Please help me shame Microsoft into doing the right thing. Microsoft (like many others) does not care about researchers and those who struggle with reading Web content from graphics browsers (like the blind community) who depend on text-based browsers such at Lynx and W3M. There are many modern uses for these browses and the Web was designed first and foremost as a knowledge exchange platform.
First, here’s my comment:
“It is extremely poor architecture to produce a documentation portal that does not work at all with any standard text-based browser. This violates the basic tenets of “progressive web design” and demonstrates a remedial understanding of web development and utter cluelessness on the part of Microsoft as a company. In 2023 such apathy about the blind community and basic understanding of Web best development practices is utterly ridiculous.”
I included screen shot of invisible pages.
This is the response I got:
“It is possible that answers.microsoft.com may not work with text-based browsers such as lynx or w3m because these browsers do not support modern web technologies and may not be able to properly render the website’s content.
Text-based browsers are designed to display simple, text-based content and may not be able to handle more complex web pages that rely on advanced features such as JavaScript, CSS, and multimedia content. As a result, websites that use these technologies may not be fully accessible or may not display correctly when viewed with a text-based browser.”
And I just couldn’t resist:
The bug is that Microsoft has decided to go directly against the council of Tim Berners-Lee and other Web leaders by making their documentation site depend completely on a technology that prevents researchers and the blind from reading it when there was no direct need for such a “modern” dependency.
For the record, there are 10s of thousands of companies and sites that do. Microsoft just doesn’t. This sends a very clear message to the world. I’ve already made sure that thousands have read this, and will continue to do so. People need to know.
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