Posts in the Accessibility Category

Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible

Published 5 years, 7 months past

In the middle of last month (July 2018), I found myself staring at a projector screen, waiting once again to see if Wikipedia would load.  If I was lucky, the page started rendering 15-20 seconds after I sent the request.  If not, it could be closer to 60 seconds, assuming the browser didn’t just time out on the connection.  I saw a lot of “the server stopped responding” over the course of a few days.

It wasn’t just Wikipedia, either.  CNN International had similar load times.  So did Google’s main search page.  Even this here site, with minimal assets to load, took a minimum of 10 seconds to start rendering.  Usually longer.

In 2018?  Yes.  In rural Uganda, where I was improvising an introduction to web development for a class of vocational students, that’s the reality.  They can have a computer lab full of Dell desktops running Windows or rows of Raspberry Pis running Ubuntu or whatever setup there is, but when satellites in geosynchronous earth orbit are your only source of internet, you wait.  And wait.  And wait.

I want to explain why — and far more importantly, how we’ve made that experience interminably worse and more expensive in the name of our comfort and security.

First, please consider the enormously constrained nature of satellite internet access.  If you’re already familiar with this world, skip ahead a few paragraphs; but if not, permit me a brief description of the challenges.

For geosynchronous-satellite internet access, the speed of light become a factor in ping times: just having the signals propagate through a mixture of vacuum and atmosphere chews up approximately half a second of travel time over roughly 89,000 miles (~152,000km).  If that all that distance were vacuum, your absolute floor for ping latency is about 506 milliseconds.

That’s just the time for the signals to make two round trips to geosynchronous orbit and back.  In reality, there are the times to route the packets on either end, and the re-transmission time at the satellite itself.

But that’s not the real connection killer in most cases: packet loss is.  After all, these packets are going to orbit and back.  Lots of things along those long and lonely signal paths can cause the packets to get dropped.  50% packet loss is not uncommon; 80% is not unexpected.

So, you’re losing half your packets (or more), and the packets that aren’t lost have latency times around two-thirds of a second (or more).  Each.

That’s reason enough to set up a local caching server.  Another, even more pressing reason is that pretty much all commercial satellite connections come with data caps.  Where I was, their cap was 50GB/month.  Beyond that, they could either pay overages, or just not have data until the next month.  So if you can locally cache URLs so that they only count against your data usage the first time they’re loaded, you do that.  And someone had, for the school where I was teaching.

But there I stood anyway, hoping my requests to load simple web pages would bear fruit, and I could continue teaching basic web principles to a group of vocational students.  Because Wikipedia wouldn’t cache.  Google wouldn’t cache.  Meyerweb wouldn’t cache.  Almost nothing would cache.

Why?

HTTPS.

A local caching server, meant to speed up commonly-requested sites and reduce bandwidth usage, is a “man in the middle”.  HTTPS, which by design prevents man-in-the-middle attacks, utterly breaks local caching servers.  So I kept waiting and waiting for remote resources, eating into that month’s data cap with every request.

The drive to force every site on the web to HTTPS has pushed the web further away from the next billion users — not to mention a whole lot of the previous half-billion.  I saw a piece that claimed, “Investing in HTTPS makes it faster, cheaper, and easier for everyone.”  If you define “everyone” as people with gigabit fiber access, sure.  Maybe it’s even true for most of those whose last mile is copper.  But for people beyond the reach of glass and wire, every word of that claim was wrong.

If this is a surprise to you, you’re by no means alone.  I hadn’t heard anything about it, so I asked a number of colleagues if they knew about the problem.  Not only had they not, they all reacted the same way I did: this must not be an actual problem, or we’d have heard about it!  But no.

Can we do anything?  For users of up-to-date browsers, yes: service workers create a “good” man in the middle that sidesteps the HTTPS problem, so far as I understand.  So if you’re serving content over HTTPS, creating a service worker should be one of your top priorities right now, even if it’s just to do straightforward local caching and nothing fancier.  I haven’t gotten one up for meyerweb yet, but I will do so very soon.

That’s great for modern browsers, but not everyone has the option to be modern.  Sometimes they’re constrained by old operating systems to run older browsers, ones with no service-worker support: a lab full of Windows XP machines limited to IE8, for example.  Or on even older machines, running Windows 95 or other operating systems of that era.  Those are most likely to be the very people who are in situations where they’re limited to satellite internet or other similarly slow services with unforgiving data caps.  Even in the highly-wired world, you can still find older installs of operating systems and browsers: public libraries, to pick but one example.  Securing the web literally made it less accessible to many, many people around the world.

Beyond deploying service workers and hoping those struggling to bridge the digital divide make it across, I don’t really have a solution here.  I think HTTPS is probably a net positive overall, and I don’t know what we could have done better.  All I know is that I saw, first-hand, the negative externality that was pushed onto people far, far away from our data centers and our thoughts.

My thanks to Tim Kadlec and Ethan Marcotte for their feedback and insight while I was drafting this post, and to Lara Hogan and Aaron Gustafson for their early assistance wth my research.


Headings and Labels

Published 6 years, 1 month past

Following on my last two posts about accessibility improvements to meyerweb, I’ve made two more adjustments: better heading levels and added ARIA labels.

For the heading levels, the problem I face is one familiar to many authors: what makes sense as an <h1> in some situations needs to be an <h2> in others.  The most common example is the titles of blog posts like this one.  On its permalink page, the title of the page is the title of the post.  There, it should be an <h1>.  On archive pages, including the home page of meyerweb, there are a number of posts shown one after the other.  In those situations, each post title should be an <h2>.

