What we found when we tested tools on the world’s least-accessible webpage | Hacker News Reader

What we found when we tested tools on the world’s least-accessible webpage

accessibility.blog.gov.uk

106 pointsrobin_reala26 comments

That page was way more accessable than plenty of sites I have seen. I mean content shows up even if you don't have Javascript enabled or Flash installed. That alone puts it way ahead of a huge number of websites.

is javascript-free content such an important issue for accessibility? Do screen-readers not work on javascript-generated websites?

They do work (and Dragon NaturallySpeaking doesn’t work if you turn JS off). You do have to be careful though that you’re using semantic elements, and you should absolutely be testing in them. It’s all to easy to change content on the page and not alert a screenreader user that they’ll need to be aware of something.

No, "works without Javascript" is way outdated advice that has nothing to do with accessibility in the modern world. The whole point of ARIA is to make dynamic, JS-driven web UIs accessible.

But websites that don't bother to make their websites accessible without JavaScript have a bad track record for implementing ARIA (correctly).

Good accessible design has benefits for everyone, not only the disabled. For instance, that half of the web breaks when you turn off JavaScript, turned into a security issue when Tor Browser enabled it by default (to not confuse their users with a broken web).

Progressive enhancement and accessibility go hand-in-hand. If not for accessibility reasons, then develop websites with accessible JavaScript for security, SEO/automated access, or progressive enhancement reasons.

It is strangely unnerving to read a blog post formatted in the Standard UK Government Website Template. There is nothing wrong with it, but I keep expecting a stern message about paying my taxes.

It looks very professional, though.

Gov.uk and other websites have usability requirements beyond most people's worst nightmares because unlike the social media platform du jour, people do not have the option of just not using the website. Even if you want to file your tax return using a paper form or over the form, you need to request the form or find out the phone number somehow, which means visiting the site. And for many, the web is the most accessible way to do what they need to do.

So this means not supporting IE8 flat-out isn't an option. Not supporting blind users is not an option. Not supporting 95-year-old users is not an option. Bells and whistles, distractingly flashy designs, any use of JavaScript without a fallback.

Weirdly, the result is a very clean, professional, usable website. It's amazing!

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ is exceedingly accessible and clean, and IMO a pretty professional design (if we disregard the content). All too often "design" ends up making things worse rather than better.

Eye-straining gray-on-gray text is not an option, either, etc. It's an excellent effort.

Yes and they don't use mobile apps (like some shitty govs do) but just plain websites.

This - and also before GDS, each of the different government departments had their own stack, their own design standards, and their own verification systems. This would even apply to the hundreds of different local authorities. GDS has done an amazing job cleaning up the mess, and open sourcing a lot of it, within a government culture that is very resistant to change.

as an American, I didn't realize it was a UK Gov website until you pointed it out.

This was a useful article. We're starting to have the accessibility discussion for our externally facing sites/applications, driven in part by new state requirements for assessing and ensuring accessibility.

There's often the knee-jerk "can't we just have a tool approve or identify problems?" because no one wants to allocate or train staff. So it's useful to have evidence that trained analysis in addition to automated tools is appropriate to enable compliance.

Hmmm. Maybe my bank's website is just a government experiment to test accessibility.

I like my credit union's website. It looks and feels like a website straight out of 2001, and it makes no attempt to be clever or slick in anyway. It's also very usable.

My other account at MegaBank is a very modern, slick, and somewhat annoying to use. It's so slick, that when I click on a dropdown, the dropdown choices appear in a modal in the middle of the screen, without greying out the rest of the screen. I had to click on the dropdown about 4 times before I realized the data was being displayed somewhere else. It was actually quite usable before they got all frontend-y on me.

Chase Bank's website appears to have been designed for mobile devices, to the exclusion of desktop computers. It is bizarre to use on a computer screen.

The page has an example of “Wide page forces users to scroll horizontally”.

    Hacker News, which is otherwise very friendly to limited browsers (such as mobile browsers) really suffers from this in certain cases, like this one.

Test case here: https://alphagov.github.io/accessibility-tool-audit/tests/pa...

This is a good article, and this is going to be really nitpicky... but please, use the word 'failures', not 'fails'. For my sake :)

> to create a web-page full of accessibility fails.

> At the moment it contains a total of 143 fails grouped into 19 categories.

On a tangent, but because they read HN sometimes: please can the ESA phone number (0345 608 8545) be made easier to find?

It's not currently on the site anywhere (as far as I can tell).

I the number into the search and landed on https://www.gov.uk/employment-support-allowance/what-youll-g... . It’s on there, but pretty small. If you look at the bottom of GOV.UK pages you’ll see an ‘Is there anything wrong with this page?’ link which is monitored, so maybe submit feedback through there?

This begs the question if using one tool is not sufficient, is using a specific selection of tools each with their own strengths, will give a better result?

No. Many of the things that automated tools can't find are simply impossible to judge in an automated way. Alt text being appropriate for images, for instance, is something that has to be verified by a human (or an AI that's indistinguishable from one).

Hmmm. Facebook is already automatically adding alt text to uploaded images (http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/5/11364914/facebook-automatic...). I think it's within reason to do a comparison of that generated text with the real text, and come up with a score of how likely it is to be representative.

i think accessibility (to a certain degree) might be a application of ML (for example: relations between text based on the layout). Or a quick summary of the page.

I just don't know how to obtain the data needed for training :). Might just be too hard, idk.

I has hoping they had found some incredibly inaccessible webpage in the wild. Instead they built one. :(

Boo! Hiss! Click-bait!

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