The point of a UI library is to interface with users. If it totally fails to interface with a subset of users then it is obviously deficient to some degree. It is callous and foolish to dismiss offhand users who rely on assistive technologies. You probably have a poor idea of who they are and how many people we’re talking about. You never know when you or someone you care about will become one of them, even temporarily. You never know how far your software will reach when you write it.
Only? It was half your comment. The point is that the amount of "real use" (I think we can all guess at a good-enough definition) of a phone without WhatsApp in a country where it's pervasive is not enough for most people. And what do you mean by "maps exist"? Paper maps?
What a depressingly elitist and exclusionary view. The modern web browser contains all the technology right there to make fast, maximally-accessible websites and even some “app”-like things, but nah you can’t be bothered, screw the less-fortunate. Would you want to “just go to a library” instead of use the device you already have? I strongly doubt it.
Public libraries are great and there should be a lot more of them and everyone should enjoy them, but they should absolutely not be a substitute for respectful, accessible web design and engineering. The elitism is that only people with the shiniest new devices should get to use your website on their terms.
You are either refusing to address the central point or your reading comprehension needs a lot of work. A premise of your original post was that libraries have newer devices than some users. I maintain that libraries should not have to be a fallback for your crappy website.
Right, and I’m positing that you don’t need to support 20 year old devices that receive zero updates because everyone has access to libraries in an absolute last resort.
There are limited resources when developing software. This is a pretty bad resource sink.
There are types of software for which I’d largely agree with you. Websites are not one of them: it takes effort or incompetence to make them slow and inaccessible.
My point is that websites are particularly amenable to being cheaply built in a fast and accessible way. I would say classes of, say, macOS apps are similar. Government certainly should be insulated from at least the market pressures that push websites into being slow and inaccessible. Competence is more a roll of the dice, I’ll grant you, but I’m not as pessimistic as you on that.
If we were talking about JS or Python or something, I’d agree with you. Most people just don’t have expert-tier knowledge of pure HTML, and even if they do, they’re slower to develop. I could get a feature out today to 99.9% of my desperate users, or I could get it out to 99.99% by waiting another two weeks. It just makes no sense. It has nothing to do with pessimism and everything to do with economics.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. There’s nothing “expert-tier” about plain accessible HTML, and with LLMs, there’s even less excuse. I’m not primarily a frontend web engineer and I can manage it.
Yes, I’m certain you can “manage it” despite not considering things like screen readers, page layout reversals, mobile responsiveness, working with legacy codebases that are 30 years old (when was the last time YOU had to update a site that simply must shut down every night for processing?), etc.
Everything looks easier from the outside. Maybe we should focus on getting private corps to provide a small amount of accessibility before forcing onerous requirements on our already-underpaid civil servants?
We're talking about governmental document-like websites with relatively simple forms here, not your particular legacy web app, there is no excuse for not getting them right. Gov.UK did. Plain HTML, used in a straight-forward way that is very clear from the approachable documentation on, say, MDN, is already responsive, readily consumable by screen readers, and works with any backend that already exists. If you have to fix a mess left by someone else you have my sympathy - I've been there too. But the original post is appealing to people who have a choice between plain, standard-use HTML, and any alternatives. And yes, I'm all for much harsher penalties for private companies that produce inaccessible web sites/apps too.
Totally wrong, re-read the article. React requires JavaScript, which the new page doesn’t. That’s a strict accessibility improvement. (And I’m not a React hater!)
The Economist is very much part of the establishment, whoever they are owned by. It is not surprising that they would want to play down any idea that the UK is less “democratic”. Furthermore, The Economist is one of the main mouthpieces of British capitalism, and so their definition of “democracy” is going to be very much of the liberal, capital-friendly kind, which is not completely incompatible with some authoritarian tendencies.
The ranking isn’t published by the newspaper - it’s by the research and insights B2B company of the overall group. Regardless of what assumptions you have about the newspaper (elite, yes, but I’m unclear on why you think fierce liberalism is likely to mean they don’t really value democracy), the B2B unit sells data - they’re as likely to skew this ranking as they are at which countries are better at rail infrastructure. Perhaps their definition of democracy is indeed flawed though - no need to speculate, go read their methodology.
I don’t find that obvious from what you’ve described. Agreeing on weights and measures is well within plausibility of a society where power was pretty evenly distributed. I don’t remember Graeber and Wengrow describing it as a stateless utopia, they were a lot more academic than their detractors suggest in the usual caricatures. Is there any more evidence you’ve read about that supports this conclusion?
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