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Comment by eurasiantiger | Hacker News Reader

The provided usage example is bad for accessibility: the name of the icon, e.g. ”check_circle”, will be announced by screen readers. If there is other contextual information that explains the icon, the icon can be hidden from screen readers using aria-hidden=”true”. However, in cases where the icon appears stand-alone, it needs to contain a human-understandable text that explains its meaning.

Also, never use Google’s CDN for loading fonts or icons — always self-host them. The CDNs are used to track your users.

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And special-purpose-font/script CDNs don't improve load times any more because browser caches are partitioned by domain nowadays. So using a CDN for fonts or scripts just increases your downtime probability and your GDPR headaches.

I guess it depends on where you're currently hosting your site and if you're using a CDN already. For smaller/private projects, a potential downtime of Google's CDN and GDPR are probably not too much of a concern.

“Check-circle” is exactly the amount of information that the able reader has. Sight-deficient users are as much used to those weird words as able users are used to unintelligible icons.

No. A sighted user can perceive the placement of the icon within its context, e.g. a checked circle within a row in a table, and deduce that it represents confirmation of whatever information the column of the table represents in the context of the row. This information is not available to a screen reader user unless the visually hidden text makes it explicitly available to them.

By the way, your comment shows an ableist bias: an analogous assumption would be that a person who cannot walk is content because they are used to a wheelchair.

If the image stands alone such that sighted users must parse it, then your logic is correct. But if the image is merely decorative due to adjacent text such that sighted users gloss over the image, aria-hidden affords users of screen readers that exact same efficiency instead of wasting their time.

In other words, eyes can skip over decorations without the developer needing to flag them as such, but audio can't auto-skip.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have everything "hidden" by default and have an explicit "aria-include" ?

All text being skipped unless the author tags it for inclusion doesn't seem like a failsafe default, assuming that excessive information is generally preferred over insufficient information.

No the reader has "account_balance_wallet" (no dashes). It will read as "account_balance_wallet account balance wallet."

It would be trivially easy to use ARIA attributes to indicate which span is the icon's label. Not something most people consider, but this is Google. At least they have an accessibility icon?

> Also, never use Google’s CDN for loading fonts or icons — always self-host them. The CDNs are used to track your users.

Any evidence of this claim? Also, given that the Google CDNs allow caching for 24h, it seems extremely ineffective even if it was done.

Yeah, seconding this. The main benefit of using a Google CDN is that there is a huge chance it's already cached on the client device. Which would mean that there is less useful tracking information.

Browsers are moving to block cross-site caching though.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/26/supercookie-pro...

> The CDNs are used to track your users

Is there evidence of this or is it just your conjecture?

>However, in cases where the icon appears stand-alone, it needs to contain a human-understandable text that explains its meaning.

Why? It's the screen reader's job to inform users of what's on their screens. It's not my job to give descriptions to things.

>The CDNs are used to track your users.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

As a web developer, it literally is your only job to make a website that is usable by people.

By which people? I think thats up to the developer to decide.

1. Not always

2. Obviously mostly yes, but in hn people just assume that you're a somewhat good person who wouldn't knowingly restraint internet access to people with disabilities

Of course that's up for the developer to decide. You can't force a developer to make a website accessible to all people regarding of their capabilities.

But you have to remember the initial goal of why the Internet started as open and what was the initial goal, to make all information accessible to everyone, that's why accessibility standards were there since the beginning.

That was the entire goal of the web, to be open and accessible to EVERYONE.

But if you want to go full head on capitalism and argue it doesn't matter for business, accessibility is literally search engine optimization, which is great for business. Googlebot is blind and doesn't use a mouse to surf the web.

From any perspective Accessibility is a requirements for any website or web application. Of course, nobody can force developers to make websites accessible.

Wait, yeah they can:

* https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-dominos-pizza/u...

If you are making web sites for public use, the law disagrees with you.

No - in most western countries it's decided in law that reasonable efforts should be made to support most people, those with disabilities like visual impairment included.

I design websites that are to be used with primarily desktop screens. If you want to use an unsupported configuration such as a tiny screen or with no screen then it is not my fault if it does not work well.

Similarly, if I make a VR game I am not going to design it in a way that makes creating a pancake version of the game easier to use. If someone does create a pancake mod for the game, they should not complain about how weird the controls are or how they can only use one hand. They should take those issues up with the pancake mom developer and not with me. If people find it hard to use my website through a screen reader then they should complain to the screen reader developer to improve it. It's not my fault if there software sucks at what it is trying to do.

> I design websites that are to be used with primarily desktop screens. If you want to use an unsupported configuration such as a tiny screen or with no screen then it is not my fault if it does not work well.

In lots of countries you are obliged to make the site accessible for what you call "unsupported configurations". E.g screen readers, heavily zoomed sites etc. So yes, it will be your fault, and you are liable for what you deliver. If you're a professional web developer, this should be known.

Sure, throw me in jail for not wanting to waste my time developing stuff I have no use for in websites that are freely accessible. If countries want me to develop and support stuff that I don't want to they should pay me for it.

Again, assuming you're a professional that's just part of the job. So you will get paid for it, just include it in the estimates/your quotes. It's not optional. And really, it's not that hard to do..

VR versus pancake typically has nothing to do with disabilities. Display versus screen reader does. It's fine to exclude people who can choose to be included, but it's good to avoid exclusion when choice is not part of the equation.

If you're talking about building something that couldn't possibly be of any use to a blind person, that's one thing, but most websites do not fall into that category.

>VR versus pancake typically has nothing to do with disabilities

Keyboard and mouse as inputs leave you essentially physically disabled. Not having a full range of motion is just an much of a disability as being blind.

Ticket: "Your website isn't very accessible to people using screen readers. Could you improve it with aria tags please?"

Response: "It's not my fault you're blind. Ticket closed."

No, my response is that your screen reader sucks. For example a bad screen reader might require that an image of an apple has to be labelled apple for it to work, but a good one could just see that image and recognize that it is a picture of an apple.

Ok, and what does that change? Are you gonna invent that software for those people? If it already exists, are you gonna give them a license? All because you didn't feel like spending half an hour thinking about accessibility.

It's not my job to work on your screen reader. Complaints about its effectiveness should go towards the developers of the screen reader software. If everyone's screen leader software sucks then there is likely a business opportunity for someone to make a better one. Also you are trivializing it by saying half an hour. Even if that was true it would be half an hour for every single website in existence. That doesn't scale. What scales is making a better screen reader.

I'm sorry you see the world this way. I sincerely hope you never have to rely on accessibility tools to use the internet in the future.

That is actually an awesome idea.

It's good that you're this steadfast in your righteousness. That way you know why so many businesses don't consider hiring you.

I make websites in my free time for fun. I don't find it fun spending time developing and testing for configurations that I won't personally use. I have better things to do in my life than fiddle with CSS.

> Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

Seems they have request logs and publish the aggregate statistics. There's no indication of tracking otherwise.

> Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure. Aggregate usage numbers track how popular font families are, and are published on our analytics page. We use data from Google’s web crawler to detect which websites use Google fonts. This data is published and accessible in the Google Fonts BigQuery database.

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...

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