Pretty Unreadable

Amphora.

Ethan Marcotte tried to use Apple’s VoiceOver to read some AMP Stories showcased by Google:

In that recording, a computerized voice can be heard reciting a seemingly nonsensical string of words, numbers, and letters. Phrases like “protecting the Antarctic” and “a journey to a continent in distress” can be heard here and there, but those are rare bits of coherence. Instead, the voice tends to sound more like this: “Button. Button. Button. Leaving web content. Null, group. Null, group. Button.” It’s a stream of gibberish.

There’s a screen recording too, so you can see the pretty pages that VoiceOver just can’t decipher.

Since the beginning, Google has insisted AMP is the best solution for the web’s performance problem. And Google’s used its market dominance to force publishers to adopt the framework, going so far as to suggest that AMP’s the only format you need to publish pages on the web. But we’ve reached a point where AMP may “solve” the web’s performance issues by supercharging the web’s accessibility problem, excluding even more people from accessing the content they deserve.

Truly, AMP is a solution to a problem that only exists because the web has been infested by ad-tech, which Google has a major hand in. Rather than replace or reform ad-tech, Google, it seems, would rather replace the web itself with a walled garden that they oversee. And if you’re not able-bodies, at the moment it looks like the gates are closed to you…