6 ms·

The Veil of Ignorance

118 points by wallflower 11y ago

GabrielF00 11y ago
My experience has been that the thought process involved in creating accessible designs results in systems that are easier to use for people without disabilities. For example, curb cuts were designed to benefit people in wheelchairs, but they make life easier for delivery people with hand trucks, people with strollers, etc. It's the same for UX design. Features designed to increase accessibility, such as better contrast, reasonably large fonts, etc. seem to make software more usable period.
- adiabatty 11y ago
  Sometimes, but not always. While I'm a fan of larger fonts and click targets, a lot of people like to have these thugs be a lot smaller so they can have more information-dense screens. …which itself is an accessibility issue; if you have good eyes but rotten limbs, you'll want to increase the information density of your screens so you have to scroll as little as possible. Most voice recognition systems accept one or more of: - space - page down - scroll down one page Now imagine needing to say that every time you want to page down; you'd turn the font size down as low as possible, sit closer to your monitor, and turn it 90° so it's taller than it is wider. It's nice when accessible designs provide benefits to people who don't _need_ them, but sometimes a design that's better for people with one class of disabilities will end up being a worse design for normal people or differently disabled people.
  - jacalata 11y ago
    Sure, but if you do the work to make it user resizable then you help both groups.
bpchaps 11y ago
I love this. Nothing really groundbreaking here, but it's still true from my experience. A few weeks ago, I went to a hackathon for domestic violence. It was.. interesting. Lots of cool designs and products came out of it, but none of them actually had any interest in designing a problem that had a broad and proper enough solution. The biggest problem? Everyone created a smartphone app except for mine and two others'. One of the lawyers who hosted the event and I had a conversation about this and agreed - this is the class of problem that prevents so many people from getting the help they need. They're simply aren't represented because they don't have the luxury of having a smart phone or constant internet access. (mildly shameful plug) - My submission [0] was a map of all DV centers, as nothing like that exists or even close. It was made by scraping domesticshelters.com's center names and plugging it into a geocode service. domesticshelters' owner refuses to use it because of the privacy issues of an abuser being able to find a shelter just as easily as the abused - which is easily solved by mapping to a city center as my code does with an attached phone number. I received last place, with 'honorable mention'. Point is, very few in tech really ever want to take on these hard issues since they're not fun, or they're not easy, or they involve social interaction with those they're helping. It's sad. red-bin.github.io [0]
- CM30 11y ago
  To be fair, couldn't that just be because generic mobile apps are seen as a way to get rich quick? Okay, maybe you'd expect a bit more from someone attending a hackathon, but from my experiences, every time I mention the word 'startup', someone immediately suggests or asks about a mobile app. For them, the only use of tech is mobile app that somehow blows up like Uber. It might be less about whether it's fun or easy or involve social interaction and more about whether the founder can see the dollar signs in his/her eyes.
  - bpchaps 11y ago
    Yes, I think that's exactly the reason. Which is also why I'm a critic of SV. There definitely are great things that come out of the ability to quickly identify and create helpful apps/sites, but these days I'm wondering if the nuance of those who needs help is far more nuanced than app developers think. Or that maybe they they're aware, but they think "good enough" will inspire others to create their own, better/helpful service. In my personal experience again, the problem happens when the need for wages and time (jobs, unemployment, family, health, etc etc etc,..., etc) completely de-mantles that motivation. It's these sorts of things that make basic income seem to make sense.. as in, if addressing socioeconomic nuance is solvable only time and motivation, the only limiting factor is money on an individual level. My cynic side wants to call this "wage slavery", despite fucking hating that phrase. --- For what it's worth, the hackathon winners created an app for reporting DV by hiding it as a calculator with a passcode. It was neat, but after having dated someone VERY technical and someone who's NOT technical, these sorts of things would fall flat on their face. It's surprising how far their technical thoroughness went in both cases. non-tech girl: "My friend told me how to look at DNS cache and you were clearly looking at porn earlier." tech-girl: "I sniffed my ex's AIM traffic to find out he was cheating. Don't cheat on me."
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >To be fair, couldn't that just be because generic mobile apps are seen as a way to get rich quick? In general yes, but as in the parent's case, this also happens when money is not the end target: lots of devs will just go and design a mobile app first, without really thinking it.
mibrah 11y ago
I'm sorry dude but I don't want disabled people working for me. I want to hire and work with people who aren't disabled. Would you hire a mentally retarded person? Exactly. Also if you are old -- get the fuck out of the valley. Go move to someplace where it gets cold in the winter. It'll help your joints.
- jacalata 11y ago
  There are so many things wrong with this comment that I can't believe it actually exists.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I think it was a poor attempt at humour - that is my generous interpretation anyway.