Part of the redesign’s changes were to write a single PHP routine that generated posts and their markup, which I could then simply call from wherever.  So I added an optional function parameter that allowed me to indicate the context in which a post was being placed.  It goes something like this:

<?php blogpostMarkup("archive"); ?>
function blogpostMarkup($type = "standalone") {
    if ($type == "archive") $titletag = "h2"; else $titletag = "h1";
    // …markup is all generated here…
    echo $output;
}

Or code to that effect.  (I did not go copy-paste from my actual code base.)

So now, heading levels are what they should be, at least on most pages (I may have missed updating some of my old static HTML pages; feel free to point them out in the comments if you find one).  As a part of that effort, I removed the <h1> from the masthead except on the home page, being the one place it makes sense to be an <h1>.

As for ARIA labels, that came about due to a comment from Phil Kragnes on my last post, where he observed that pages often have multiple elements with a role of navigation.  In order to make things more clear to ARIA users, I took Phil’s suggestion to add aria-label attributes with clarifying values.  So for the page-top skiplinks, I have:

<nav role="navigation" aria-label="page" id="skiplinks">

Similarly, for the site-navigation bar, I have:

<nav role="navigation" aria-label="site" id="navigate">

The idea is that screen readers will say “Page navigation region” and “Site navigation region” rather than just repeating “Navigation region” over and over.

Other than cleaning up individual pages’ heading levels and the occasional custom layout fix (e.g., the Color Equivalents Table needed a local widening of the content column’s maximum size), I think the redesign has settled into the “occasional tinkering” phase.  I may do something to spruce up my old Web Review articles (like the very first, written when HTML tags were still uppercase!) and I’m thinking about adding subnavigation in certain sections, but otherwise I think this is about it.  Unless I decide to go really over the top and model my Tools page after Simon St. Laurent’s lovely new Grid design, that is…

Of course, if you see something I overlooked, don’t hesitate to let me know!  I can’t guarantee fast response, but I can always guarantee careful consideration.


Increasing Accessibility

Published 6 years, 2 months past

Thanks to the fantastic comments on my previous post, I’ve made some accessibility improvements.  Chief among them: adding WAI-ARIA role values to various parts of the structure.  These include:

  • role="banner" for the site’s masthead
  • role="navigation" added to the navigation links, including subnavigation links like previous/next posts
  • role="main" for the main portion of a page
  • role="complementary" for sidebars in the blog archives
  • role="article" for any blog post, whether there are several on a page or just one

In addition, I restored skip links to the masthead of most pages (the rest will get them soon).  The links are revealed on keyboard focus, which I’m not sure I like.  I feel like these aren’t quite where they need to be.  A big limitation is the lack of :matches() (or similar) support in browsers, since I’d love to have any keyboard focus in the masthead or navigation links bring up the skip links, which requires some sort of parent selection.  I may end up using a tiny bit of enhancing Javascript to make the links’ UX more robust in JS situations, but still obviously available if JS fails.  And I may replicate them in the footer, as a way to quickly jump back up the page, especially to the navigation.

Speaking of the navigation links, they’ve been moved in the source order to match their place in the visual layout.  My instincts with regard to source order and layout placement were confirmed to be woefully out of date: the best advice now is to put the markup where the layout calls for the content to be.  If you’re putting navigation links just under the masthead, then put their markup right after the masthead’s markup.  So I did that.

The one thing I didn’t change is heading levels, which suffer all the usual problems.  Right now, the masthead’s “meyerweb.com” is always an <h1> and the page title (or blog post titles) are all <h2>.  If I demoted the masthead content to, say, a plain old <div>, and promoted the post headings, then on pages like the home page, there’d be a whole bunch of <h1>s.  I’ve been told that’s a no-no.  If I’m wrong about that, let me know!

There’s still more to do, but I was able to put these into place with no more than a few minutes’ work, and going by what commenters told me, these will help quite a bit.  My thanks to everyone who contributed their insights and expertise!


How Do I Increase Accessibility?

Published 6 years, 2 months past

I have an accessibility question.  Okay, it’s a set of questions, but they’re really all facets of the same question:

How do I make my site’s structure the most accessible to the most people?

Which sounds a bit broad.  Let me narrow it down.  Here’s the basic layout order of most pages on meyerweb:

  1. Masthead
  2. Navigation (in a <nav> element)
  3. Main page content (in a <main> element), occasionally with a sidebar
  4. Footer (in a <footer> element)

But this is, at the moment, the source order of those pieces:

  1. Masthead
  2. Main page content (in a <main> element), occasionally with a sidebar
  3. Navigation (in a <nav> element)
  4. Footer (in a <footer> element)

The difference is the navigation.  I put it later in the source order because I want those using speaking browsers to be able to get the content quickly, without having to tab through the navigation on every page.

But is that actually a concern, given my use of a <main> element for the main content of the page?  And the <nav> and <footer> elements, do those also help with jumping around the page?  If not, what’s the best-practice structural order for those pieces?

If so, does that mean it’s okay to put the navigation back up there in the source order, and stop doing wacky things with the order element to place it visually where it isn’t, structurally?

I have the same questions for those who use keyboard tabbing of the visual layout, not speaking browsers.  What’s the best way to help them?  If it’s tabindex, how should I order the tabbing index?

And in either case, do I need skip links to get people around quickly?  Do I want skip links?  Do my assistive-technology users want skip links?

Maybe the real question is “Given this layout, and my desire to make getting to main content and other pieces of the page as easy as possible for those who rely on assistive technology, how should I structure and annotate the content to raise the fewest barriers for the fewest people?”

Unless, of course, the real question is one I don’t know enough to ask.

Can you help me out, accessibility hivemind?  I’d really appreciate some expert insight.  All my instincts are more than a decade out of date.


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