on accessibility on Reddit. It seriously pissed me off.

See, here's the thing: the reason these requests are getting ignored or rejected is because it's incredibly expensive to retrofit a site for accessibility, and the only people it will benefit are the small number of disabled people using the site. Right?

Only that's incredibly wrongheaded. Everyone's disabled at some point or another, as far as your website is concerned. You on a crappy phone? Disabled. Laptop with a shit trackpad? Disabled. SSH session where you can only use Lynx? Disabled.

Got a unit-test suite? It's disabled. How can it tell which picture is which? Using a site fifteen years from now when all your shitty plugins are abandoned? Wow are you disabled. You really think Flash will still be around and backwards-compatible in 2026?

The issue isn't accessibility, it's compatibility. Everyone benefits from an internet that works across all platforms. I hate the short-sighted motherfuckers that don't see that.

[rbandrews]

Not to mention, this is why the "just make a better screen reader" argument falls over. Webrat is not going to use a screen reader, it's just going to ignore your ugly Flash blob. Guy from 2026 isn't blind, he just has Chrome version 93, which doesn't support Flash on his 512-core machine.

[jazzfish]

ha, yes. Exactly. From a technology perspective, there is literally no reason for websites to be that inaccessible. (Restaurants and companies with Flash websites were inaccessible to me eight years ago, but that's because I'm a plain-text guy at heart and I do not want to sit through your slow-ass animation.)

(Speaking of websites, I'll be looking at the game this evening. Needed to disable brain this weekend.)

[rbandrews]

Fair enough. I've been trying to keep mine busy enough actually. Spent most of the weekend playing Picross 3D.

Restaurant websites uniformly suck, and there's a simple reason why: people who run restaurants don't know shit about websites. They make decisions about them based on what looks coolest when they first see it, rather than what's actually going to accomplish their goal (get people into the restaurant). So, Flash. It's Flash now anyway, in the 90s it was animated GIFs everywhere.

Not just restaurants either; designing software is as much a technical skill as implementing it, but for some reason idiot suits think they can do it.

[firecat]

I think it's more heineous than that: It's because whoever it is that makes restaurant websites is telling them to do it that way (probably because if they code a fancy flash web site they can charge more) and the restaurants are all copying each other because restaurants are desperate not to stand out among other restaurants in a way that might turn customers off, which also is why they all offer the same menus.

[rbandrews]

I figured the menu thing was because they all order food from the same restaurant suppliers (which probably also supply recipes). I've noticed definite trends in Chinese places; most Chinese restaurants are one of about five different types. Very occasionally I'll find one that's unlike any other place I've been in before, and those I'm willing to drive across town for.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

Without reading it, the first link: He/she had to write a zillion letters and the majority of them were greeted with either rudeness or blank incomprehension, right?

The last link: ...yes, wow. That's all I can say.

[jazzfish]

Close! Exactly 50% of them were ignored altogether. The other half were either rude or "i dunno man not my job go talk to bob over there."

I spent fifteen minutes trying to find a good pull-quote for that last link and just gave up, because it's all a) that good and b) so entwined that I couldn't separate it out.