Accessibility
10Is there anyway this site can be more accessible to screen readers? Currently it’s very hard to figure out what’s going on in the page and this site seems to be missing a lot of WCAG guidelines for even A compliance. I want to promote this site to friends, but since some of those people use screen readers, I can’t in good faith. https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
- 5 comments, 18 replies
- Comment
Someone’s getting ready to sue.
@sammydog01
/giphy cynical
@sammydog01 Nope, not planning on suing, just wanting to call attention to it. I work in accessibility and random lawsuits do nothing to push accessibility forward. I would rather work with them to create a better site.
@srancour
@sammydog01 All good!
Just curious why you want to promote a site that you just joined? What do you like about it?
@RiotDemon I think that’s a very interesting question…why would a brand new user want to promote meh.com?
So @srancour, any illumination on why the sudden interest in “promoting” this particular web site?
@RiotDemon a more general question is why would anyone want to promote meh…
@RiotDemon @robson I want to send this to friends of mine because I was an original woot user and loved it before I got into accessibility and before it got bought by Amazon. I just found out this site existed yesterday thanks to a coworker and was planning on tweeting about it until I ran through it with a screen reader. I know a bunch of my friends loved woot before it got acquired as well and wanted to share with them.
@RiotDemon @robson @srancour
@srancour thanks for your reply. Good to see new faces. Ignore anyone being grumpy. They are protective of their home.
@RiotDemon @srancour I still don’t trust them.
@RiotDemon @srancour @therealjrn
Are they on your lawn?
@RiotDemon @sammydog01 @srancour I just hope they don’t launch a new “chat room” that will be SO MUCH BETTER than the forums.
I would note that inserting an image using the formatting entry (not the inline URL method or /mehdown tags) users can enter text alternatives. However, all of these forums are user-generated and if users don’t enter text alternatives to embedded images, no amount of magic can add it.
As for the homepage of the mediocre family of websites, that’s something only the meh/mediocre labs development technical teams can address.
You could post some resources (testing tool, accessibility toolkits, etc.) to point them in the right direction if you want to offer actionable hints.
@mike808 I imagine somebody getting ready to sue wouldn’t be very helpful.
@mike808 Right, I wasn’t talking about the forums because you can only do so much to control people adding their own accessibility. I was more talking about the home page where they are selling things. That area is a nightmare from a screen reader perspective. And yeah, tools you can use:
Those are just a few tools I use on a daily basis to check accessibility. Like I said above, I’m not trying to sue, I’m just trying to help and let friend’s of mine know about how the people who made woot have remade something to go back to their roots, which I love!
@srancour Props for posting some starters for the web geek folks. I’m sure there’s more than a few of us regular non-flask people that work in web tech.
Unfortunately, bean counters often evaluate accessibility only in terms of revenue ROI and not in the intangibles like brand goodwill. There are downsides as well, mostly from a security standpoint, in having a larger attack surface to protect. So its not always happy feels.
The well known example of fraudsters (ab)using ACA-mandated TTY services for the disabled to commit fraud or abuse victims because TTY operators are required by law to say exactly what the TTY tells them to say, even if they know it is hate speech, fraudulent speech, or in the furtherance of a potential crime. i.e. a threat.
We still have this problem with VOIP, fax, and alarm/dry circuits, etc. to some extent
@srancour my company is trying to ramp up on a11y at the moment, and there’s a lot to absorb. I’m handling the testing end, trying to educate my fellow testers on how to ensure that our devs did it right. JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, high contrast, zoom, keyboard-only, etc. there’re a lot of customers out there who have different needs. I’m glad that companies are starting to wake up to this!
@UncleVinny FYI JAWS sucks, or at least it did 3 years ago at reading pdf’s of excel sheets. It was a real PITA to figure out how to make it so that student could “read” test bank questions in finance and stats that did that. I told the publishers but who knows if they did anything about that in the future.
Man, you guys are a rough crowd. Anyone that seems to have been disillusioned with the Amawoot is okay by me.
@cinoclav To be fair, (s)he didn’t open with that explanation. They just joined up and said your site is jacked up for screen readers.
A little bit of an introduction goes a long way, Clavvy.
Late to the conversation, but I don’t see that the OP was rude in their approach. The fact is that most websites are fairly unfriendly to those of us (yes, I am one of those people) who rely on a screen reader to access this internet thing that has become a necessity in this day in age. Most of us are intelligent and wish to live independently and not have to constantly ask someone else for assistance in carrying out everyday chores and pleasures.
Have an open mind and realize we’re just trying to live life and enjoy all the cheap thrills and deals that meh has to offer.