HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ Tomte

Dan Luu on Twitter:

> This video was really eye opening for me in terms of how bad a lot of text-oriented websites are on screen readers (HN at 6:27, reddit at 8:01):

I would recommend that everyone go check out Sian Bahram’s 2016 talk on computing while blind. At around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c

⬐ Fargoan

Wow. I don't know anything about screen readers or how blind people use the web, but I'm surprised that a strictly text website like HN would be inaccessible to blind people.

⬐ easrng

It uses table layouts and has no skip links.

⬐ lozenge

Root, parent, prev and next are all skip links aren't they?

Or do you mean on the front page?

⬐ edflsafoiewq

Curiously those are all aria-hidden.

⬐ extra88

Sina is great, it's a shame the device output is so much louder than his microphone in the video.

I didn't hear him mention the lack of skip links on HN's home page (skip links are more for sighted keyboard users than blind screen reader users like him), I did hear him mention that the stories on the home page are not headings. Yes, a screen reader can navigate link to link but there are ~7 non-story links between each story link so being able to navigate from story to story as headings would be really helpful and semantically accurate.

⬐ ufo

Oof. Is there anything that could be done to make HN more accessible? Who do we call for this?

I lost the video a while back, then finally re-found it. Here's a blind person showing how Hacker News sounds over JAWS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c&t=386s

(Headphone warning: the volume is unfortunately all over the place, the screen reader is way too loud and the speaker volume is way too soft.)

TL;DR, the page design places so much emphasis on visual table layout that it doesn't incorporate a single <h1> or <h2> anywhere, and it is effectively impossible to read the site rapidly without unconditionally listening to all the

  Hacker News. Page has 224 links. Hacker News visited Unlabeled graphic Graphic y18 link Hacker News link new vertical bar link past vertical bar link comments vertical bar link ask vertical bar link show vertical bar link jobs vertical bar link submit. link login

at the top of every single page.

I just got mad and got JAWS working in demo/evaluation mode. Here's what blind users hear every time they visit HN:

  Table with 3 columns and 61 rows. 1. link upvote link Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane left paren link nature.com right paren 115 points by link jnord link 1 hour ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 46 comments. 2. link upvote link Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition link vinepair.com right paren 131 points by link harambae link 4 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 42 comments. 3. link upvote link SoftBank’s Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO left paren link reuters.com right paren 126 points by link gaius_baltar link 4 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 24 comments. 4. link upvote link You can change your number left paren link signal.org right paren 508 points by link feross link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 300 comments. 5. link upvote link Finding the average of two unsigned integers without overflow left paren link microsoft.com right paren 249 points by link mlex link 8 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 119 comments. 6. link upvote link IRS to ditch biometric requirement for online access left paren link krebsonsecurity.com right paren 328 points by link bonyt link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 112 comments. 7. link upvote link KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE left paren link complete.org right paren 167 points by link jrepinc link 9 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 65 comments. 8. link upvote link Some mistakes Rust doesn’t catch left paren link fasterthanli.me right paren 118 points by link jacobwg link 6 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 17 comments. 9. link upvote link Flexbox Froggy – A game for learning CSS flexbox left paren link flexboxfroggy.com right paren 210 points by link mrzool link 9 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 21 comments. 10. link upvote link Ask HN: How to raise funds for rare disease research? 204 points by link halukakin link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 127 comments.

That doesn't sound too bad, but as outlined (somewhat) in the video above, blind users typically don't go for walls of text like the above, they typically navigate interactively by virtually zooming "in" and "out" of the navigation hierarchy in a document.

This does not work with sites that do not have any headings - and HN has none.

You'd better not be blind and have ADHD! Not only do you have to listen to all the navigation cruft, you have to listen to the entire front page as a well of text and lean on working memory, because the lack of headings makes it nontrivial to pause/rewind.

Now, 75%+ of the material linked here can be expected to have a minimal level of reasonable common sense with regards to semantically-structured layout, so once you've left the link and title soup you can probably expect to listen to some proportion of articles and information in relative peace.

But hang on... what if you come to the site for the comments?

