4 ms·

> That was really great of them to hire a blind developer, what makes me mildly furious is that disabled in the tech world means blind or deaf, there isn't any

by daenney 10y ago

> That was really great of them to hire a blind developer, what makes me mildly furious is that disabled in the tech world means blind or deaf, there isn't any room for people with extreme motor skill difficulties. Perhaps your could be of help by providing some guidance in the area? I can certainly understand the frustration but without further information on what to do, not to do, material to read up on and what not it's going to be hard to get anything done. Not everyone has Apple's resources or even their understanding of what disability means, which forms it can take and how that affects the usability of their products.

escapologybb 10y ago
I'm totally with you, there just isn't a way for your average developer to access information about quadriplegics and how they might go about using the Internet. The infrastructure just isn't there and I think until it is we are reliant upon personal relationships, by that I mean "I worked with this quadriplegic guy once who was a geek and he gave me some useful feedback on what we were doing". Sadly that really is the state of affairs at the moment as I see it. Coincidently it was word-of-mouth that got me involved in the Apple beta test program, so even they are relying on a word-of-mouth network to a point. Now I understand that the quadriplegic/geek crossover may be a small one but we are large enough market to be worth catering to, as we also have money that we are willing to exchange for goods and services. :-) However there is just no way for me to give large companies advice, or even small ones for that matter. Everybody makes sure their website or product works with a screen reader and out the door it goes, why would you think about motor skills if you've never had to before and you don't know anybody who is quadriplegic and you've got so much else to do and your boss is on at you to do some testing about something else and on and on it goes. I can totally understand why the development hasn't been done, I really can. Maybe someone wants to fund me to start up a quadriplegic Internet Users Information Widget Forum Type Thing™. You give me huge amounts of venture capital and I'll tell you my opinion on all things Internet, that sounds like a great swap! :-) In all seriousness the one piece of advice I would give you is to sit in front of your product whatever that might be, put your hands under your thighs and think to yourself "how am I going to accomplish this task?". Because over the past decade that's when I've had to do with each new piece of technology, and if you have another idea about how I can interact with companies please do let me know. Hope this long winded rant helps!
- extra88 10y ago
  > Everybody makes sure their website or product works with a screen reader and out the door it goes I don't think even a majority do anything to test or ensure their website or software works with a screen reader or other assistive technologies. I think it can be useful to think of accessibility as an aspect of usability. To that end, user testing, which involves people who aren't necessarily technically knowledgable or "geeks," should include people with disabilities, particularly those who use assistive technologies (AT). I mainly think about web accessibility which doesn't pose some of the challenges that hardware products have. With web sites, someone can pay you for an hour of two of your time to get on Skype (or whatever), share your screen, they give you a URL to visit, and ask you to perform some tasks. They watch to see what fails and listen to you talk about your thought processes regarding how you go about performing a task or when you think you've run into an obstacle that may or may not be AT-related. This kind of remote user testing has many advantages unrelated to accessibility but especially for testing with AT it means not having the expense, expertise, and logistics of having a facility that's easy to get to and equipped with many different kinds of AT.
  - escapologybb 10y ago
    I would happily take part in that kind of testing for pretty much any kind of product, the more I can do to make the world and accessible place the better. If anybody needs that kind of service drop me a line, I'd be happy to get involved. Probably don't want to get involved in nuclear weapons research, but beyond that we are cool. :-)
EdSharkey 10y ago
When I worked on an accessibility project, we were told that there was a pecking order to the disabilities simply based on how noisy/politically active groups were. If I recall right, the order went: blind, low vision, deaf, motor, color blind, cognitive. I'm sure I'm forgetting a group or two, and motor had a lot of subgroups to care for. Those groups were how we prioritized the work, the blind were always tops. It was interesting how we classed users too in an attempt to be respectful. Blind were 'screen-reader' users. Non-disabled users were called 'sighted' users.
- mwcampbell 10y ago
  I wonder why that pecking order is the way it is. I'm guessing it's because, before the rise of graphical user interfaces, it was quite easy to adapt computers for blind people. Low-cost (albeit crappy) speech synthesizers were available as add-on cards not long after the beginning of personal computers, and with one of these, writin ga screen reader for a text-based environment like MS-DOS was quite straightforward. And even with the rise of MacOS classic and Windows, developing a screen reader for a GUI primarily required some clever low-level hacking to intercept calls to the OS's drawing functions (e.g. TextOut in GDI) and build a model of what's on the screen. That still seems easier than, say, implementing good speech recognition. So is this pecking order just a consequence of which groups were able to effectively use computers and, by extension, become active online, first? Or is there more to it than that? Do we blind and low-vision people unknowingly do anything to make it worse for people with other disabilities? And can we avoid that?
  - fencepost 10y ago
    > I wonder why that pecking order is the way it is. Probably because the web is primarily visual. While there are many things on the web that are less usable if you're deaf, color blind or have motor control or cognitive issues, there are huge areas of it that are inaccessible if you're blind. If I mute my speakers or change my display to greyscale to simulate hearing or color problems I may find that Youtube is a lot less interesting, but if I turn my monitor off I'm going to have a hard time getting to Youtube in the first place. Motor control issues are more likely to be addressable at the user's equipment than at the site level except in ways likely to overlap with visual issues (e.g. keyboard control).

