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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Two of my best coworkers are blind. They're ops people, so their job is computers. I don't think anyone can tell any difference in productivity between them and sighted people. I was surprised, initially, because I thought that it would be hard to work without the high-bandwidth data transfer medium that is vision, but apparently they make it work beautifully.

Also, it has shown me how hard I make their lives when I don't design with accessibility in mind. I didn't use to think that anyone with vision problems used the internet much, but it turns out not only they do, but they do the exact same things I do. This is a good tool for accommodating visually impaired people:

https://khan.github.io/tota11y/

I guess I'm saying don't be a jerk, be mindful of sight-impaired people when designing your products.

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> I guess I'm saying don't be a jerk, be mindful of sight-impaired people when designing your products.

Agreed. Or name your javascript tool the same thing as the most popular screen reader.

JAWS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005415

JAWS: http://www.freedomscientific.com/Products/Blindness/JAWS

They even preserved the all caps. Now when vision impaired people search for their screen reader, they get results for a javascript framework, since they're both in the context of software as far as a search engine is concerned.

Seems like a very minor problem.

For someone who's sighted.

Really, though?

I always design with accessibility in mind, but I feel like there are more visceral complications than having to add a little extra context to a web search.

Almost everyone in development has encountered unfortunate name collisions that make what you're looking for hard to find... it's a pretty common inconvenience. Usually you just refine the query, like: "JAWS screenreader." The first result takes you where you probably intended to go, and it's at most 1-2 keystrokes away.

I think the real lesson here is to design inclusively. HTML has a lot of handy attributes to augment content; knowing & implementing the essentials means someone can follow the core flow of your site/application without relying on visual cues. And for the pragmatists... it has the added benefit of self-documenting and increasing semantic conformity in your markup.

I don't see how this problem is related to vision at all. Besides, why would someone need to google JAWS all the time? It's a software you install once. It's such a trivial issue compared to the accessibility problem on websites.

Seems like exactly what trademark law was designed to prevent.

Oh come on, surely they get results for the animal as well? If you want a unique name, you have to invent one.

I remember going over some html I had written in person with one of those coworkers. I had forgotten to write alt text for an image, and the filename itself was some ugly hex string or something. When he got to that part of the page the screen reader starting reading off the filename - it sounded like it was speaking tongues! His nose scrunched up and he shook his head disapprovingly: no, no no! After hearing that cacophony myself, I now try to remember to make things as accessible as possible.

ಠ_ಠ Don't I know you?

Get me on IM! I have an awesome new lib to tell you about.

Vision is not particularly high-bandwidth. It just creates the impression of high-bandwidth because it is directed. You only take in a tiny fraction of what's around you, but because you can direct your attention at arbitrary things and refine your impression of them, it feels like you are seeing a very rich picture. You're actually just drawing your own very personal path through a very rich scene that you can only see a tiny piece of at a time, and, like OP you are filling in most of the details from your imagination.

There are things around you which are plain as day, but which you will never see, because you will never think to look at them.

But the amount of information gleaned from vision is immense. Maybe not in the transfer of light to the eye, but the derived and concluded information from the resultant images is huge. Especially when your vision brings up loads of related memories and context from other/previous experiences... (I realize my vocabulary is lacking to the point I can't fully articulate this particular thought as clearly as I would hope)

But I'd like to know if you're diffentiating between the actual bandwidth of the eye's ability to see light (I.e. Peripheral vision is fairly narrow) vs the amount of thought and memory that can be induced in the mind based on the (limited) amount of light/images/info coming in through the vision.

I am not blind, but I do have terrible floaters and other eyesight issues as a consequence of my medical condition. I suspect many handicapped people spend more time online than average. I certainly do and have for many years. Online banking and a million other things make my life far more manageable than it would be without the Internet in the face of a serious handicap.

> I guess I'm saying don't be a jerk, be mindful of sight-impaired people when designing your products.

At a job I had five years back, new US government standards for handicapped accessibility came down, and I was asked pretty explicitly to do the absolute minimum necessary to make our web app technically comply with the letter of the rule. This essentially amounted to adding one- or two-word alt-text tags to image buttons, and nothing else. I wasn't happy with that, and I investigated to see if I could do better, but really doing it right would have taken weeks or months of work and a lot of inter-department cooperation, and I was just a contractor and the decision had been made many levels above me, so ultimately I had to do what was asked and move on to my next task. :(

So I guess my point is, don't assume that just having accessibility standards is enough, when there are people in the pipeline who view them as an annoyance. Whether you're a manager or a low-level dev, do what you can--more than I did--to make your coworkers understand that this stuff actually matters.

Similar,

I was on a team designing a mobile app and we sometimes had confusing conversations with the project-manager, at some point he told us he was partially color-blind. Specifically in this image: http://i.imgur.com/jJIWv9X.jpg , all three pics look exactly the same to him. This app was basically a monitoring app using the well-known traffic colors of green=OK, orange/yellow=UhOhWarning, red=BigProblemHere.

That incident made us take extra care in designing the app such that we never conveyed info solely with the colors.

WCAG 2.0 guidelines were basically intended for web use, but I find them a good guide for developing retry much any visual interface. The problem you mention would be a single-A level fail under section 1.4.1: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/#qr-visual-audio-contr...

Well said (and major props to https://twitter.com/jdan, a force at Khan Academy behind accessibility and the inspired tool you linked).

I had to test accessibility software compatibility with the application I work on, and man, it was an eye opener. I decided to try to do some basic tasks using it, and the closest analogy I could come up with was trying to do productivity work through a phone menu.

I had to listen very carefully for the things I was interested in, and then slowly navigate my way through the UI tree. If my mind wandered I became totally lost.

Its like the opposite of walking your parents through something over the phone...

In first two years of college, only one student cared to stop the teacher, it was the blind guy. I don't want to be positively discriminating, but it seems being blind forces you to be sharp and focused in everything (I'm almost envious).

I'd love to discuss their perception and thoughts about everything.

ps: this is a great tool you linked in.

I don't think there was any correlation, it sounds to me you're reading too much into it.

I may have the gene that could cause me to go blind when I am very old. It's nice to live in a world where losing my vision in the future wouldn't be such a big problem, with all the medical improvements.

What other tools does your coworkers use?

They mostly use a screen reader, I think it's a proprietary one that is the current best. One also has a braille display that is insanely expensive (multiple thousands of dollars IIRC), but he almost never uses it.

They also use iPhones, as they complain that Android's accessibility is bad. I thought it was just the typical "I like what I'm used to", until I tried to use it on mine to help one of my coworkers with it, and he was right. It was unusable (taps wouldn't register, gestures wouldn't register, they were hard to do, etc). I was ready to throw my damn phone in the trash after ten minutes, I can't imagine having to use a phone like that all day.

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