Comment by jedimastert
6 years ago
> However, being a blind person, I guess I have to accept that Google doesn't care anymore.
Jumping from "this isn't working on my incredibly niche browser" to "Google don't care about blind people" is completely ridiculous.
Defaulting to simple HTML allows one to support all incredibly niche browser. That is the beauty of protocols and standards. This is particularly relevant when it comes to accessibility. Google search results are literally lists of web links, so this is absolutely doable.
They don't do it because they are more preoccupied with extracting data about their users than they are about accessibility, and yes, this includes blind people. There is not way around it.
It is perfectly legal to be selfish, but let's not bullshit ourselves about what is really going on...
Yep. Following standards has great side-effects all around. The same things that break sites for the blind also break it for UX-enhancement extensions like Tridactyl, which lets you click elements from the keyboard, so long as sites don't go out of the way to make clickable buttons undiscoverable.
(Extreme apologies for any implied equivalence between myself and the blind.)
I actually think this a great example of the Curb Cut effect, where accessibility features that are vitally important to one group of people (wrt curb cuts, wheelchair users) also provide broad benefits to many others (wrt curb cuts, one example would beparents with small children in strollers).
Blind enablement also allows easier webscraping, which is what I think Google is more worried about.
It has solutions, like Google voicing out the contents, instead of doing a webpage that is so scrappable that screenreaders can parse it.
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I don't feel that's fair -- yes, Lynx is not really updated much anymore and at this point very niche. But it must work for their workflow, and I feel like something as critical as search should have fallback to work with very 'primitive' browsers and older W3 standards.
(FWIW I work at Google, but not on the search team. I might go looking at internal discussions to see if this is being looked at at all)
Recently I read announcements that Google was making it harder to view internal projects/discussions on other teams [0] (suspiciously, this came after the leak that they were still working on a search browser for China [1]). Have you, as a Google employee, found it hard to audit or observe previously visible projects?
[0]: Couldn't find a quick source on this
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/google-ongoing-project-d...
Perhaps you could contribute better by citing examples where Google does care about blind people instead of calling an actual blind person's argument ridiculous.
It doesn't matter if he's blind; I'm calling the connections ridiculous. Lynx isn't a browser for blind people, it's a browser for the terminal. The terminal isn't some accessibility tool either, and was never made to be one. Drawing a connection between Lynx and blindness accessibility is tenuous, saying that this change is Google is attacking Lynx is even more tenuous, and drawing some sort of transitive connection between all of them to say that the change made is somehow against accessibility because it doesn't work on lynx is doubling so, bordering on...
It should also be noted that it seems that this is a bug with Lynx, not Google.
There's this is you care to read it: https://www.google.com/accessibility/
But that's not the point.
Please, learn a bit about edbrowse, made by a blind developer, and think again.
https://edbrowse.org/
Perhaps we could contribute ourselves instead of asking if others can.
Google seems to be heavy users of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A... which offers a lot more power and flexibility towards accessibility compared to plain text by enabling accessibility to full featured web interfaces instead of basic versions.
See other methods https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/accessi...
How about the built-in screen reader in ChromeOS?
Lynx is niche now? Low user count, yeah, but it’s a standards complaint browser.
The definition of niche is literally "appeals to a small, specialized section of the population" so, er, yes.
Perhaps, but in this case Google would just have to comply with the standards, which are not niche at all.
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It seems that the problem is caused by the fact that Lynx isn't standards compliant anymore, and fails to interpret valid HTML5 structures correctly because they aren't valid under older standards.
Lynx is the definition of niche...
According to some other comments, the problem might indeed be that it is not a browser compliant with the current HTML standard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21629207
> it’s a standards complaint browser.
What does that even mean? What standards it complies with? Is there a compliance test suite or report somewhere? Because there definitely are bunch of standards it does not comply with.