4 ms·
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
by 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 agoYes, 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.