2021-03-21 - The inaccesible web
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In order to clean up and minimize my computer a bit, i performed a
full reinstall of Debian today. While doing this, i reduced my
partition sizes in half in order to force myself to keep being
mindful not to collect and install everything i can find.
For now i've not installed X, in order to try working in console a
bit more (using tmux). I think i could do most of my work in CLI
except for browsing to the occasional site i use of my bank or
utilities company.
It is really a shame is that all of these modern websites fully
rely on javascript to do anything at all. So without a modern
graphical browser it is impossible to visit them or log into these
sites. And that would be the one of the main reasons to install X.
Wouldn't it be cool if those sites worked with good-old-fashioned
non-javascript POST/GET forms, parsing the input on the server, and
replying with a html response to the client. Instead of pushing
EVERY possible thing through an AJAX query which is called over
javascript.
The other day i was visiting a "new and improved" version of the
website of my utilities company. And this new site is now FULLY
relying on AJAX calls to show just about anything on the page.
Without javascript, the page just remains completely empty. How is
this even acceptable behaviour? What about implementing fallbacks
to the simplest forms of communicating with the website? You know,
so the website is actually accessible without Firefox version 213
or Chrome 496.
And the utilities company's site is not a unique case. Actually,
it's very difficult to find pages nowadays which can properly
function in Lynx or other non-javascript browsers.
So yeah, i'm currently without X, but still need to find a way to
visit the javascript-laden websites which are forced on me by my
utilities company and bank etc. Booh... i think such companies,
which specifically REQUIRE you to log into websites, should be
forced to also provide maximum accesibility to their websites.
I wonder how blind people deal with all this javascript-crap when
they are using screenreaders etc.
