Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
We could make the argument similar to @christoslitras
that "users should just use the latest tech" but there are loads of reasons why they don't (for example):-
cost (see below),
lack of technical expertise to know how to update - this one is the big one, just because we know our way around a computer does not mean that kids who drop out of school at 15 to pursue a trade and are technophobes know how to do things we assume to be simple.
OS restrictions (32 bit machine vs 64 bit machine is one that is starting to cause people issues as 32 bit support is reducing).
With regards to JAWS cost it depends entirely on what country you are in as they use a distributor model.
In the UK to upgrade from 2017 JAWS or earlier to 2020 JAWS would cost you £375 as a home user. If you need it for work expect to pay double for a commercial license (although with a bit of fiddling and patience you can get that paid for by the government).
This is why NVDA is so popular (as you mentioned, it's FREE!), and it is a great piece of kit, but JAWS is still better with some programmes etc.
It is also familiarity, if you have used JAWS for 10 years then you know the shortcuts, the speech patterns, idiosyncrasies etc. Forcing someone to use NVDA and a certain browser is like me asking you to start writing with your left hand if you are right handed (or vice versa) in order to use my service.
You could do it but it would take a lot of time and effort so I am sure you would just stick with your right hand and just go to someone else who will let you write with the hand you prefer. (Not my best analogy but hopefully you get the point!)
I agree on the balance, it frustrates me that I have to still support IE9 - but I blame Microsoft for the issues I have with IE9 not my end users.
We choose IE9+ (rather than IE8+ etc) as our support level as that supports modern HTML and most CSS and compiling your JavaScript to work in IE9 isn't difficult.
When I say support IE9 I am not talking about pixel perfection, we can live with layout quirks and certain features not working perfectly as long as the site is still usable and fully accessible.
Also we support IE9+ for E-commerce sites, for SAAS we support IE11+ due to not wanting to have to create our own frameworks. We do however ensure that older browsers have alternative ways of performing critical actions.
That is just my 2 cents and why we support that far back, everyone is different, I just think it makes commercial sense to support things people still use as when they can't use your website as you don't support them they will hopefully come to mine 😊.
If you have your own site statistics and you can see there is a quite percentage of IE users using your site/services, then you and your team can decide if it's worth the time and effort to support such obsolete and abandoned browsers.
According to gs.statcounter.com, IE (all versions) global share is 1.68% and it keeps falling. Also many companies like Google, Facebook and even Microsoft, have stopped supporting IE for all new releasde of some very popular frameworks like React, Angular, Blazor/.NET SPA and even VueJS.
It does not worth it, not only for the time you or your team spends on this, but also having your site/app downloading and loading several JS/CSS files for pollyfilling missing features for obsolete browsers is bad for the projects ecosystem, for the majority of end users, for devices and even for the environment.
Agreed. The place I work at currently does have to support some older browsers, but that's typically more for core functionality rather than aestheitcal items. If things look a bit different, that's acceptable.
I suppose one could attempt to detect support of the emoji being used in a web page and use a method like this to fill them in, but again, is it worth it?
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Thanks for your comment!
@ashleyjsheridan Yes it is true.
We could make the argument similar to @christoslitras that "users should just use the latest tech" but there are loads of reasons why they don't (for example):-
With regards to JAWS cost it depends entirely on what country you are in as they use a distributor model.
In the UK to upgrade from 2017 JAWS or earlier to 2020 JAWS would cost you £375 as a home user. If you need it for work expect to pay double for a commercial license (although with a bit of fiddling and patience you can get that paid for by the government).
This is why NVDA is so popular (as you mentioned, it's FREE!), and it is a great piece of kit, but JAWS is still better with some programmes etc.
It is also familiarity, if you have used JAWS for 10 years then you know the shortcuts, the speech patterns, idiosyncrasies etc. Forcing someone to use NVDA and a certain browser is like me asking you to start writing with your left hand if you are right handed (or vice versa) in order to use my service.
You could do it but it would take a lot of time and effort so I am sure you would just stick with your right hand and just go to someone else who will let you write with the hand you prefer. (Not my best analogy but hopefully you get the point!)
I agree on the balance, it frustrates me that I have to still support IE9 - but I blame Microsoft for the issues I have with IE9 not my end users.
We choose IE9+ (rather than IE8+ etc) as our support level as that supports modern HTML and most CSS and compiling your JavaScript to work in IE9 isn't difficult.
When I say support IE9 I am not talking about pixel perfection, we can live with layout quirks and certain features not working perfectly as long as the site is still usable and fully accessible.
Also we support IE9+ for E-commerce sites, for SAAS we support IE11+ due to not wanting to have to create our own frameworks. We do however ensure that older browsers have alternative ways of performing critical actions.
That is just my 2 cents and why we support that far back, everyone is different, I just think it makes commercial sense to support things people still use as when they can't use your website as you don't support them they will hopefully come to mine 😊.
If you have your own site statistics and you can see there is a quite percentage of IE users using your site/services, then you and your team can decide if it's worth the time and effort to support such obsolete and abandoned browsers.
According to gs.statcounter.com, IE (all versions) global share is 1.68% and it keeps falling. Also many companies like Google, Facebook and even Microsoft, have stopped supporting IE for all new releasde of some very popular frameworks like React, Angular, Blazor/.NET SPA and even VueJS.
It does not worth it, not only for the time you or your team spends on this, but also having your site/app downloading and loading several JS/CSS files for pollyfilling missing features for obsolete browsers is bad for the projects ecosystem, for the majority of end users, for devices and even for the environment.
Agreed. The place I work at currently does have to support some older browsers, but that's typically more for core functionality rather than aestheitcal items. If things look a bit different, that's acceptable.
I suppose one could attempt to detect support of the emoji being used in a web page and use a method like this to fill them in, but again, is it worth it?