1044
Early internet nostalgia (europe.pub)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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[–] -3 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

How accessable was the old internet for visually impaired people?

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  • [–] 12 points 3 weeks ago

    While I appreciate the heavy handed strawman argument, it was entirely possible to make the old internet more accessible to those with disabilities WITHOUT making the technology worse in every single other way.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    Mixed and depending on the year. Hardware was available, (braile and speech syth) but it was expensive as hell. There was a bit of a crisis when we went from dos to windows. None of the early GUI supported any of the hardware. In 95 you could use JAWS screen reader. Navigator 4 and IE5 were shit for a while until they started supporting it. Graphic images were still a problem, even after ALT tags became available, trying to get content makers to use them was a fight.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    To say nothing of Flash. Sighted navigation was nontrivial.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    oh god yes, flash and shockwave were awful. When my company used flash they also put text-only versions of the site up behind the scenes, but we were in the minority

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    So many mid-century googie disasters with bitcrushed sound effects whenever you so much as looked at a button. Homestar Runner isn't a parody, it's just how the web was. Toons! Toons! Chawacte--! Stooore!

    The most personally nostalgic version of this still accessible is surely some PC Gamer demo disc launcher. Coconut Monkey era navigation by bouncing around a starship to run the Final Fantasy VII installer. That presumably still works, too, since the most stable Linux API is Win32.

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