Dear Google:

[sethrenn]

I understand you want as many people as possible to use your Chrome browser. But re-designing all of your services so that they will suck and be less accessible or downright inaccessible in every other browser? Ur doing it rong. You used to be a cool company compared to the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft. Please, please stop pulling this shit on

Comments

[pendelook]

I also really hate the transition to icons rather than text in Gmail. I know they think it looks shiny, but I don't know what all their little pictographs mean, and I have to hover the mouse cursor over them all the time, which is really bad for accessibility. I feel like they're trying to design like Apple, but only succeeding in becoming less accessible.

[sethrenn]

Yeaaahhh, they don't seem to get that Apple's success is largely because their services actually work and are user-friendly and intuitive, not just because of the diversity of them. :\ It just seems like... they're overreaching. First they tried to be Twitter, but they did it rong again and got sued for violating people's privacy. Now they're trying to be Facebook, but with worse design, less accessibility, and even more failtastic about privacy violation, with the "real names" business. Is it seriously not enough that they're, you know, the world's most widely used search engine to the point where "googling" has entered common parlance like "xeroxing," AND have one of the most popular webmail services AND now own Youtube too?

-blendyish

[pendelook]

Apple has been pretty bad for accessibility in my experience as well. All I have is an iPod, but when I was trying the blindfold experiment I found my iPod completely unusable due to the touch screen that I didn't want in the first place but had to get because all the new Nanos have them.

So yeah, not a thing to copy, especially half-assedly, IMO.

[luinied]

Wait, how exactly do the new sites work better in Chrome? I had assumed they were just trying to make everything have the same look and feel as Google+, which, as I understand, was designed with a lot of testing and consideration to how average people interact with websites even when the conclusions reached conflict with how people who actually know what they're doing like things to work.

(But I'll admit that I pretty much only use Firefox, I don't really use Google services as much as most people, and I don't have any particular accessibility needs, so it's not too surprising that I wouldn't have noticed.)

[sethrenn]

TBH, I'm not actually sure if or how they look better in Chrome-- we've so far resisted all their attempts to make us download it. I just know that every time I use Google Documents or Google Books in any other browser, it pops up a message telling me that "your browser does not support all the features of [service]. If you are having problems, try switching to Google Chrome."

About the accessibility... we have a close friend& who use a screenreader, and we know from them that a lot of these "improved" Google services are not very accessible to screenreaders, or no longer accessible at all. So that right away is a Big No. Regarding our own accessibility needs, drastically changing the layouts of things without giving us the chance to opt out, or switch back to the old design, will make it initially difficult to impossible for us to use the new layout for a while-- our brain just freezes up, to the point where we don't even have reading comprehension for words that are sitting right there in front of us. One of the things LJ has

[luinied]

I'm going to guess that those messages are unrelated to accessibility. I know Google has proposed a few new pieces of HTML5 functionality by adding them to Chrome - like the ability to display those "toaster" popups - that so far no other browser supports (and that might not become standards in the end).

It is disappointing to hear that Google is dropping the ball on accessibility, though. You'd think, with their resources, that they'd be able to get that right. But, alas, I think that having the ability to opt out of a style change is mostly a thing of the past. (On that subject, have you heard about the eventually-upcoming removal of comment subjects on LiveJournal?)

[ksol1460]

There is a script you can get that works with the Greasemonkey utility and it gets rid of the giant black monolith they have for the choices down the left-hand side now.