Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
One of the rules on HN I vehemently disagree with. These tangential annoyances often coincide with genuine accessibility issues, and should be called out when seen.
I agree with you, to be called out when seen if applicable, although maybe it would be useful to be able to separate which comments are about such thing than not.
Fortunately, if there is such a top-level comment, any other comments can be replies to that and so you do not need to fill up the top-level comments with such kind of complaints, I think.
If it were reliably contained to one thread I don't think there would even need to be a rule, yeah. I often see it where a bunch of top-level comments are spelling out the same 2 or 3 issues (some in a mean-spirited way), and though I care deeply about software accessibility, that is itself a usability issue for HN.
Sorry about that, I did actually forget about that, but in my defense I offered something constructive to save others the trouble of having to cook up that console snippet themselves
... and the icons are a mixture of the two and the name is a link and the "BY-NC-SA 4.0" is an internal link, not to be confused with the CC icon which goes to the license. The good thing about standards: so many to choose from!
I'll try to bear your "new site, new visual iconography" preferences in mind when I build out my site and decide that Captialized links are offsite links, MiXeDcaSe are dynamically generated ones, and all text except hyperlinks will be blue underlines
This person's site is clearly packed full of innovative idea; I don't understand why CSS tomfoolery needs to be one of them in order to make it stand out
No self expression "needs" to be there. We can criticize it's effectiveness and accessibility, but let's not insist that people's individual blog sites conform to a uniform standard. I'd like the web to be weirder and more experimental. I'd also like users to be empowered to overwrite these decisions when it impacts their accessibility, or even if it's just not to their taste. We can have both.
Yes, the convention is not at all obvious. I also thought it was a link-free page and closed it the first time thinking there wasn't really much to show.
It doesn't once you know the secret code (i.e. a user manual in the form of your comment). I read the page with interest but I thought those were just like a stylistic choice, like a stand-in for specifics (which makes sense for a hyperlink in retrospect).
That is true, but unfortunately it is not implemented very well for other purposes; most of the stuff relating to accessibility tends to be made for blind users. While it is possible to help blind users, good accessibility would be able to help everyone, whether you can see perfectly fine or not.
"ARIA view" with a user specified CSS and using a combination of HTML and ARIA roles to decide how to display, can be helpful, perhaps. (This would be true for form fields too; some web pages implement their own, but sometimes specify by ARIA codes, what they represent; you can use that to replace them by the standard widgets instead of their specialized ones.)
The links are accessible to everything which can determine an <a> exists, uniquely defined with a visual indicator that doesn't require color, and show before you hover if it is internal or external.
Requiring a link to be underlined doesn't seem productive from an accessibility perspective to me. I did some research on a11y and didn't see anything in the audit checklists that this violates [0], could you explain what the precise issue is?
The link styling system used on the wiki complies with all web accessibility standards: it clearly and consistently shows a link without using color as the sole determining factor. An underling is not required (whether you think it should be or not, though feel free to get involved, join a working group, and lobby for the change to your hearts content... though I think it will be an uphill battle for you). Accessibility standards are about helping those with disabilities. What you are experiencing is a difference of opinion about _usability_. I personally do not experience the same usability issues, but to each their own on that one. Accessibility and usability are two very different things and should not be conflated.
> Accessibility and usability are two very different things and should not be conflated.
Nope. They are the same. It's a taxonomy of convenience.
I do not care what W3C says about this.
Example: If you have something with say clean typefaces it may be considered more usable unless the person has low vision or dyslexia then it's accessibility. The labels are easily swappable and there's tons of learning and attention disabilities people have (most people are probably not cognitively perfect).
What if you add an elevator to a building with a bunch of stairs. That's accessibility for the handicapped but also usability for others and thus we've swapped in the opposite direction.
You can take everything labeled usability and relabel it accessibility with a slightly different narrative and the reverse is true also.
The distinction therefore, in this context, is illusory. It's not an actual material difference here, just a fiction.
In scholarly research sure it's not the same. But in the material world without the clinical precision of scholarship, they are in practice always intertwined.
And this is fine, I don't care. A taxonomy of convenience is still a convenient taxonomy. Let's not kid ourselves however...
If you dont care about the standards, which governments use to define how accessibility works and who it applies to for legal purposes, then you essentially want to make up your own rules, policies, and ideas. Which is fine, mostly. However, it doesn't really give you solid ground to stand on when making an argument about other people's work. The fact is that according to the recognized "experts" on the subject (I'm using recognized here because again, governments use these standards and they have legal merit) there is nothing wrong with these links. There is, however, something wrong with conflating accessibility and usability. They are different. One applies to protected classes. The other has to do with everyone, but is in no way protected. There are legal ramifications to one. With the other, you are maybe a jerk for doing things against usability, but if it is equally bad for everyone, it often is not an accessibility issue. Accessibility is about leveling a palying field, usability is an opinion based thing regarding how a random person might interact with a website and usually relates to design decisions, not programatic experiences.
> Example: If you have something with say clean typefaces it may be considered more usable unless the person has low vision or dyslexia then it's accessibility. The labels are easily swappable and there's tons of learning and attention disabilities people have (most people are probably not cognitively perfect).
If it's equally a problem for everyone then it's not an accessibility problem.
(And don't think for a second that any design avoids causing problems.)
The link styling is inconsistent with basically every other web page; underlines haven't been "everywhere" since the late 1990s (for better or worse), but distinguishing links has usually been done via the use of color, maybe some other border effect.
The style chosen by this particular web page comes across not as hyperlinks, but as a weird choice to randomly remove words and phrases from the main sentence matter, rendering them more difficult to read and comprehend, and worse, leaving the reader unaware this this choice actually denoted a link.
Using color alone to distinguish links is explicitly an accessibility violation. Underlines are not a requirement. I certainly agree that the link system here is atypical. It just isnt an accessibility violation.
