Couldn’t agree with this more.
Every time I create a website, I first create it with only HTML. If it looks right and makes sense, then I will add CSS. If it looks good and works fine, then I will add JS.
Note there’s a group of users that larger than the group of users without JS (for whatever reason): users of assistive technology. And they don’t even have a choice.
While I’m all for considering the needs of every user… If you get to the point where you’re worrying about no-JS users, I hope you’ve already considered the needs of people with disabilities, whether temporary or permanent.
Edit: oh right, wanted to add: just making a site work without JS doesn’t automatically make it accessible to people with special needs.
No-JS pages that fully comply with WAI ARIA are much better for users of assistive technology than any single page web app can ever hope to be. All the myriad states that an interactive JS page can enter are absolutely never ever properly tested for disabled users, and even after full expensive testing, just a little change in the JS can ruin it all again. While with WAI ARIA you can just quickly assert that the page is compliant with a checker before pushing it to live.
Definitely not. NoJS is not better for accessibility. It’s worse.
You need to set the ARIA states over JS. Believe me, I’ve written an entire component library with this in mind. I thought that NoJS would be better, having a HTML and CSS core and adding on JS after. Then for my second rewrite, I made it JS first and it’s all around better for accessibility. Without JS you’d be leaning into a slew of hacks that just make accessibility suffer. It’s neat to make those NoJS components, but you have to hijack checkbox or radio buttons in ways not intended to work.
The needs of those with disabilities far outweigh the needs of those who want a no script environment.
While with WAI ARIA you can just quickly assert that the page is compliant with a checker before pushing it to live.
Also no. You cannot check accessibility with HTML tags alone. Full stop. You need to check the ARIA tags manually. You need to ensure states are updated. You need to add custom JS to handle key events to ensure your components work as suggested by the ARIA Practices page. Relying on native components is not enough. They get you somewhere there, but you’ll also run into incomplete native components that don’t work as expected (eg: Safari and touch events don’t work the same as Chrome and Firefox).
The sad thing is that accessibility testing is still rather poor. Chrome has the best way to automate testing against the accessibility tree, but it’s still hit or miss at times. It’s worse with Firefox and Safari. You need to doubly confirm with manual testing to ensure the ARIA states are reported correctly. Even with attributes set correctly there’s no guarantee it’ll be handled properly by browsers.
I have a list of bugs still not fixed by browsers but at least have written my workarounds for them and they are required JS to work as expected and have proper accessibility.
Good news is that we were able to stop the Playwright devs from adopting this poor approach of relying on HTML only for ARIA testing and now can take accessibility tree snapshots based on realtime JS values.
This is both factually incorrect, and ignores the original point.
First of all, no you cannot just run an automatic WAI ARIA checker. That will highlight some surface level basic structural issues but in no way is adequate testing for a pleasant accessible UX.
Secondly, modern frameworks like React and Angular have the same ARIA validation utilities. It does not matter whether components are loaded in dynamically by the framework as long as they’re defined in the codebase where linters and code analyzers can run.
Thirdly, you’re ignoring the actual point that is being made. You know as well as I do, that virtually nowhere actually puts serious effort and usability testing into websites making sure their websites are accessible, and that directly impacts the lives of millions of people who are cut off from the world of technology because of a disability.
Until you’re making all of your websites and apps accessible by second nature (i.e. until at a bare minimum you have your Web Accessibility Specialist certification), then focusing your time and efforts on catering to a niche ideological no JS crowd is quite frankly somewhat cruel and self serving.
If you want to learn the stuff necessary for that certification, here’s a document, the WAS Body of Knowledge listing what you need to know and maybe where you can learn that. Less detailed version in the WAS Exam Content Outline.
Heh, just deleted my reply - thanks for covering all that, you’re exactly right :)
deleted by creator
Doesn’t avoiding JS typically structure a website in such a way that the browsers built-in assistive services can cover it easier?
Not necessarily, unfortunately. (Though I guess technically it’s easier to throw up barriers using JS, but it’s not an inherent quality, and leaving it out doesn’t automatically make it good.)
I’m curious what parts would be challenging to use with a screen reader? If a site just has basic links and no JS, I can’t really think of anything unless the tab layout is somehow completely shuffled due CSS.
A comprehensive answer is out of scope and probably best given by a true accessibility specialist, but for example, if you only use
<div>tags for everything, a lot of the screen reader’s affordances for navigating are unusable. Images that carry information but not in their alt text are another simple example.And then there are parts where JS could actively help. For example, if you have a tabbed interface, but clicking a tab results in a full page refresh, the screen reader loses all context.
Also keep in mind that there’s more to assistive technology than just screen readers, e.g. sufficient colour contrast and keyboard navigability are important to many people. Too many websites still get those basics wrong.
Thanks for responding. I’m not really a web dev, so I haven’t thought about it much.
