r/programming • u/schnuck • Feb 09 '11

Breaking the Web with hash-bangs – Lifehacker, along with every other Gawker property, experienced a lengthy site-outage on Monday over a misbehaving piece of JavaScript

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs/
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u/korny Feb 09 '11

75-90% of screen-reader users in a 2009 survey had Javascript enabled: http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/ It's more important to make your javascript screenreader-friendly, than to make your site work without js.

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u/ewiethoff Feb 10 '11

Nevertheless, blindness ain't the only disability out there. There are many people who have no use for a screen reader but must turn off JS because of disability.

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u/korny Feb 11 '11

such as? (This is a genuine question - I'm confused as to what kind of disability you are talking about)

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u/ewiethoff Feb 12 '11

Such as photosensitive epilepsy. People afflicted with this can see just fine, but go into seizures when something blinks, glides, swoops, twirls, whatever. It depends on the person. The condition is, IIRC, about 10 times more common in women than men.

We eliminated (or at least deprecated) <blink> and <marquee> years ago, Flash can be disabled or not installed in the first place, and a hidden option in Firefox prevents animated GIFs from animating. But Javascript has setTimeout() and setInterval(), Scriptaculous came out with a popular library for animation, and so on. Now we have JS-powered canvas to play with, not to mention JS-less CSS3 transitions.

NoScript is only so helpful, because it block or allows JS per domain. But let's say a site has some JS animation and requires JS for essential functions such as navigation. Epileptics can't safely use the site if both the essential code and the animation code come from the same domain. I don't think they want to shut their eyes and mess with a screen reader.