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Comment by throwaway290 | Hacker News Reader

I guess google is fed up with freeloader piggy backing. Requiring JS is going to break a bunch of LLM crawlers immediately

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It'll also break for a lot of of people with impaired vision and screen readers. Screen readers can't keep up with the insane development pace of JS and CSS and so people with impaired vision are going to be left behind. It's an accessibility nightmare.

My understanding is that people with impaired vision use the regular browser and a layer on top of it, such as VoiceOver. They don't need a special version of website. And screen readers don't need to keep up with JS.

This is a common myth.

Screen readers are not a type of web browser. They are software which interacts with other software running on the computer, including web browsers. There is nothing which inherently makes JS or CSS incompatible with screen readers.

That doesn't make it a myth. There are plenty of screen readers that break directly because of shitty use of javascript.

Sure. But it certainly isn't as simple as "screen readers don't support Javascript or CSS" (or whatever). You can make an inaccessible web site with or without modern web technologies - a site based around HTML image maps or table layouts will baffle a screen reader just as badly.

Two words: shadow dom. Now tell me how a reader is supposed to know what's what?

Yep. There's a bazillion of accessible JS libraries. Just manage tabindex/aria attributes. Accessibility is about actual DOM not the html string returned from server.

JS gives the same improvements for screen readers as for everyone else especially with complex apps.

Bad JS of course ruins things as usual, same bad HTML with table layout or whatever. But that's not JS on google.com;)

Google or most search engines work fine with screen readers with javascript enabled. I think your understanding of how web accessibility works is likely severely outdated. There's just too many websites that use JavaScript that it would be a disservice if web didn't support accessible interface for pages with javascript.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAI-ARIA

That said, as ARIA rule #1 says, it's better to not use javascript, as it's always less error prone. That doesn't mean websites shouldn't use javascript when they have reasons to do so, as long as they correctly follow ARIA.

And which reasons do you think Google absolutely has in order to disable completely the usage of the search engine without Javascript?

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