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Comment by hackernews1134 | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of Microsoft having done this far in advance of Sony; I recall (perhaps incorrectly) that Satya has an autistic child.

I wonder if a leader that has to personally, in their daily lives, deal with an individual who requires assistive technologies imparts a level of empathy to their organization… which led to Microsoft taking a lead in this?

Just a random thought….

Edit: paragraph spacing

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I have observed the same anecdotally, where the personal effect on the leader led them to provide more empathy and time to employees through policy changes.

But conversely, I've also seen our prime minister get covid, come close to dying, and it did nothing to stem the cruelty and disregard that they proceeded to maintain out for the next few years.

In most of the world investments in sport (football - the one americans call soccer) are made because the CEO who is the main shareholdrer like it.

Especially as in most of the world leagues have relegation, so the money invested can be quickly lost.

Not autistic, cerebral palsy, and died young. I imagine that would shape the way you do everything in life yeah.

There seems to be more focus on accessibility in Microsoft products since Satya took over as CEO. For instance, now there's a section dubbed "Accessibility" in the bottom bar in MS Office.

It's box-ticking accessibility, not truely increasing accessibility. Ask yourself how much of the MS site is usable in a text-only browser, or even one that merely has JS turned off.

Do disabled people usually use text-only browsers or turn off JS? That seems orthogonal to being disabled.

That's why I'm saying it's box-ticking. Simple HTML is more accessible to everyone. That includes those with screenreaders and other content extraction/reformatting tools.

My understanding is all modern screenreaders (NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, etc.) handle JS websites perfectly fine and modern accessibility standards in JS are much more than box-ticking.

I'm a fan of simple HTML, too-but I don't believe it has any real impact on accessibility over JS with accessibility in mind. If there are specific cases where that is not true, I'd love to know them

JS issues with accessibility is not inherent to the JS compatibility itself with the browser.

It’s much more that JS tends to make your page being modified in unexpected ways. If all you have is a voice reading the page, you may be submerged by information each time the dom changes and you may have a hard time understanding what is the context of the element which changed.

You can still make it perfectly accessible screen-reader-wise/WCAG-wise.

Pointing out to actual accessibility issues would have been a much better argument than generic complaining about the website requiring JS.

How does it work with a screen reader when the JS decides to refresh all controls simultaneously?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

Here is a video of a blind person browsing the web https://youtu.be/OOvXuz6ejuw

The point is that for some reason no one's guilty for the crap sites; i guess they just show up when it rains.

If you think it's confusing to have a page change while you're reading it with your eyes, imagine what that would do to someone who can't see and relies on a screenreader telling them.

Right, but that’s why you have aria-live regions and politeness levels. All things considered, a simpler page is typically more accessible but:

- a simpler page is typically more usable as well, and

- sometimes you have inherent complexity that it’s also possible to make accessible

Blind users definitely lean heavily on the text-only dimension of the web.

The last time I opened the Accessibility tab in powerpoint, it was full of reminders to add alt text for images and other things like that. It seems meaningful. Is all of that stuff meaningless?

Office has some useful accessibility features but there are obvious features missing. For example, Word will read aloud documents, which is great. There is a shortcut to bring up relevant controls but I couldn't find a shortcut to resume reading after I edited the text. There also doesn't seem to be a way for it to read comments. Ultimately, you need to use a screen reader.

Also, Microsoft recently started banning unauthorized third party devices, which includes some disability devices (not all, just some).

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