Okay, from my Firefox+Orca perspective, the site that results from the
"click here for a simplified shopping experience" is still there, and
the simplified site is what I get when I load Amazon from my
bookmarks.
The simplified homepage is filled with various advertising and
recommendation clusters, each headed by a level 2 html heading.
Admittedly, the one's that are filled with category links instead of
individual product links tend to go to pages with an atrocious
shortage of html headings, and the body of the simplified homepage is
empty if JavaScript isn't enabled. However, even without JavaScript,
the search box and cart links are easy enough to find(the go button on
the search box is the second button from the top of the page and often
the last button on the page, and shifting tabbing from this is the
link to clear the search box, the search box itself, and the cart
link.
In this view the shopping cart and individual product pages seem to
match the mobile view I remember using on an android phone prior to
blindness, with all of the most important stuff either a button or a
few tabs/shift tabs from a button. My only real complaint about this
view of the cart is the lack of a subtotal for saved items, and my
only real complaint about this view of product pages is that some
times the product description is truncated compared to the full site
and the inability to acess customer Q&A.
Admittedly, checking out from this view of the cart makes it difficult
to utilize points from my Amazon Prime card and for some reason, the
block that's supposed to display subtotal, shipping, tax, and total is
empty.
Now, from the simplified homepage, I have to disable css to make the
link to the desktop/full site visible to ctrl+F which I need if I want
to access customer Q&A or place an order using my reward points. The
desktop home page is a mess and often slows my browser to a crawl, but
fortunately, if I pull up the mobile view of my cart in one tab before
switching to the desktop home page in a different tab, I can keep my
cart in mobile view even across page changes while loading product
pages in desktop view in new tabs from the cart. The desktop product
pages are kind of cluttered and make picking options for products with
options harder, but add plenty of html headings to help skip over the
clutter to reach product descriptions(again, often more detailed than
on the mobile view) and customer Q&A(inaccessible from mobile view).
Admittedly, once done with things I need the desktop/full version of
the site for, I often need ctrl+F to find the link back to the
simplified homepage, and for some reason, I have to restart firefox to
get product pages and my cart to load in mobile view after switching
back to thesimplified homepage(if I don't restart Firefox, I get stuck
with somekind of intermediate view, and while the switch to desktop
view doesn't force an existing shopping cart tab to switch, the switch
back to simplified does).
Not entirely sure what cause Amazon to toss me captcha BS every now
and then, but it's rare enough that I tend to count it as a site error
rather than deliberately bad design.
I also have a problem with Amazon trying to push mp3 downloads of
Music and Audible versions of audiobooks when I'm looking for Audio CD
editions, but I suspect I'd have that problem even if I was still
among the sighted.
Best I can tell, there isn't much, if any difference between the
desktop and mobile views of search results, but as every product link
is an HTML heading and the link to open filter options is right after
the go button on the search box, any clutter doesn't really bother me.
Admittedly, my experience using Amazon is limited to Firefox and it
might be an inaccessible mess in Chromium, Safari, and whatever the
default Windows web browser is these days, but I'd personally give
Amazon at least a B+ for accessibility, and while I might just be used
to Amazon's idiosyncrasies, I'd declare it more accessible than the
vast majority of web stores. That said, I'm pretty sure this thread
was started because Amazon doesn't play well with links, elinks, lynx,
etc. or perhaps, that these browsers don't play well with Amazon.
If a website was giving me, Firefox, and Orca as much trouble as the
OP implies Amazon is giving them, the text browsers, and whatever
console screen reader they're using, I'd probably just call the web
designers idiots and not use the site(admittedly, not using Amazon is
a much bigger sacrifice than for most other websites), but given how
well Amazon works for me and how the main reason I use Firefox is that
none of the text-mode browsers I've tried seem half as usable(though,
in all fairness, even Firefox would be a pain in the anatomy to use if
Orca didn't provide all those handy navigational hotkeys), I can't
help wondering if the problem isn't as much due to the limitations of
the major text-mode browsers as it is due to the flaws in Amazon's web
design.
I mean, it would be great if Amazon and every other major website
worked well with elinks et al., but unless I'm majorly misinformed,
many of these browsers lack functionality all the major graphical
browsers have had for years, and while some of that functionality
probably needs to die in a fire, upgrading text browsers to better
work with modern web sites is probably much easier than convincing web
masters to cater too what's probably a very small minority of users.
But hey, if there's a text-mode web browser out there that's equipped
with all the functional aspects of the modern web and provides a
decent replacement for the navigational hotkeys graphical screen
readers provide when surfing the web, I'd love to hear about it.
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