The effort to bring people to use the latest browser is understandable. For one, it forces developers to "drop" bad practices which are now "restricted" or banned in modern browser specs. For two we can bring the latest security protection browser offer to user. How I wish we could just screw every webpage on this planet and rewrite HTML spec and make it fresh and restricted.
But, it is important to note that blind users have very difficult time to use web sites that are JS-heavy and plugin-heavy. ARIA is a great solution, but honestly, even popular sites are slowly adopting it and even so Javascript interaction can be very hard to get right for a blind user.
They can still use chrome and firefox if the website provides text-based version. But the problem is still most websites don't provide text-based version.
Shameless plug: I did my senior project on this subject.[1] In this project I used gmail.js which the author did an amazing job of extracting the DOM for us (it was also on HN). I wish a website could just provide these "JS" APIs publicly so developers like me who wish to let people to interact with the website over voice without us "scarping" the API. Think of the ideal REST practice where one uses HAETOS to drive resource discovery. Imagine every website has a "IFTTT" protocol!
It is unfortunate, but today, even there are millions of blind users, they have to "adopt" to the latest technology with pain, at least this is what the blind users I've asked before and after the project said.
Anyway, my project code is a mess, but it was fun to write add-on and try blind-user tools on my own.
Comments
I want to echo this comment.
The effort to bring people to use the latest browser is understandable. For one, it forces developers to "drop" bad practices which are now "restricted" or banned in modern browser specs. For two we can bring the latest security protection browser offer to user. How I wish we could just screw every webpage on this planet and rewrite HTML spec and make it fresh and restricted.
But, it is important to note that blind users have very difficult time to use web sites that are JS-heavy and plugin-heavy. ARIA is a great solution, but honestly, even popular sites are slowly adopting it and even so Javascript interaction can be very hard to get right for a blind user.
They can still use chrome and firefox if the website provides text-based version. But the problem is still most websites don't provide text-based version.
Shameless plug: I did my senior project on this subject.[1] In this project I used gmail.js which the author did an amazing job of extracting the DOM for us (it was also on HN). I wish a website could just provide these "JS" APIs publicly so developers like me who wish to let people to interact with the website over voice without us "scarping" the API. Think of the ideal REST practice where one uses HAETOS to drive resource discovery. Imagine every website has a "IFTTT" protocol!
It is unfortunate, but today, even there are millions of blind users, they have to "adopt" to the latest technology with pain, at least this is what the blind users I've asked before and after the project said.
Anyway, my project code is a mess, but it was fun to write add-on and try blind-user tools on my own.
[1]: http://ccvcl.org/mediawiki/images/archive/3/37/2014051804182...