3 ms·

On the topic of physical disabilities in particular (social and intellectual challenges are more tricky) - I think we need better ways of simulating disability

by 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.
anexprogrammer 11y ago
Hear hear. It's really hard to empathise with some of the issues until you can experience. I never realised the issues aging eyesight causes - until I aged! I'm long sighted. I can mostly still see fine, except my life long trick of moving things to arm's length no longer works - my arms aren't long enough any more. Or the distance is now such that the tiny text of the instructions or ingredients is now too small. Aging sucks :) I imagine the day-to-day frustrations are very different for someone with short sight, macular degeneration or the multitude of other eyesight disorders. Android is terrible at being accessible - I can change font sizes, or zoom the website, but crucial elements don't. Plenty of apps "know best". Or there is some limit of zooming the website or its font. Or you zoom and it completely screws up the columns. In ten or fifteen years, perhaps less, Android will be useless to me. I would need a magnifying glass to use a phone! It's not an issue now, but I can clearly see where it will be, in my forseeable future. There's quite a few colour blindess simulators out there (http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simula... http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/ http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/) but none of them that I ever found let you plug in a URL. I'm not aware of scientifically sound vision simulators - we need some. Same goes for other senses and disorders. Given how the web, and technology, work it should be easy to do much better.

by sago 11y ago

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.

anexprogrammer 11y ago

Hear hear. It's really hard to empathise with some of the issues until you can experience. I never realised the issues aging eyesight causes - until I aged! I'm long sighted. I can mostly still see fine, except my life long trick of moving things to arm's length no longer works - my arms aren't long enough any more. Or the distance is now such that the tiny text of the instructions or ingredients is now too small. Aging sucks :) I imagine the day-to-day frustrations are very different for someone with short sight, macular degeneration or the multitude of other eyesight disorders. Android is terrible at being accessible - I can change font sizes, or zoom the website, but crucial elements don't. Plenty of apps "know best". Or there is some limit of zooming the website or its font. Or you zoom and it completely screws up the columns. In ten or fifteen years, perhaps less, Android will be useless to me. I would need a magnifying glass to use a phone! It's not an issue now, but I can clearly see where it will be, in my forseeable future. There's quite a few colour blindess simulators out there (http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simula... http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/ http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/) but none of them that I ever found let you plug in a URL. I'm not aware of scientifically sound vision simulators - we need some. Same goes for other senses and disorders. Given how the web, and technology, work it should be easy to do much better.