I don’t totally understand why given that it’s 2014 and we really should be beyond it, but the subject of plain text, “more accessible” versions of websites still comes up more than you’d think. For the record, I hate those and you should, too. And in a new post on his accessibility blog, Marco breaks down why.
For one, letting a website know you’re using a screen reader means running around the web waving a red flag that shouts “here, I’m visually impaired or blind!” at anyone who is willing to look. It would take away the one place where we as blind people can be relatively undetected without our white cane or guide dog screaming at everybody around us that we’re blind or visually impaired, and therefore giving others a chance to treat us like true equals. Because let’s face it, the vast majority of non-disabled people are apprehensive in one way or another when encountering a person with a disability.
Second, this is just a modern form of the text-only alternative web sites of the 1990s when screen readers were still learning to stumble around graphical user interfaces, let alone the web, and those text-only alternatives were a necessary evil to get anything done in most cases. In the early 2000s, as screen readers became better and browsers more modern, those faded away. And only in recent years has the trend sort of reverted, primarily because people just don’t know, or don’t care, to make their new shiny dynamic web sites and widgets properly accessible, even though the techniques exist to do just that. The current worst of the bad examples is the “accessible alternative” of the Audible.com web site. For one, its feature set is limited, and second, it constantly throws you back to the standard web presence, when doing searches, for example, and other totally screwed user experience snafoos. Or is there anyone out there who is actually wanting to tell me they enjoy this and find it even remotely useful? And to add insult to injury, the stuff that is currently a bit tricky on the standard web site can easily be fixed by some WAI-ARIA markup and some consistent keyboard navigation JavaScript.
And the old arguments still apply: Alternative versions of web sites tend to get out of date, no longer being maintained, and creating and maintaining them is more expensive than properly applying markup and learning the web accessibility skill properly once.
There’s more, and if any of our dev friends are reading, I encourage you in the strongest possible way to read it.