aetherson 11y ago
I'd like to see a source to the claim that at 40, fully fifty percent of the light that reaches your eye didn't get to the retina.
- trurl 11y ago
  Yeah, I'm only a couple years off from forty and I'm pretty sure my vision is not nearly fifty percent dimmer than twenty years ago. Certainly my glasses prescription has changed slightly, but that is more about redirecting the light.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Having 50% less light getting to the retina is not necessarily that it looks 50% dimmer subjectively. E.g. it's not like having a dimmer for your room lights at 100% and 50%. I guess it's more like a 1-stop difference in photography (where again, half as much light hits the film/sensor from one stop to the next). Here's an example with half the 50% less light hitting the sensor between the two pictures. It's not as dramatic as you expect (except in the "depth of field", e.g. how focused stuff is): http://www.adammoroz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Untitled-1.jpg http://www.adammoroz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Untitled...
- good_gnu 11y ago
  http://lrt.sagepub.com/content/26/2_IEStrans/95.abstract http://lrt.sagepub.com/content/26/2_IEStrans/95.abstract The abstract of this paper offers a data point that is consistent with the claim. For the purposes of this discussion, it is safe to say that the claim is not too far off.
- coldtea 11y ago
  That's like one "stop" of light in photographic terms (each stop is half the light at the previous one). It might sound too much of a difference, but it's not that apparent (you can try changing an f-stop on a camera for comparison). (Probably there's some logarithmic sensing involved).
sago 11y ago
On the topic of physical disabilities in particular (social and intellectual challenges are more tricky) - I think we need better ways of simulating disability for able-bodied folks, and more willingness to have people use those tools. This can be as simple as a tool on your desktop that limits the color output of your machine (in various types of color blindness), or blurs the screen to particular partially sighted simulations. Not in-app, but general. And we need to enforce their use as part of development. Physically, there are companies that will train staff by putting them in wheelchairs and asking them to navigate their space. How welcoming is it for a wheelchair user? Can they get through the pull to open door? Can they get into the bathroom to get as far as the accessible stall? As a wheelchair user myself, I often get the feedback that people just didn't realise how difficult things were in their ADA compliant buildings, because nobody had tested it out. We test things on multiple devices, with multiple sets of capabilities, but we don't do a good job of testing as users with multiple sets of capabilities.
- mwcampbell 11y ago
  It's pretty easy to approximate the experience of a totally blind user if you use a Mac. Just turn off your monitor or put on a blindfold, then press Command+F5 to enable VoiceOver. On iOS, you can find VoiceOver in Settings -> General -> Accessibility. For Android, there's TalkBack. Windows has a built-in screen reader called Narrator, but it's still limited enough that practically nobody uses it as their primary screen reader, so instead I'd recommend NVDA (http://www.nvaccess.org/ http://www.nvaccess.org/). For desktop Linux, there's Orca. There's a danger, though, that a sighted person using a screen reader for a short time will come away with misguided ideas about what is practical for a blind person that uses these tools day in and day out. For example, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284567
  - sago 11y ago
    Yes, the same is definitely true of wheelchair use - you get the problems without the hard-won tactics for coping. I'm going to navigate a space better than you in a chair, mostly. Simulation is not perfect, but lack of simulation- just thinking hard - obviously doesn't work, to anyone who's rolled around shaking their heads at 'best practice'. Still, having a worse-case experience is not necessarily a bad thing. There are people who are newly blind, people who are newly disabled, people who are newly incapacitated.
barrkel 11y ago
I'm a big fan of Rawls' Veil and use it in my own thinking about what is just. I do want to add, though: "No one complains that typefaces set at 20px are too big to read." - I do, very often, when reading on my phone. If the font is so big that only three or four words fit on a line, I cannot read the paragraph - the vertical scrolling & concentration required is too fatiguing. I'd say it happens on 10-20% of mobile sites today, and it's an increasing proportion. I strongly prefer tiny text with very little scrolling to the opposite. Browser text size preference don't help much; the setting often doesn't have any effect. This site is fine on mobile (for me), though. And I fully agree with the message, with my caveat.
justin_vanw 11y ago
I think this isn't fair to Rawls. If you had to design the internet today, you would probably design the internet just as it is today. Not because you want to exclude 'people that are 80 and have really bad vision', but because even if you made every page have high contrast and an 60pt font, there are almost no 80 year olds on the internet compared to 20 year olds, and you have to cater to your actual audience, not your 'in some universe where old people were on the internet what would be the best way to make it easy for them' universe. This isn't really so crazy, and it's not some kind of ableist ageist blind spot that content creators have. There is no demand for 60pt fonts, the people that need them, who are extremely few, are more able to adapt the world to their needs than the world is able to adapt itself. Or maybe their needs are totally missed, but you can say that about literally any tiny group.
sheharyarn 11y ago
This was a very interesting read!

