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Re: [Lynx-dev] Why Won't this Site Work in LYNX?


From: Karen Lewellen
Subject: Re: [Lynx-dev] Why Won't this Site Work in LYNX?
Date: Mon, 2 May 2022 20:15:09 -0400 (EDT)

David,
How can anyone meet a legal obligation by testing with a single tool like jaws? The technical baseline clause in at least some editions of WACG discourages that sort of thing, unless you are providing the tool in question. after all, major sites doing business across borders would have a hard time using Jaws alone as their basis.
and what about other populations who are equally entitled to access?
Karen



On Tue, 3 May 2022, David Woolley wrote:

On 03/05/2022 00:15, Chime Hart wrote:
 Since I really have little understanding of user agent strings, is their
 anything specific I can type in L Y N X to process this article

User agents have been a mess for a long time, although it looks like the original standard is beginning to be reinstated.

In the very early days of graphical browsers, sites used to discriminate against some browsers and as a result Internet Explorer started claiming to be Netscape and adding its real identity as a comment. It looks like the latest versions still do that.

As such if you are up against browser discrimination, you just have to experiment, to work out the rules the site uses. There is a database of them here: <http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php>, which looks like it isn't Ajax based.

The other big problem for Lynx, is that many sites, probably most of the major sites, do not send the common browsers a document, but rather a program which loads data and formats it into the page. You can sometimes recognize these on graphical browsers, either because you get a placeholder format, with grey blocks for notional text, before the actual text appears, or by the way that individual parts of the page fail independently.

Of the ones I've looked at in some detail, both ancestry.com and Nextdoor normally operate in this way. The main reason they might create a simple text version is for search engines, not for end users. If you are very luck they may also consider text only browsers, but there is probably no commercial imperative for this, as they can generally meet their legal obligations by creating pages that work with Jaws and a graphical browser.

A lot more probably do this as well. Maybe most of the well known sites; I haven't looked at how the typical small business site (the one page sites with sections that replace each other as you scroll through the page) work, when it comes to document mode fall back.

From what is going on under the hood on the site you are looking at, they have absolutely no interest in providing a static document. The site is behaving like one that is there to attract people to the adverts.






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