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Here's a question for you, then. Has any thought been given to the accessibility story for Eve and tools like it? As a blind developer, I always get a bit nerv

Here's a question for you, then. Has any thought been given to the accessibility story for Eve and tools like it? As a blind developer, I always get a bit nervous when the future of programming is discussed in terms I've read used to describe Eve. It seems like a very useful way of developing apps, but one that can easily exclude a subset of the population if a11y issues aren't thought through in advance. Also, part of me is tempted to dismiss Eve because I suspect we'll always have the current way of developing software to fall back on. But when I consider it more, I don't find that line of thinking productive for me. For instance, lots of folks might be tempted to dismiss GUIs for blind users because graphics, but there are actually huge advantages to representing UIs as trees of objects that can be introspected and interacted with. I can write code that scans the accessibility hierarchy for a specific element and reads it, for instance. In a command line interface, that code would need to either scan for a non-specific set of characters that a curses app might use to draw a thing that looks like a button and make a guess at its contents, and even then that logic would be very brittle. So even if Eve and whatever comes after derives lots of its power from rendering concepts visually, the underlying primitives needed to do so might have beneficial a11y implications and shouldn't be discounted because the end goal happens to look nicer than a wall of text. Anyway, would be nice to see that on the roadmap if it isn't already. Even if only 20% of programming is like this in 10 years, that's still a substantial subset that might exclude me by virtue of the accessibility story not being thought out first.

ibdknox 11y ago
Amusingly enough, I actually started thinking a bit about this just the other night after being told about a talk given at Dropbox about accessibility. To be up front, we know very little about it and the other night was the first time I'd ever tried to use a screen reader, so it's something we aren't likely to be good at right of the gate, but it is something we've been setting ourselves up for completely by accident. Many of the previous versions of Eve would be pretty completely inaccessible, so your dismissal would definitely be warranted. The version we've decided to run with though basically has three parts: a document editor, embedded spreadsheet cells, and a fancy plain english search. All three of which have a history of accessible solutions, so that makes me much more optimistic that we can provide something nice here. Along the way, another thing we've been very cognizant about is making sure no matter what form of input you prefer, Eve should be efficient and useful to you whether you're using a keyboard, a mouse, or touch. Many of the interaction issues we'd need to solve to better work with screen readers popup when trying to support complete keyboardability, but I have no delusion that there will be plenty more to solve there. Another interesting aspect of this version of Eve is it's really easy to imagine a voice interface to since virtually everything is done using plain english queries - it'd be kind of like having Jarvis in your google docs. Admittedly, we don't know what we're doing when it comes to accessibility, but it is something we've been thinking about indirectly and it's something I think we can at least do more naturally than the code editors of the world. Thanks for raising the issue and it's something I'd like to have a more concrete answer for in the future.
- ndarilek 11y ago
  Cool, glad to know this is on the radar! Out of curiosity, what are you using to render the current GUI? Toolkit/framework choice unfortunately has pretty significant a11y ramifications.
  - ibdknox 11y ago
    It's all HTML at the moment.
    - ndarilek 11y ago
      HTML rendered via what? nw.js? Electron? I feel like the former is a bit more solid by virtue of having been around longer, but unfortunately both ecosystems are such a mess a11y-wise that I haven't really delved into them. In any case, it's probably a safer bet than something like GTK/QT which is either entirely or mostly inaccessible. But HTML rendered in a browser at least has the potential to be highly accessible, and one workaround for poor a11y implementation of nw.js/Electron would be exposing the HTML to another browser over a local port with functions callable via JS over the server port.
      - joshuafcole 11y ago
        Eve is served as remotely as a webapp, and it'll run in all modern browsers. Presently it's supporting Chrome first; but support for FF, IE Edge and others is on the map. Along the way, we're looking forward to gathering feedback on how we can improve user experience across the board, so please drop us a few issues on how we can make things better if you get the chance to try it out.
danso 11y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience...I teach programming and always feel a little guilty that I'd be completely unprepared for a vision-impaired student, even though everything I teach involves the command-line or text editor. But part of why I go this route because I'm unable to efficiently/patiently work with GUIs. Even as someone who can see, I am too confused by redesigns. I even get confused when there isn't a redesign, but am unaware that my browser has hit a breakpoint and various interface elements have changed/collapsed. Seeing how we haven't yet come up with universal agreeance on text interfaces (i.e. naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science)...I'm worried it'll be some time until we've achieved some uniformity with visual interfaces and intentions.

ibdknox 11y ago

Amusingly enough, I actually started thinking a bit about this just the other night after being told about a talk given at Dropbox about accessibility. To be up front, we know very little about it and the other night was the first time I'd ever tried to use a screen reader, so it's something we aren't likely to be good at right of the gate, but it is something we've been setting ourselves up for completely by accident. Many of the previous versions of Eve would be pretty completely inaccessible, so your dismissal would definitely be warranted. The version we've decided to run with though basically has three parts: a document editor, embedded spreadsheet cells, and a fancy plain english search. All three of which have a history of accessible solutions, so that makes me much more optimistic that we can provide something nice here. Along the way, another thing we've been very cognizant about is making sure no matter what form of input you prefer, Eve should be efficient and useful to you whether you're using a keyboard, a mouse, or touch. Many of the interaction issues we'd need to solve to better work with screen readers popup when trying to support complete keyboardability, but I have no delusion that there will be plenty more to solve there. Another interesting aspect of this version of Eve is it's really easy to imagine a voice interface to since virtually everything is done using plain english queries - it'd be kind of like having Jarvis in your google docs. Admittedly, we don't know what we're doing when it comes to accessibility, but it is something we've been thinking about indirectly and it's something I think we can at least do more naturally than the code editors of the world. Thanks for raising the issue and it's something I'd like to have a more concrete answer for in the future.

ndarilek 11y ago
Cool, glad to know this is on the radar! Out of curiosity, what are you using to render the current GUI? Toolkit/framework choice unfortunately has pretty significant a11y ramifications.
- ibdknox 11y ago
  It's all HTML at the moment.
  - ndarilek 11y ago
    HTML rendered via what? nw.js? Electron? I feel like the former is a bit more solid by virtue of having been around longer, but unfortunately both ecosystems are such a mess a11y-wise that I haven't really delved into them. In any case, it's probably a safer bet than something like GTK/QT which is either entirely or mostly inaccessible. But HTML rendered in a browser at least has the potential to be highly accessible, and one workaround for poor a11y implementation of nw.js/Electron would be exposing the HTML to another browser over a local port with functions callable via JS over the server port.
    - joshuafcole 11y ago
      Eve is served as remotely as a webapp, and it'll run in all modern browsers. Presently it's supporting Chrome first; but support for FF, IE Edge and others is on the map. Along the way, we're looking forward to gathering feedback on how we can improve user experience across the board, so please drop us a few issues on how we can make things better if you get the chance to try it out.

danso 11y ago

Thanks for sharing your experience...I teach programming and always feel a little guilty that I'd be completely unprepared for a vision-impaired student, even though everything I teach involves the command-line or text editor. But part of why I go this route because I'm unable to efficiently/patiently work with GUIs. Even as someone who can see, I am too confused by redesigns. I even get confused when there isn't a redesign, but am unaware that my browser has hit a breakpoint and various interface elements have changed/collapsed. Seeing how we haven't yet come up with universal agreeance on text interfaces (i.e. naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science)...I'm worried it'll be some time until we've achieved some uniformity with visual interfaces and intentions.