118 points by wallflower 11y ago

My experience has been that the thought process involved in creating accessible designs results in systems that are easier to use for people without disabilities. For example, curb cuts were designed to benefit people in wheelchairs, but they make life easier for delivery people with hand trucks, people with strollers, etc. It's the same for UX design. Features designed to increase accessibility, such as better contrast, reasonably large fonts, etc. seem to make software more usable period.

adiabatty 11y ago
Sometimes, but not always. While I'm a fan of larger fonts and click targets, a lot of people like to have these thugs be a lot smaller so they can have more information-dense screens. …which itself is an accessibility issue; if you have good eyes but rotten limbs, you'll want to increase the information density of your screens so you have to scroll as little as possible. Most voice recognition systems accept one or more of: - space - page down - scroll down one page Now imagine needing to say that every time you want to page down; you'd turn the font size down as low as possible, sit closer to your monitor, and turn it 90° so it's taller than it is wider. It's nice when accessible designs provide benefits to people who don't _need_ them, but sometimes a design that's better for people with one class of disabilities will end up being a worse design for normal people or differently disabled people.
- jacalata 11y ago
  Sure, but if you do the work to make it user resizable then you help both groups.

bpchaps 11y ago

I love this. Nothing really groundbreaking here, but it's still true from my experience. A few weeks ago, I went to a hackathon for domestic violence. It was.. interesting. Lots of cool designs and products came out of it, but none of them actually had any interest in designing a problem that had a broad and proper enough solution. The biggest problem? Everyone created a smartphone app except for mine and two others'. One of the lawyers who hosted the event and I had a conversation about this and agreed - this is the class of problem that prevents so many people from getting the help they need. They're simply aren't represented because they don't have the luxury of having a smart phone or constant internet access. (mildly shameful plug) - My submission [0] was a map of all DV centers, as nothing like that exists or even close. It was made by scraping domesticshelters.com's center names and plugging it into a geocode service. domesticshelters' owner refuses to use it because of the privacy issues of an abuser being able to find a shelter just as easily as the abused - which is easily solved by mapping to a city center as my code does with an attached phone number. I received last place, with 'honorable mention'. Point is, very few in tech really ever want to take on these hard issues since they're not fun, or they're not easy, or they involve social interaction with those they're helping. It's sad. red-bin.github.io [0]

CM30 11y ago
To be fair, couldn't that just be because generic mobile apps are seen as a way to get rich quick? Okay, maybe you'd expect a bit more from someone attending a hackathon, but from my experiences, every time I mention the word 'startup', someone immediately suggests or asks about a mobile app. For them, the only use of tech is mobile app that somehow blows up like Uber. It might be less about whether it's fun or easy or involve social interaction and more about whether the founder can see the dollar signs in his/her eyes.
- bpchaps 11y ago
  Yes, I think that's exactly the reason. Which is also why I'm a critic of SV. There definitely are great things that come out of the ability to quickly identify and create helpful apps/sites, but these days I'm wondering if the nuance of those who needs help is far more nuanced than app developers think. Or that maybe they they're aware, but they think "good enough" will inspire others to create their own, better/helpful service. In my personal experience again, the problem happens when the need for wages and time (jobs, unemployment, family, health, etc etc etc,..., etc) completely de-mantles that motivation. It's these sorts of things that make basic income seem to make sense.. as in, if addressing socioeconomic nuance is solvable only time and motivation, the only limiting factor is money on an individual level. My cynic side wants to call this "wage slavery", despite fucking hating that phrase. --- For what it's worth, the hackathon winners created an app for reporting DV by hiding it as a calculator with a passcode. It was neat, but after having dated someone VERY technical and someone who's NOT technical, these sorts of things would fall flat on their face. It's surprising how far their technical thoroughness went in both cases. non-tech girl: "My friend told me how to look at DNS cache and you were clearly looking at porn earlier." tech-girl: "I sniffed my ex's AIM traffic to find out he was cheating. Don't cheat on me."
- coldtea 11y ago
  >To be fair, couldn't that just be because generic mobile apps are seen as a way to get rich quick? In general yes, but as in the parent's case, this also happens when money is not the end target: lots of devs will just go and design a mobile app first, without really thinking it.

mibrah 11y ago

I'm sorry dude but I don't want disabled people working for me. I want to hire and work with people who aren't disabled. Would you hire a mentally retarded person? Exactly. Also if you are old -- get the fuck out of the valley. Go move to someplace where it gets cold in the winter. It'll help your joints.

jacalata 11y ago
There are so many things wrong with this comment that I can't believe it actually exists.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I think it was a poor attempt at humour - that is my generous interpretation anyway.