DUN DUN DUN

All I can say is... hopefully you don't have ADD either. Here's a portion of this thread as a blind user would hear it:

  link left bracket dash right bracket I have to assume the reason that it hasn’t been done is HN doesn’t consider it a problem, from my viewpoint I just followed and I can see there are definitely a few flags I did not intentionally do. I have two pages of flags, I would say approximately a page worth is misflags. on edit: I don’t seem to have any misvouches so not sure why misflags would happen and not misvouches. link reply link upvote link benrbray link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket HN is one of the best designed websites I use daily. The information density is unmatched on the "modern" web. link reply link upvote link alksjdalkj link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket So are you refuting the assertion that HN does a poor job with accessibility? Or just saying that you don’t care because it works well for you? link reply link upvote link DoreenMichele link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket I love HN and it works well for me, even on mobile and I’m seriously handicapped, including visually impaired. It’s also got known accessibility issues, including for people who are blind or otherwise more visually impaired than I am. The lead mod has acknowledged this in comments. link reply link upvote link guiseroom link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket To prove your point: the only post I’ve ever flagged was one of my own which I’m pretty sure was an accident click. link reply link upvote link smt88 link 4 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket There are a ton of alternate HN UIs for web, mobile, and terminal. I don’t use any but I’ve seen them posted about many times. link reply link upvote link dylan604 link 4 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket At the risk of beating a dead horse to death (huh?), this is pretty abysmal. I understand it is, it was, it always will be, but c’mon. I can totally see hesitancy to change it, as whatever change will not make 100% of users happy and law of averages suggest a > 0% of users will be unhappy. Sometimes, devil you know.... link reply link upvote link jb1991 link 1 hour ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket Indeed I spend a significant amount of time undoing whatever I accidentally clicked. link reply link upvote link opportune link 3 hours ago link left bracket dash right bracket Wow I seem to fat finger the flag button a lot. Surprised my flagging privileges have not been revoked (or maybe they silently have). Maybe it makes sense for HN to lower the weight of flags based on the user-agent, since I assume all of these are from me using mobile link reply link upvote link shaunxcode link 6 minutes ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket Same! Almost NONE of them are ones I intentionally flagged! link reply link upvote link superasn link 1 hour ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar

If you actually do read through that you might wonder why it says "vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar" repeatedly. I was extremely confused about this too; I'm not aware of any points where there are three "|"s in a row anywhere. Turns out, the links in the "... ago | parent | context | flag | on: ..." section have aria-hidden=true on them, so JAWS doesn't read them, but it does read every single vertical bar in between.

I'm honestly just confused at this point. I am extremely not interested in stepping over the ad hominem boundary here, but... it's clear there is an understanding of Web accessibility, and HN is, you know, the technology startup accelerator, and this is in the middle of the supposed tech capital of the world, so it's like... I look at Hanlon's razor (do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence/stupidity), and I go, well this is supposedly a place that focuses on optimizing for intelligence and "doing things correctly", in an incredibly detail-oriented industry, and I just... exploding brain moment :(

I did have a bit of an idea though. On the one hand the Silly Valley is all about "the next big idea" or "what's just around the corner", while it's well understood that SF municipality facilities (transport, city manglement, etc) are *well* underpar. Maybe, just maybe, that juxtaposition has an underdocumented impact on the culture of everyday living - focus on the inside, on your heart, on what could be, and remember that if you ignore how bad everything is, this is the key to being successful.

That's the only way I can explain the "this is how we do things here" situation in terms of the site design being what I would describe as pragmatic-to-a-fault.

With the above being said, I should point out that I incidentally happen to still be working out some pretty fundamental areas of personal equilibrium, and have a bit of an oversensitivity to invisibility and "it's fine, it's fine (narrator: it wasn't fine)" types of situations. So I have a bit of bias/lack of perspective in this area, and can't help not being a bit snappy when talking about it.

⬐ Santosh83

I think the reasons are pretty simple. HN is focused around tech folk & they are expected to write or use other frontends or tweak the output themselves. Also I get the feeling that no one wants to touch the working code to rewrite it. What's the incentive? It works and is lightweight. The number of people complaining is just not big enough. They probably don't have a dedicated dev because the site is that simple, and they want to keep it that way.

⬐ hnbad

> [tech folk] are expected to write or use other frontends or tweak the output themselves

Weird how that expectation only seems to apply to tech folk using assistive technologies. I'm sighted and while I think HN is needlessly ugly and user hostile in some places the only thing I need to do to use it is zoom in a bit. But I guess that just means I'm more technically adept than someone who has to mess around with their screen reader or crawl through the pile of poorly maintained "UIs" to make the site work.

> It works and is lightweight.

That's quite the response to someone demonstrating that it doesn't work.

⬐ exikyut

Unfortunately the major thing stopping me from doing precisely that is that login is fundamentally not straightforward: there's no API for it, so you have to go through the website... which is behind CloudFlare, and thus is effectively not reliably scriptable. So, every wannabe alternative frontend is not only required to demand your actual HN username and password, it's effectively impossible for anything other than something like a phone app or browser extension to actually pull everything off, because you need to host a webview for the user to login into to ensure you get past the CF wall and then capture both the login cookies and CloudFlare's cookies. And then the API doesn't expose certain site functionality such as showing dead comments or indicating when something has been heavily downvoted, so the only reliable way to provide feature parity is to ScRaPe ThE hTmL, yayyy.

The only way I can see to fix this is to enable something like OAuth2, which would be a fairly significant departure from HN's brand of minimalism.

My understanding is that dang both moderates the site and maintains the codebase. I've seen new functionality slowly pop up over time; the site is definitely in a slow-but-steady state of continuous development. You may have a point in terms of noone wanting to touch the codebase in specific places (like the voting logic), but I can't see semanticity improvements being too difficult - at least, my surface expectation is that it shouldn't be too hard. It's possible the Arc code specifically powering HN is a giant spaghetti mess.

The incentive perspective is also a very good point. IMHO this is one of those things that's high-effort, high-QoL-improvement, yet low-*perceived*-impact. I'm still trying to figure out what to call it. Whatever it is, it's really hard to straightforwardly make the point that this functionality is absolutely worth investing in, very sadly. It's just one of those things that just doesn't pop out in an... obvious way, for want of a better way to put it. And it's an absolute shame.

⬐ IanCal

They are simple, they're just disappointing.

It's definitely simpler to completely ignore accessibility. It's also a bad thing.

It's easier to not put a ramp at my shop, after all there aren't that many people in wheelchairs. It's easier to not add induction loops to help those with hearing aids, after all there aren't that many people with them.

We can keep going with this logic. Facial recognition only works with white faces? But most of my users are white, let's just keep it.

It's easier to exclude people. Across society, that ends up pretty poorly, particularly when it's the same groups that are excluded time and time again.

> What's the incentive?

It would be nice if making the content work for people with accessibility requirements was a reward in itself, but this is why we end up with laws, to make not doing these things a punishable offence so that in the end it's easier to actually do them.

For what it's worth, my own desire to see if I can help out somehow has definitely only increased over the past few months as I've noticed the messages at the tops of threads about pagination. I don't have any particular skills that would make me a hand-in-glove fit (eg, I'd need to learn Arc...), but surely there are tons of little boring things I could usefully do that would take the heat off. If I'm thinking this way, surely there are (many?) others...?

For example, something tiny that I'd love to fix is to split vote() in half and move the UI update logic into an Image.onload handler, so that the UI only changes if the upvote absolutely committed. I'm OCD about this because I actually use voting as bookmarking, and recently realized that some unknown percentage of my upvotes/bookmarks have sadly been lost because the auth= value had expired (eg in the case of a weeks-old tab) or because I was on bad 4G on my phone, but the UI state has no bearing on the network response.

Something else that I'd be very happy to put effort into, after being told how to approach the problem :), would be to make the site screen-reader-accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c&t=386s (size-XL volume warning - unfortunately the speaker volume is like 5% of the screen reader volume).

A longer-term project that I also think would also be very useful would be to implement OAuth2, so that users would be able to safely attach external logins to their accounts without needing to supply their actual user passwords (which thankfully none of the alternate UIs have tried to do AFAIK). This could support fine-grained scopes like "can see own comment votes", "can vote", "can post replies", etc. IMHO the best way to do this would be to have a central pool of manually-approved app registrations; this is definitely the most complicated approach :/, but it means the entire system would depend on a human who could go "...that OAuth2 app in particular is behaving weird. [pause]" which would be very tricky to achieve with an autonomous system (where everyone independently creates their own tokens that have no semantic value). This sort of thing utterly fails at large scale (see also: Google, YouTube, etc), but I think it would be perfect for HN. While implementing this it would also make sense to support 2FA using TOTP.

A while back I read that one of the reasons the site was closed was to keep the voting logic private. The chances are there are probably a bunch of other things (like maybe the spam detection/handling systems, and maybe the moderation tools) would be similarly classified as (for want of a better word) "sensitive". Well... it could be very, very interesting to split the codebase in half, with all the sensitive stuff in one corner, and the remainder of the codebase capable of running locally without it. Maybe you've already considered this, and consider it nonviable :(

(NB. The reason for the Rube Goldberg OAuth2 architecture I suggested was precisely to make it that much harder for people to register throwaway/bot accounts etc, keeping in mind the voting logic thing. Couldn't figure out how to reword the above two paragraphs to resolve the info dependency :) so put this here instead. lol)

IIUC, there are a very small pool of enthusiasts around the K programming language (https://kx.com) that privately study the source code to Kdb, and I understand that Arthur Whitney et al. are actually open to newcomers taking an interest in the project. (I'm sure I saw a comment mentioning as such a while back, possibly by geocar, but don't seem to be able to find it. I might've read as such elsewhere.) At some point I hope to go down that rabbithole, which looks genuinely interesting, but learning that it *was* actually accessible left a bit of an impression given that (http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320):

> Whitney demonstrated his “research K interpreter” at the Iverson College meeting[5] in Cambridge in 2011. We had visitors from Microsoft Research. The performance was impressive as always. The tiny language, mostly familiar-looking to the APL, J and q programmers participating, must have impressed the visitors. Perhaps conscious that with the occasional wrong result from an expression, the interpreter could be mistaken for a post-doctoral project, Whitney commented brightly, “Well, we sold ten million dollars of K3 and a hundred million of K4, so I guess we’ll sell a billion dollars worth of this.”

> Someone asked about the code base. “Currently it’s 247 lines of C.” Some expressions of incredulity. Whitney displayed the source, divided between five text files so each would fit entirely on his monitor. “Hate scrolling,” he mumbled.*

The above, combined with the project's niche accessibility (I understand that one does have to be genuinely interested) speaks to me of business and engineering focal points in perfect calibration and harmony with each other. (Hnng. :P) It also gives evidence that it is in fact possible in the first place to achieve and sustain this kind of calibration in contexts and situations that make use of niche technology. The (meta-?)question (to me), then, is how the same sort of niche accessibility context might be applicable/applied to news.arc (et al) to varying degrees.

I also wanted to incidentally mention that I've long had mixed feelings about using GitHub (in a sharing capacity). There's a bit of "but I don't have anything interesting enough!" in there, but it's mostly hesitancy about dumping stuff underneath The Giant Spotlight Of Doom, Inc™. This isn't GitHub's fault; it's more that the consumer end of open-source has something of a demand/non-empathy problem toward the higher end of the long tail, that GitHub is the biggest platform, that everything not-GitHub correlates with an exponential drop-off in terms of visibility... and the intrinsic lack of any nice middle ground in the resulting mess. Applying these considerations to HN's crazy popularity, I think that using GitHub could be great for "pop culture accessibility", if you will - but at great potential cost to behind-the-scenes logistics (maintaining CI that merges closed-source modules, explaining Arc for the 5,287th time, etc), and a noteworthily increased maintenance burden. While there are a variety of "alternative" Git hosting platforms, I think LuaJIT's approach is most interesting (https://luajit.org/download.html): the Git repo is only available over HTTPS as a firewall convenience, and there's no browser-accessible repository viewer. Thus everyone needs Git installed. You could also for example require everyone's Git client to provide an HTTPS client certificate, for example. Such speedbumps would enable a scalable form of "proof of interest" (there's also the fact that everyone has to go learn Arc once they do finally get at the code...) and naturally rate-limit this new dimension to something hopefully maintainable.

Lastly, and as a bit of a continuation of the last point, regarding the question of licensing ("oh no"), I'd actually be in favor of something custom. Both because all the opportunity (read: $$$ xD, but also Bay Area) is available to properly figure that option out, and also because virtually all existing licenses (and their wide use) bring a sort of reification to the table that makes politicking/taking sides ("ooooh! XYZ does ABC! that puts it in the same group as DEF!") all too easy, which may potentially threaten HN's pragmatic ethos somewhat. A unique license has no reference points and thus less potential impact to cohesion, and also makes solving niche cases extremely easy; you just work backwards from whatever end state you want (which you've almost certainly had years to think about, or at least subconsciously gather context for). One concrete example (working with the limited context I have) might be disallowing mirroring or copying of the code, which would close the loop on the Git setup described above.

I'm not sure what bits of the above are interesting and what bits ultimately amount to excited bikeshedding :) - but I definitely want to convey that I, and probably (many) others, would be genuinely interested in helping out. Also, I realize stuff does actually get fixed, like * vs \*, which I am very appreciative of :D.

⬐ exikyut

Hmm. This is currently at -1.

I've obviously misstepped or misread the situation/context somehow. *Sigh* I'm sometimes really bad at this, sadly, despite my best efforts to the contrary. Sorry.

If someone would like to point out where I went wrong I'd greatly appreciate it.

Edit: I've realized that maybe my comment was interesting, but not as a reply to the specific comment I replied to. As my comment grew I thought at a couple different points that maybe it wasn't a good fit for subthread I was replying to, but barreled onwards because this happened to be dang's most recent reply to the whole thread at the time. Maybe this amounted to a spot of tone deafness - and if this is indeed the case, I do actively/explicitly request that my reply be detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756111.

⬐ elendee

I think you’re well intentioned obviously, but in your offer to help, the first thing you do is ask he take 5 minutes to digest your ideas, when he hasn’t really indicated he’s looking for help. Thats a very long time for an internet browser. So yes I think they’re downvoting the context not the content. They are interesting ideas though.

⬐ exikyut

Yeah, I definitely mushed the context here; this wasn't the correct spot to put this.

Thanks also for the reference to the time factor. The text took a good maybe hour, maybe (while doing other things) to put together - and at that point I just wasn't considering that text might actually take some time to read. Time to start paying attention to how long I take to read...

There is indeed also a bit of subtle intermixing of "I help!" vs self-centeredness in there too. That one seems to be proving a bit of a real challenge.

Thanks very much for the clarification.

⬐ Wowfunhappy

I thought it was tactless to insert yourself into the situation that way, well-intentioned or no.

⬐ exikyut

Yep. :(

I need to find whatever volume control is set to "imperceptibly subtle" and turn it up so I don't need the 20/20 focus of hindsight to act correctly on these sorts of cues.

The clarification is honestly appreciated.

⬐ krapp

If you want to contribute to an Arc based forum, the open source Anarki fork[0] is always open. It won't effect the original Arc distribution or HN but several other forums do use it.

[0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

⬐ exikyut

Huh, TIL that there are forks of Arc!

My only point of hesitancy with diving into something like this is my strong suspicion/fear that HN has diverged sufficiently enough from Arc that almost all improvements I made to news.arc et al would need manual/refactoring before they would be useful - and this would need to be done every time I tweaked something on my end.

My interest in Arc is motivated solely by the fact that it's what runs HN, and while part of my motivation to dive into HN from a technical standpoint is because I just like doing that :) the rest is just wanting to help the site get out of users' ways, while retaining a pragmatic focus.

Here's a talk by Sina Bahram from five years ago -- at around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user. Nothing that he mentioned has been addressed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c

I recommend that everyone go check out Sian Bahram’s 2016 talk on computing while blind. At around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c

⬐ pixelbath

I find it interesting that not a single problem mentioned in the talk has been addressed on the site in the intervening 5 years.

There's an amazing 10min !!Con 2016 talk by Sina Bahram, How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!!

I use a computer very differently than most people, because I’m blind. When I’m surfing the web, tweeting, checking email, reading the news, and writing code, I’m doing so because a program called a screen reader is reading me what’s on the screen. I happen to listen to it read me this text at a thousand words per minute! Join me in listening to how I experience some common user interfaces. Yes, I’ll slow it down for you. I also have a challenge for everyone in the audience. Can you get through a day only using the keyboard? What about not looking at your screen?

Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include high-tech startups, fortune 1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c

⬐ mistersquid

> There's an amazing 10min !!Con 2016 talk by Sina Bahram, How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!!

At 6:28, Bahram points out how HN (!) is not very accessible to screen readers.

⬐ mwcampbell

At some point in there, he says, "Table? Is this 1999?"

pg explained several years ago why Arc's web library, and by extension HN, uses tables. [1]

> Arc embodies a similarly unPC attitude to HTML. The predefined libraries just do everything with tables. Why? Because Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.

[...]

> Tables are the lists of html. The W3C doesn't like you to use tables to do more than display tabular data because then it's unclear what a table cell means. But this sort of ambiguity is not always an error. It might be an accurate reflection of the programmer's state of mind. In exploratory programming, the programmer is by definition unsure what the program represents.

> Of course, "exploratory programming" is just a euphemism for "quick and dirty" programming. And that phrase is almost redundant: quick almost always seems to imply dirty. One is always a bit sheepish about writing quick and dirty programs. And yet some, if not most, of the best programs began that way. And some, if not most, of the most spectacular failures in software have been perpetrated by people trying to do the opposite.

> So experience suggests we should embrace dirtiness. Or at least some forms of it

It seems to me that the iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian, "unPC" hacker spirit reflected here can be taken too far, and this sometimes has a negative impact on the experience of some users, as Sina demonstrated. Now that HN's core UI is way beyond the exploratory phase, I wonder if it's time to re-do some of the markup in a more structured way.

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html

⬐ wwweston

On one hand... the idea that tables used for representing tabular data and tables used for layout couldn't be distinguished and managed functionally is odd. Lynx could handle table layouts reasonably well by the end of the last century, and I don't think you'd even need an ML model to code up some reliable heuristics and get them into most browsers, though I expect ML could be used to pretty good effect.

On the other hand, getting universal buy-in on a different approach to semantics and ubiquitous client adoption is harder than just buying into the agreed on semantics. And that recognizes the opposite of the hacker spirit. "Real hackers", if that term means anything, recognize the value of adhering to semantics by convention in all sorts contexts, even lisp-y ones. And while I have no idea what other things Arc's web library does, it's pretty clear to me that there's little if anything in HN's layout that wouldn't benefit from using CSS over tables for managing layout.

⬐ naniwaduni

pg was just wrong here. Or rather, it's a position that could've made sense at the time, but only if the thing you're most interested in experimenting with were mocking up page layouts to e.g. present to users for UX testing; layouting in 2008-era CSS was not something you necessarily wanted to do up-front, whereas with tables you could at least copy some boilerplate and have at it. (It makes no sense in context; it doesn't make sense in most contexts. But it is a position which could've been defensible at the time in a different context. Problems with tables include that (a) you don't want to write into a table layout; it's at best tolerable if you paste text into a template, and (b) there is no natural transition away from a table layout other than just redoing the layout wholesale. So even if you're experimenting with it, you probably should not ever let it go into production, because once it's there you will get convinced to leave it there for a long, long time.)

It's been a somewhat less sensible position since flexbox support became widespread, and is frankly just wrong in 2017.

Hopefully this will be helpful: I found Sina Bahram's talk at !!Con 2016 How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! inspiring and incredible. He's blind and has his computer read everything out ridiculously quickly, and apparently gets input that way much faster than sighted people can read! Amazing.

I use a computer very differently than most people, because I’m blind. When I’m surfing the web, tweeting, checking email, reading the news, and writing code, I’m doing so because a program called a screen reader is reading me what’s on the screen. I happen to listen to it read me this text at a thousand words per minute! Join me in listening to how I experience some common user interfaces. Yes, I’ll slow it down for you. I also have a challenge for everyone in the audience. Can you get through a day only using the keyboard? What about not looking at your screen?

Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include high-tech startups, fortune 1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums.

Talk: http://youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c

Text copied from this page: http://bangbangcon.com/2016/speakers.html