The tab layout and
<div>examples were definitely not things I was thinking about. I guess that’s a good incentive to use tags like<section>and <article>` instead of divs with CSS classes.I’m actually a bit color blind myself, so I appreciate sites being high contrast and not relying on color alone for indicators. A surprising number of sites completely break when trying to zoom in and make text bigger too, which is often due to bad floating layouts. Especially if it’s resized with JS…
They overlap. Js is a shit technology for the blind.
Dynamic sites that move / hide / unhide components as you do things are unhelpful and confusing. A screen reader will tell you what’s under the cursor right now. If that changes, you don’t get notified that you’re now pointing at something else.
Static sites are better for accessibility too.
They can overlap, yes. Static sites are definitely not automatically better for accessibility.
Hmm…this has me thinking, maybe I’ll change up my Hugo site a little, so that there’s no dropdown menu - it’s the only thing javascript is needed for.
Thank you for this, some points that I’d not even considered, and a helpful reminder to myself to try and get that javascript from 99% to 100% unused. :)
JavaScript sucks. I hate using it I hate coding it.
I whitelist js sources on my personal computer.
Only absolutely necessary for function scripts get loaded.
If they ask me to disable the adblocker I blacklist the domain.
I’ve done more than 18 years of dev work. I only hate js. All the other parts of the job are fine. Other languages are fine as well. I’ve had to learn so many. Hell I know cobol right along side ruby.
Js sucks. It sucks to debug. Its frameworks still have issues with basic stuff like many to many relationships.
All the solutions that don’t use or use it sparingly work for years. The ones that rely on the language usually die a firey death by npm/yarn or get deprecated within 6 months.
Js frameworks make php frameworks seems stable efficient and logical by comparison.
Yikes.
Modern day php and laravel is actually not terrible.
But yeah I agree with you.
Laravel is shit.
I can believe it became popular only because devs don’t care about the code.
Its frameworks still have issues with basic stuff like many to many relationships.
Not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean ORMs? Which one and when did you try it?
Javascript is like Dungeons and dragons. It’s a mess, weighed down by legacy decisions, too heavy in some places and too light in others, and used in far more places than it should be. It also has some diehard fans, and some diehard fans who have never used anything else.
Sadly, the rise of frameworks and SAAS have really killed security and accessibility through enforcement of JS.
‘Back in the day’ performance, download size, backwards compatibility, and non-js functionality was expected. Now it’s not even on the radar for most big corps/agencies. Many places I’ve worked don’t even care about responsiveness, which is crazy.
Now, there are so many 25mb websites that are unusable without JS or the right device…
Not to mention, more accessible.
People should not be prioritizing no-JS users. No one turns off JavaScript.
If you keep the JS to a minmum, you have
- less work maintining that shit, HTML/CSS is patient
- better user experience
So much forms and textboxes don’t save content anymore after a reload, because it’s dynamically loaded from somewhere or even a <div> frame handled entirely by JS. Buttons/Checkboxes that don’t work, it’s sad.
Can confirm I’m one of those people with JS off and a pretty strict whitelist !
Lmao, oh yes, let’s go back to the golden age of every app having all of its logic running on centralized servers, rather being able to easily create cross platform client side distributed applications.
The “no-js” philosophy is fundamentally at odds with a future of distributed, OS agnostic, application development.
It remembers the web when the web was simpler, and ignores that that was the era of dll hell and applications being locked to specific OSes. The modern web is the most successful cross platform development framework by orders of magnitude,it’s all based on open internationally agreed on standards, and it is vastly simplifying and detangling the overall computing environment / platforms that we used to be locked to.
Just use a framework like Nextjs or it’s open source off shoots / clones and get the best of both static pre rendering and dynamic on the fly rendering.
#1 popup and tracker enjoyer over here
I use utilities like unlock origin, a pihole, etc to block trackers and ad network requests without blocking literally all logic that can run on a page, which works great as an interim solution.
And the long term solution to advertising and tracking is legislation, not throwing out a computer’s ability to compute.
Personally I think it’s better if WWW moves beyond HTTP as a protocol
HTTP is really nice. We should move beyond HTML as a document format
A lot of people who shared this sentiment were hung up on the idea that “no one turns off JS.” But some people do, for a variety of good reasons!
What % are we talking about? 50%, 25%, 10%, 1%, 0.1%? People make choices, but those are their choices. I need to get the job done and I can’t cater to everyone’s needs.
I can’t cater to everyone’s needs.
Can’t wait for the law to slap you in the face someday.
Forget about your job for a moment. In general, why are you willing to set a threshold on how accessible your work is? I urge you to forget about how callous your employer wants you to be.
You call people callous for using js? 😂 Sorry, I’m not interested in a conversation with a fanatic because that kind of arguments have zero value.
And who has to maintain it, not you?