by daenney 10y ago

escapologybb 10y ago

I'm totally with you, there just isn't a way for your average developer to access information about quadriplegics and how they might go about using the Internet. The infrastructure just isn't there and I think until it is we are reliant upon personal relationships, by that I mean "I worked with this quadriplegic guy once who was a geek and he gave me some useful feedback on what we were doing". Sadly that really is the state of affairs at the moment as I see it. Coincidently it was word-of-mouth that got me involved in the Apple beta test program, so even they are relying on a word-of-mouth network to a point. Now I understand that the quadriplegic/geek crossover may be a small one but we are large enough market to be worth catering to, as we also have money that we are willing to exchange for goods and services. :-) However there is just no way for me to give large companies advice, or even small ones for that matter. Everybody makes sure their website or product works with a screen reader and out the door it goes, why would you think about motor skills if you've never had to before and you don't know anybody who is quadriplegic and you've got so much else to do and your boss is on at you to do some testing about something else and on and on it goes. I can totally understand why the development hasn't been done, I really can. Maybe someone wants to fund me to start up a quadriplegic Internet Users Information Widget Forum Type Thing™. You give me huge amounts of venture capital and I'll tell you my opinion on all things Internet, that sounds like a great swap! :-) In all seriousness the one piece of advice I would give you is to sit in front of your product whatever that might be, put your hands under your thighs and think to yourself "how am I going to accomplish this task?". Because over the past decade that's when I've had to do with each new piece of technology, and if you have another idea about how I can interact with companies please do let me know. Hope this long winded rant helps!

extra88 10y ago
> Everybody makes sure their website or product works with a screen reader and out the door it goes I don't think even a majority do anything to test or ensure their website or software works with a screen reader or other assistive technologies. I think it can be useful to think of accessibility as an aspect of usability. To that end, user testing, which involves people who aren't necessarily technically knowledgable or "geeks," should include people with disabilities, particularly those who use assistive technologies (AT). I mainly think about web accessibility which doesn't pose some of the challenges that hardware products have. With web sites, someone can pay you for an hour of two of your time to get on Skype (or whatever), share your screen, they give you a URL to visit, and ask you to perform some tasks. They watch to see what fails and listen to you talk about your thought processes regarding how you go about performing a task or when you think you've run into an obstacle that may or may not be AT-related. This kind of remote user testing has many advantages unrelated to accessibility but especially for testing with AT it means not having the expense, expertise, and logistics of having a facility that's easy to get to and equipped with many different kinds of AT.
- escapologybb 10y ago
  I would happily take part in that kind of testing for pretty much any kind of product, the more I can do to make the world and accessible place the better. If anybody needs that kind of service drop me a line, I'd be happy to get involved. Probably don't want to get involved in nuclear weapons research, but beyond that we are cool. :-)

EdSharkey 10y ago

When I worked on an accessibility project, we were told that there was a pecking order to the disabilities simply based on how noisy/politically active groups were. If I recall right, the order went: blind, low vision, deaf, motor, color blind, cognitive. I'm sure I'm forgetting a group or two, and motor had a lot of subgroups to care for. Those groups were how we prioritized the work, the blind were always tops. It was interesting how we classed users too in an attempt to be respectful. Blind were 'screen-reader' users. Non-disabled users were called 'sighted' users.

mwcampbell 10y ago
I wonder why that pecking order is the way it is. I'm guessing it's because, before the rise of graphical user interfaces, it was quite easy to adapt computers for blind people. Low-cost (albeit crappy) speech synthesizers were available as add-on cards not long after the beginning of personal computers, and with one of these, writin ga screen reader for a text-based environment like MS-DOS was quite straightforward. And even with the rise of MacOS classic and Windows, developing a screen reader for a GUI primarily required some clever low-level hacking to intercept calls to the OS's drawing functions (e.g. TextOut in GDI) and build a model of what's on the screen. That still seems easier than, say, implementing good speech recognition. So is this pecking order just a consequence of which groups were able to effectively use computers and, by extension, become active online, first? Or is there more to it than that? Do we blind and low-vision people unknowingly do anything to make it worse for people with other disabilities? And can we avoid that?
- fencepost 10y ago
  > I wonder why that pecking order is the way it is. Probably because the web is primarily visual. While there are many things on the web that are less usable if you're deaf, color blind or have motor control or cognitive issues, there are huge areas of it that are inaccessible if you're blind. If I mute my speakers or change my display to greyscale to simulate hearing or color problems I may find that Youtube is a lot less interesting, but if I turn my monitor off I'm going to have a hard time getting to Youtube in the first place. Motor control issues are more likely to be addressable at the user's equipment than at the site level except in ways likely to overlap with visual issues (e.g. keyboard control).