I agree with such activists. It's stupid to have to make a phone call when a website should be perfectly capable for this role.
While I don't claim to know what such disabilities are like, I feel I have experienced analogous frustrations. Back when Linux on the desktop and Firefox were catching on, I remember it being a crapshoot about whether critical sites (like banks and tax filing) would play nice with non-IE browsers, and I had to have a PC/Windows/IE setup as a fallback. Same issue: the use the meth-addled design that breaks any non-mainstream clients.
I also use Tridactyl (and before it, Vimium and pentadactyl), an extension that lets you click links from the keyboard, which is a huge UI improvement and (along with other keyboard input methods) speeds up web browsing significantly. It's generally good at detecting links, but the same sloppy design and over-clever features make clickable elements undetectable and frustrate this enhancement.
And for the kicker ... often times, these improvements "for the disabled" end up benefiting everyone else even more, but designers/buisdev people don't get it! See my previous comment about the Curb Cut Effect [1].
The web was designed with screen readers in mind. It is a serious regression to find major sites telling blind users to call in. This isn't the 60s.
While I don't claim to know what such disabilities are like, I feel I have experienced analogous frustrations. Back when Linux on the desktop and Firefox were catching on, I remember it being a crapshoot about whether critical sites (like banks and tax filing) would play nice with non-IE browsers, and I had to have a PC/Windows/IE setup as a fallback. Same issue: the use the meth-addled design that breaks any non-mainstream clients.
I also use Tridactyl (and before it, Vimium and pentadactyl), an extension that lets you click links from the keyboard, which is a huge UI improvement and (along with other keyboard input methods) speeds up web browsing significantly. It's generally good at detecting links, but the same sloppy design and over-clever features make clickable elements undetectable and frustrate this enhancement.
And for the kicker ... often times, these improvements "for the disabled" end up benefiting everyone else even more, but designers/buisdev people don't get it! See my previous comment about the Curb Cut Effect [1].
The web was designed with screen readers in mind. It is a serious regression to find major sites telling blind users to call in. This isn't the 60s.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195054