aetherson 11y ago

I'd like to see a source to the claim that at 40, fully fifty percent of the light that reaches your eye didn't get to the retina.

trurl 11y ago
Yeah, I'm only a couple years off from forty and I'm pretty sure my vision is not nearly fifty percent dimmer than twenty years ago. Certainly my glasses prescription has changed slightly, but that is more about redirecting the light.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Having 50% less light getting to the retina is not necessarily that it looks 50% dimmer subjectively. E.g. it's not like having a dimmer for your room lights at 100% and 50%. I guess it's more like a 1-stop difference in photography (where again, half as much light hits the film/sensor from one stop to the next). Here's an example with half the 50% less light hitting the sensor between the two pictures. It's not as dramatic as you expect (except in the "depth of field", e.g. how focused stuff is): http://www.adammoroz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Untitled-1.jpg http://www.adammoroz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Untitled...
good_gnu 11y ago
http://lrt.sagepub.com/content/26/2_IEStrans/95.abstract http://lrt.sagepub.com/content/26/2_IEStrans/95.abstract The abstract of this paper offers a data point that is consistent with the claim. For the purposes of this discussion, it is safe to say that the claim is not too far off.
coldtea 11y ago
That's like one "stop" of light in photographic terms (each stop is half the light at the previous one). It might sound too much of a difference, but it's not that apparent (you can try changing an f-stop on a camera for comparison). (Probably there's some logarithmic sensing involved).

sago 11y ago

On the topic of physical disabilities in particular (social and intellectual challenges are more tricky) - I think we need better ways of simulating disability for able-bodied folks, and more willingness to have people use those tools. This can be as simple as a tool on your desktop that limits the color output of your machine (in various types of color blindness), or blurs the screen to particular partially sighted simulations. Not in-app, but general. And we need to enforce their use as part of development. Physically, there are companies that will train staff by putting them in wheelchairs and asking them to navigate their space. How welcoming is it for a wheelchair user? Can they get through the pull to open door? Can they get into the bathroom to get as far as the accessible stall? As a wheelchair user myself, I often get the feedback that people just didn't realise how difficult things were in their ADA compliant buildings, because nobody had tested it out. We test things on multiple devices, with multiple sets of capabilities, but we don't do a good job of testing as users with multiple sets of capabilities.

mwcampbell 11y ago
It's pretty easy to approximate the experience of a totally blind user if you use a Mac. Just turn off your monitor or put on a blindfold, then press Command+F5 to enable VoiceOver. On iOS, you can find VoiceOver in Settings -> General -> Accessibility. For Android, there's TalkBack. Windows has a built-in screen reader called Narrator, but it's still limited enough that practically nobody uses it as their primary screen reader, so instead I'd recommend NVDA (http://www.nvaccess.org/ http://www.nvaccess.org/). For desktop Linux, there's Orca. There's a danger, though, that a sighted person using a screen reader for a short time will come away with misguided ideas about what is practical for a blind person that uses these tools day in and day out. For example, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284567
- sago 11y ago
  Yes, the same is definitely true of wheelchair use - you get the problems without the hard-won tactics for coping. I'm going to navigate a space better than you in a chair, mostly. Simulation is not perfect, but lack of simulation- just thinking hard - obviously doesn't work, to anyone who's rolled around shaking their heads at 'best practice'. Still, having a worse-case experience is not necessarily a bad thing. There are people who are newly blind, people who are newly disabled, people who are newly incapacitated.

barrkel 11y ago

I'm a big fan of Rawls' Veil and use it in my own thinking about what is just. I do want to add, though: "No one complains that typefaces set at 20px are too big to read." - I do, very often, when reading on my phone. If the font is so big that only three or four words fit on a line, I cannot read the paragraph - the vertical scrolling & concentration required is too fatiguing. I'd say it happens on 10-20% of mobile sites today, and it's an increasing proportion. I strongly prefer tiny text with very little scrolling to the opposite. Browser text size preference don't help much; the setting often doesn't have any effect. This site is fine on mobile (for me), though. And I fully agree with the message, with my caveat.

justin_vanw 11y ago

I think this isn't fair to Rawls. If you had to design the internet today, you would probably design the internet just as it is today. Not because you want to exclude 'people that are 80 and have really bad vision', but because even if you made every page have high contrast and an 60pt font, there are almost no 80 year olds on the internet compared to 20 year olds, and you have to cater to your actual audience, not your 'in some universe where old people were on the internet what would be the best way to make it easy for them' universe. This isn't really so crazy, and it's not some kind of ableist ageist blind spot that content creators have. There is no demand for 60pt fonts, the people that need them, who are extremely few, are more able to adapt the world to their needs than the world is able to adapt itself. Or maybe their needs are totally missed, but you can say that about literally any tiny group.

sheharyarn 11y ago

This was a very interesting read!