Re: Lynx is a form of accessibility (was Re: Lynx is not Accessibility)
Hi,
Le 08/03/2022 à 00:26, Thorsten Glaser a écrit :
Sam Hartman dixit:
Thorsten> Alternative solutions may • have accessibility problems
Thorsten> (not work with lynx, for example
Working with Lynx is not a requirement for accessibility.
No, but not working with lynx is an accessibility problem.
No, sorry, refer to international standards such as WCAG.
In the official international definitions, accessibility is the
situation where anybody can use or access to something, regardless its
disability or situation. To avoid the risk of people saying "ok so it
forbids any change and improvement in design of my environment" (a
frequent feedback from people who does not want to do accessibility
effort), the normative definition says rather: an accessible environment
is a one where everything exists enabling an assistive technology to
work. So if a website gives the appropriate info to a browser, itself
able to transmit it to an assistive technology, the environment is
accessible. In technical words, if a site sends the appropriate info to
Firefox, sending the good ones via at-spi, it is fine. Why? Because
requiring someone to use a GUI is not discrimination. Because a GUI now
is accessible (flexible, open to assistive technology, free (and
opensource), compatible with very old and non expensive hardware.
Using a text-based environment is not an accessibility requirement, it
is a choice. Accessibility is not a choice freedom.
Obviously accessibility depends on what your requirements are.
Exactly.
The needs of someone who is blind are different than than for someone
who has mobility issues for example.
Right.
I occasionally help out a couple of blind users on the lynx mailing
list. Some of them are on DOS systems and shell out to Unix systems
to access lynx, even.
Such is their choice, not requirement. They cannot request everybody to
accept it and designing things around it.
But that’s not the only use case. Slow connections, text only,
or even font sizes (lynx runs in a terminal where *I* choose
that), are other use cases.
All these cases can be covered without these technologies. Ther are not
forbidden in any accessibility standard.
Also, JavaScript thingies tend to be over-designed. There was
this firewall solution I encountered at work where you had to
drag-and-drop things to create and order firewall rules.
See the standards to see how to make accessible JS or dynamic contents.
The current solution is to just enter a couple of numbers,
sign and send, which is just perfect for many use cases.
Can we at least agree that there are multiple use cases and there
is not a single solution covering all of them out of the box?
Yes and no. If I take the example of the DDTP, yes, I would PREFER
working via mails, more convinient. But the web interface works, is
accessible. So I cannot require mail. Another example: Transifex is not
accessible. But it provides API to have another interface than the web
app. So it becomes usable via an alternative, without requiring them to
do some particular effort.
IIRC you mention something about writing a frontend to help craft
the mails that are sent to the voting system. I agree that having
the need for that, in such a technology-oriented community that
Debian is, while surprising to me, shows that eMail only has its
problems.
But I want to assert that removing the current, working, method
cannot be a/the solution for that problem either.
I stopped using Lynx many many years ago. Originally it was because
some sites just weren't usable in Lynx and I wanted to use them.
Yeah. I use lynx daily and do encounter this problem. I have an
ever-changing mix of browsers to fall back to, but the developers
of Firefox seem to want to make my life just so much harder (ever
since the update from 78 to 91 it’s so slow it’s barely usable on
a Core2Duo laptop), and I really hate the bad mouse-oriented
usability of it. Also, lynx at least has black background in my
terminal…
ALl this can be addressed. See vimperator, stylus, other addons.
Seamonkey. Less heavy browsers. I have no problem with text-apps users,
I use them myself, I think it is more compatible with my approach. But
no, accessibility does not require things to be compatible with this use
choice.
These days though, modern browsers actually have better
technology for navigating a web page accessibly than Lynx does.
Again, depends on your use case. In my case, the font and colour
selection being user-controlled, the blazing-fast rendering (also
on page down, search, etc.), links and form fields are numbered,
textfields need activation, and the space and b keys for scrolling
is massively superiour to any graphical browser (even though links2
comes somewhat close… I like it as manga viewer, but it has issues
elsewhere).
Yes, you like, and I understand. But you could do differently without
loosing what is necessary for you.
is not directly an accessibility issue. In some cases it is because
I’d argue having to rely on proprietary JavaScript drawing things
is both an accessibility and a worse issue (GNU LibreJS seems to
not have gone anywhere, plus, with it enabled you’d have just the
same site breakage as in lynx).
Standards address JS, ARIA and other kind of techno like this
Best regards
Webbrowsing at the German ministry for IT security also is (or at
least was $smallnum years ago) enforcing JS disabled for GUI browsers.
misleading to simply say doesn't work with Lynx == accessibility
problem.
I will continue to assert that it is, even if not for the obvious
reasons it used to be, with the reasons I listed above.
regular basis please don't spread the myth that Lynx == accessibility.
I’m not. I *do* spread that !Lynx == !accessibility though, which
I have enough reasons to consider justified.
(There’s also the ROCA principle, in which some webpage should
work fine without CSS and JS, and every “layer” (CSS, then JS)
added just makes it “nicer”. I attended a tech talk by someone
proposing this and figured that it’s also a great case for both
lynx and some amount of a11y out of the box. I think the other
attendees were a bit… surprised by the presenter and me nerding
about it like that… but it’s a point.)
Sorry for rambling, it’s late and I need sleep. I hope I was
at least able to make my points.
Goodnight,
//mirabilos
Reply to: