- From: Chaals McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex.ru>
- Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2017 12:17:12 +0200
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org, "David Woolley" <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>
(Note, this is something of a wandering rant, not very long but very quickly getting away from the original topic) On Thu, 05 Oct 2017 20:05:31 +0200, David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk> wrote: > On 05/10/17 18:34, Giacomo Petri wrote: >> a WebAIM survey in 2014 reported that 97.6% of respondents had >> Javascript enabled > > The significance of this is the opposite of the obvious one. Given the > vast number of sites that are unusable without Javascript enabled, it is > saying that there are still people who think it important not to enable > it. Yes - that is quite true. However the reasons for not using javascript are rarely related to accessibility any more, and more to do with privacy and security, or occasionally performance. There is some intersection of concerns - because of poor accessibility in browser's privacy and security interfaces there may be a stronger incentive to just turn off JS if you want enhanced security an privacy. As David notes, that means foregoing the ability to use many many common sites - a price some people are willing to pay in an attempt to improve their protection. While I think there is a strong case to be made for pushing browsers to enhance the accessibility of security/privacy, it is a difficult argument in practice and not just because browsers put accessibility at a low priority. The common approach over the last decade or so has been to try to ensure security *by default*, making it hard for users to do things that degrade their protection, on the assumption borne out by evidence that almost anything that requires users to understand security in order to protect themselves will effectively expose the vast majority of users. The consequence of this is that enhancing the ability to deal with exceptional cases - those who will work harder to keep more privacy or security than average - is a lot of work for a small segment of consumers, and will effectively commit developers to ongoing maintenance of the feature. That's already a big disincentive :( "Further complicating" the work, to ensure that it is done with accessibility in mind *should* be a natural process, because accessibility should be a straightforward requirement for any professional, but in practice we are a long way from that desirable state of justice and professionalism. And so the reality is that few people are in a position to do this, and many of those people are not sure *how* to do it even if they think it is what they should be doing. On top of that, because in many cases this work is done "on the margins" - for example only when developers have spare time to look after something - they may not have a practical way of finding out what they need to know. Some research and practical, *reproducible* work on enhancing the accessibility of user security and privacy would be a great thing. There are many browsers around, and some of the smaller ones (Brave, Vivaldi, Whale, ...) may be faster to improve in this area than those who are trying not to disturb their already large market share. cheers -- Chaals is Charles McCathie Nevile find more at http://yandex.com
Received on Friday, 6 October 2017 10:17:36 UTC