yeah this is an odd article. hamburger menus are not perfect, but they do the job and they’re expected by the user, which is important in UI
this article’s main justification for them being poor is that they don’t work well without a mouse and/or when you have javascript turned off. okay there are times and places and people for whom javascript will be off, that’s understandable, but still rare. who is browsing the internet with just a keyboard though?
they’re fixing an issue for the vanishingly few by worsening the experience of overwhelming majority, and acting as if this is an obvious solution that developers are too blighted to see
There are people that can't use a mouse and have to use keyboard navigation.
The negative attitude against towards accessibility vexes me greatly. Are wheelchair ramps a pointless waste of money because the vast majority of people can walk just fine? Should we not care about making cities safer for blind people because they are just a small minority?
These kinds of attitude wouldn't be socially acceptable in the "real world" but the web still likes to pretend that it is the Wilde West. And yes, actively excluding people from being able to use your services is a bigger problem than you site being slightly less pretty.
I don’t believe that you’re replying to the strongest possible interpretation of what I said. you’re replying to a strawman that you’ve allowed to make you angry
the point is that a ramp is of equal use to a non-disabled person as a disabled one. what this author wants is to make everyone use stairlifts
People with disabilities (mostly vision impaired) browse the internet with "just a keyboard" or a screen reader. It's quite cumbersome, but for some people, that's the best they can do.
At a previous job, we had to follow their extensive rules for making everything accessible. A few things that I can remember:
* minimum contrast ratio
* support for the high-contrast mode that some browsers have
* screen reader support for every UI element - this requires a ton of different things
* everything must be usable without a mouse
There were tools to check for a lot of this. There was a separate team of accessibility people who would check the result and create tickets for things that were not good enough.
It was annoying when the designers specified low-contrast colors, then we'd build it with the colors specified by the designers, and then the tool tells us the colors are unacceptable. Why can't the designers check the contrast ratio of their colors?
Testing with a screen reader was extremely annoying (because it reads a description of the currently focused item), but it gave me a lot of empathy for the poor people for whom this is the only way to use a web UI.
this article’s main justification for them being poor is that they don’t work well without a mouse and/or when you have javascript turned off. okay there are times and places and people for whom javascript will be off, that’s understandable, but still rare. who is browsing the internet with just a keyboard though?
they’re fixing an issue for the vanishingly few by worsening the experience of overwhelming majority, and acting as if this is an obvious solution that developers are too blighted to see