Quote:
Originally Posted by Philip M
And WTF would anyone want to disable Javascript in his browser anyway nowadays? What benefits does he imagine will arise? It is as silly as saying that you could still use a website if you were viewing it on a monochrome monitor.
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A lot of disabled people find that many web sites are completely unusable BECAUSE they use JavaScript and so they have no way of telling where they are in the page or what is happening. The need to have JavaScript off for those web pages in order that the pages will hopefully be usable without the JavaScript that is breaking the site for them.
If the site also fails to work without JavaScript and if there is no alternate site for them to use then they end up without a site that they can use for that particular purpose at all since the site is equally broken for them whether they have JavaScript enabled or not. No bank would take the risk of being taken to court over having not provided an accessible way for their disabled customers to use their site.
As an example of how allowing a page to be functional without JavaScript requires no more effort than one that can only use JavaScript, consider a form where ajax is to be attached to call the server and update the page based on what is entered into the form. With properly written JavaScript all of the JavaScript would be in an external file linked into the page. The server side code that the ajax calls would also be in a separate file. To get the page to work without the JavaScript you'd need to add an action parameter to the form, you'd need to link the server side script into the page and modify it very slightly so that it returns the result instead of echoing it when the script is included instead of being run directly. That's a whole four extra lines of code with most of it being exactly the same code for each form where you do this extra work. If the form were being used to make a purchase then the cost of the modifications would be recouped out of the profit the first time someone without JavaScript used the form to make a purchase.