Accessible Computing

On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 01:18:01PM -0800, Chuck Guzis wrote: [...] I wonder how tts would manage with a website like nasa.gov ... Some time ago they became javascript-only. At least this is what I see. I do not need accessibility option but I always admire a website which can be read in text-only mode. In many cases this means that I will have to slide down past meaningless crap, like fifty or hundred links to other "interesting" articles du jour, until finally I get to the thing which I wanted to read (in a graphical mode, the crap is semi hidden in marginal parts of the page and does not get in my way). When I try nasa with a browser like Lynx, the website is not showing anything at all. When I load an article in Firefox, then try to open same URL in Lynx, once again, nothing. Source view in Lynx displays lots of html without actual content, which needs to get loaded by JS. Now, the funny stuff: I try "print preview" in Firefox and it shows me sixty three pages, because, you know, apart from the original article I was interested in there is a side frame with about twenty (forty?) others and for whatever reason they all want to go into printer. Actually those are not full articles, just enough of them to constitute sixty pages of worthless addendum, full of color photos and scraps of text. http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/plunging-into-the-ionosphere-sate… [...] I am afraid technology is no longer oriented towards helping with technical problem as much as it used to be. I would say, it is increasingly more about serving the purpose to "being liked" or actually "being like us" (as opposed to those who do not use said technology and are therefor "not like us"). In other words, if you ever disliked the mob of goodwilling citizens [1], today this mob has a deciding voice about what technology will be like. There used to be a time of "revenge of geeks", now the "revenge of cheerleaders" is approaching. Empire strikes back, heheheheh. This and pitiful approach to design, which has to be new, shiny and blinking. And this is just a beginning of a long sliding down. :-/ Of course I am wrong. There is a good chance fifty years from now some people will point to today's nasa.gov as a wonderful example of classic web design - now, what kind of horror will be modern at that time so that nasa.gov will be opposed to it as classy ideal? But it was nice to write all this. And if I am right I will point to this piece and say "see, I was right, I only had to pretend I was joking". -- [1] Like archetypical football players, cheerleaders and their minions who boo at nerds and other weirdos [2], but it is not really so much about players vs nerds, perhaps more like people who want purposeful tech and those who want pretty tech? Pretty tech to show off how much modern and up to date they are, when in fact this is just about being fashionable. [2] I do not take such tales too seriously as I never have been booed at back in a days when cheerleaders were all jumping high - not for being weird. But I keep hearing stories about booing which is why I am using this rhetorical device here. Then again, back in a days we did not have cheerleaders in Poland and weirdos who could do a computer were actually kind of admired :-). Perhaps more because they had access to the half mythical hard-to-get hardware and not because of their abilities, but still. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **