Just a rant about inaccessibility of web tools

[u/mehgcap]

I know this isn't news to anyone, but the internet isn't always very accessible. We use a ticket system at work, one for which I'm the sys admin. It's had some accessibility problems, some of which I've fixed on our installation, some of which I can't fix. Today, I finally opened a ticket with the company behind the software, sending a long list of what's wrong.

When I went to submit my report, I was stopped by a CAPTCHA prompt. Care to guess whether this CAPTCHA was accessible? I'll give you a hint: I had to find sighted help. Oh, and I've told this company about some of the problems before. They were receptive. Nothing was fixed.

The worst part is that two of the most glaring issues are, I think, from third-party components. These components were made inaccessible, or could be easily broken for screen reader users with bad implementation but still work for sighted users. Either the company chose these and never checked for screen reader support, or they checked and didn't care that they were using broken pieces.

To cap it all off, I was stopped from reporting these bugs by an inaccessible CAPTCHA. I fully realize I'm not special, and that all of us deal with this kind of thing daily. Or at least, it can feel like it. Still, it's beyond frustrating, especially when I got a bug report from a user today complaining that some new icons in our local version of this software were too blue and he couldn't easily see the white arrow. I'm over here unable to use two critical components of the software without frustrating workarounds, and the biggest problem sighted people have is something is a little too blue.

Feel free to blow off steam in this thread. What web-based frustrations have you encountered lately that made you want to go buy a goat farm?

[u/Amethystmage]

Almost everything modern is simply garbage in terms of accessibility.

Lets' talk about one of the obvious ones. Dynamic scrolling. That makes the top of my list. Pages that add or remove content depending on whether the user is scrolling up or down. There's probably a way to do this properly, but most implementations cause issues when navigating with the keyboard. My favorite issue is when the content slowly scrolls by, making it practically impossible to find something and keep it long enough to use it. Then there are the sites that'll push your focus all the way to the top or bottom of the page. So much fun.

Next up is the improper use of aria-hidden. To be fair, this one is pretty easy to screw up if you don't know exactly what you're doing. It's meant to hide extraneous content from screen readers, but if done incorrectly it can cause focusable parts of the page to be hidden as well.

Finally, websites pretending to be applications. These have to be so fancy that they can't be navigated with standard screen reader commands most of the time, so the best solution seems to be to implement native keystrokes and force screen reader users to switch between navigating like a website and navigating like an application with a different mode or cursor. Infuriating.

[u/Feather_in_the_winds → u/Amethystmage]

They should make the dev teams use their own product through what you use. It'd take an hour. Then they'd understand.

They are not willing to put in a single hour to understand your disability. Let alone 100 hours to implement a fix. It is garbage. You're completely right.

[u/Good-Ad-2978]

I'm just visually impaired and I find basically all technology is not designed for me at all. Obviously I have an easier time than you.

But sometimes it really does feel like it wouldn't even be that hard to get something that works properly, if not like ideally, if like a bit of effort or thought was put in, rather than being that hard to do.

Android can scale onto a phone that's like​ 3 times smaller diagonally than my tablet not problem, why can't I just have that but at the size of my tablet

[u/Feather_in_the_winds]

No IT department in the world will put an hour's work into making their data or captchas more accessible. None that I can find. File as many tickets as you want, they'll go right in the trash. The only option is to get a lawyer at that point. Sometimes a letter from a lawyer will get things moving. Sometimes they'll turn it into a circus to make a point that they do not help the disabled unless forced to. It happens.

Users telling an IT department how they should run it? Lol. They don't work that way. Never have. Never will.

[u/starfishpaws]

I have low-vision and use a 2016 android tablet for several things. Just this week I went looking for a replacement and found out they no longer make them with physical buttons: you have to use a touchscreen toolbar that I know from experience I can't see. Why?! All I want is a physical button I can find with my fingers! Grrrrrrr!

/rant

[u/gwi1785 → u/starfishpaws]

want a list, lol

captcha very much especially since fu** audio does not help me at all

sites that block a dark-backgrouvd addon and have no dark mode

damn cookies, popping up somewhere outside the zoom window.

zooming and switching images like amazon uses. they are a pest.

no idea how you are supposed to use the web with mainly audio or braille. it certaibly is no fun.

[u/SaxyLady251]

The frustration is real!

[u/intellectualnerd85]

Good god. My pet peeve is “we are accessible!” Clashes with voice over and isnt. Jaws screwing up with certain formats so i have to work without it. Ive got sight but i know its on borrowed time.

[u/Many-Check8007]

Sounds like you’re a site admin for Jira like me!

[u/mehgcap → u/Many-Check8007]

Thankfully no. I've heard horror stories of Jira's accessibility. We use Request Tracker from Best Practical.

[u/BassMarigold]

Members of the Nfb went last year to DC to talk to legislators about passing a law for web accessibility. The Nfb has good parts and bad parts, but that was pretty cool

[u/Leseratte10]

I mean, the websites / web applications themselves should absolutely be accessible with screen readers or similar applications, but for the captcha itself, I'm not sure if there's a good solution for that.

As a non-blind person who's sometimes dealing with web development - most captchas I've seen rely on the fact that distorted images are somewhat easy for a non-blind person to interpret, but incredibly hard for a computer to interpret - whether that's an old-school "type this text" or the new fancy "Click on all stop signs" one. I have not ever found any type of captcha where I would say "Yes, this seems difficult for a computer to solve but easy for a blind person to solve with a screenreader".

The issue is that with a screen reader the only thing a website can convey to the user is them listening to text/words spoken by the screenreader. And any instructions inside that text can then also be read and executed by bots. I understand that solving captchas is annoying, but as someone "on the other side" - *is* there a particular captcha a web developer could use that works for blind people but still keeps bots away? While still complying with data protection laws (so, ideally something that can be self-hosted)?

The only two captcha types I know that would work with this are either the ones that ask, in text form, a math or knowledge question like "What's 2+2?" or "Who is America's president?", or the ones that play a sound file of a spoken word and have you enter these. Unfortunately, these are very very easy for a bot to get around, so they aren't often used anymore because they aren't effective.

And companies aren't going to remove their captchas (and get overrun with bot spam) to make their website more accessible to people.

As for the general content issues elsewhere - that just seems to be due to the constant enshittification of the internet. Websites are supposed to use descriptive tags for stuff like headline, navigation, content, ads; so every client and every end user (blind or not) can easier navigate the page and get to the useful content. But I guess that's not "cool enough" because it allows people to skip the bullshit and go straight to the content ...

[u/mehgcap → u/Leseratte10]

Google's ReCAPTCHA generally works well. Check the box, and you're done. If you fail that test, an audio test is provided. While this still leaves out those with hearing problems, it's at least better than no blind person being able to get past it. No, you can't host it locally.

The problem isn't so much that sites are hard to get around, or the content is annoying to get to. Yes, those things happen, but there are workarounds more often than not. The problem is absent form field labels, dialogs popping up that don't get focus, dropdowns whose options are literally not read by screen readers, and more.

[u/Superfreq2 → u/Leseratte10]

Most CAPTCHAs are pretty useless now anyway thanks to better AI. Sites are just clinging to them out of false hope, and the CAPTCHA providers aren't going to disabuse them of it until the last possible second. We should have moved to passkey authentication years ago.