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So much this! I happen to be a blind software developer who has had just this sort of experience in years gone by. Web apps mean that you are at the mercy of t

So much this! I happen to be a blind software developer who has had just this sort of experience in years gone by. Web apps mean that you are at the mercy of the developers. Something can work one day and break the next. This is even more true for blind people than it is for the general public. Even if there is accessibility testing, I doubt that it covers my particular toolstack. I'm on Linux. So I'm doubly a niche user. The web (and web apps) are all about providing an experience. I don't want an experience, I want a reliable tool.

DrJokepu 9y ago
Out of curiosity, what is your toolstack?
- blindgeek 9y ago
  I use emacs with emacspeak for programming and a good many other things. For pure terminal interaction outside of emacs I use a console-based screen reader called Speakup. For graphical applications, I use a screenreader called Orca. I don't use a whole lot of graphical applications, but I need Firefox for most of the "modern" web. I've also used Chrome with Chromevox over the years. Honestly I prefer text-mode browsers when I can use them, but that ship has mostly sailed. I've been involved with the development of edbrowse; the author is a friend of mine.
welder 9y ago
Besides building accessibility into frontend/React component toolkits, how do we automate testing for accessibility? I've turned on text dictation and tested apps with a blindfold, but that doesn't scale and I'm not even sure if it's how people really use an app without sight.
- abugher 9y ago
  Tangent: I think you should really have someone who hasn't seen the app test with the blindfold. Is that double blind, or just single blind plus literally blind?
  - fludlight 9y ago
    In a medical context, double blind means neither the patient or the doctor knows if the patient is receiving the drug being tested or a placebo. I'm not sure how that would work for software, but it sounds like a much larger experiment than is currently customary.
- hedora 9y ago
  I’d think regression testing is easier than with a GUI. Just interpose between the app and the screen reader, and check for expected strings in the output.
- frio 9y ago
  After years of trying, I've still not found a reliable way to automate accessibility testing. The only really workable way to manage it currently is: bake it into your entire dev process. When designing an application, forget the visuals: design the flow of information, and the interactions. This is a surprisingly good facsimile for mobile-first thinking, as it follows similar principles: in both cases, you have a restricted amount of information to display, and have to design to deal with that. Once you've got the information flow, step from there to visual elements, and ensure that as you build, you're baking in ARIA support and your testers are interacting with it using VoiceOver/JAWS. At the end, the fact is you won't have anything perfect, but you'll have something better than the majority of sites out there. The reality is that perfection is impossible, but if you bake inclusive thinking into your app from the get-go, it's pretty straightforward, and you usually end up with an application that is less confusing and overloaded with information for your visual users too. If you leave it as something to slap on at the end, it's almost always impossible.
  - steveax 9y ago
    All good points there, and agreed about automated testing, I think the most you can hope for in that department is linting level testing (color contrast, valid html, associated labels and form controls, etc.) The hard things like focus control require manual testing, ideally by a skilled user of AT.
- darekkay 9y ago
  > how do we automate testing for accessibility Have you looked into pa11y and its CI integration [1]? It's a good start but it cannot replace properly testing your UI with accessibility in mind. [1] https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y-ci https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y-ci
ndarilek 9y ago
Oh man, makes me so happy to see the accessibility concerns at the top of this thread. I hate Slack so much. Nothing has made me say "is 10 AM too early for a beer?" quite so much as that absolute pile of uselessness. I thought they'd actually improved their accessibility story when my screen reader read various elements as buttons. Later I discovered that, while they'd likely added the correct ARIA role to a <div/>, they didn't bother adding expected keyboard behaviors. I'm fortunate enough to work with co-ops, and the company I'm founding hosts its own tools specifically because those I can control, and I can pick the more accessible open source chat solution. But I can't count how many times I've had to be some company's special snowflake because I can't use Slack, can't use Toggl, can only use parts of Basecamp, and as such can't participate in a bunch of their processes. Now I'll encourage companies further away from Slack than I already do. Forget not touching it with a 10-foot pole. The 100-footer is coming out for this one. I'm sorry to post such an unproductive comment, but if you're working for a silicon valley company and not doing accessibility then you're doing it wrong, and you can pay me or any number of other talented blind developers with some of that investor capital if you want us to show you how to do it right. There is no excuse for being so exclusionary.
- Cambridgeport90 9y ago
  I couldn't agree more!
- ankitank 9y ago
  Go host your own messaging tool: Relay is an alternative to slack. Relay is open source, built on top of Mattermost. This means you can host Relay yourself. https://relay-chat.com/ https://relay-chat.com/
  - nqzero 9y ago
    i see the comparison to slack, but how does it compare to mattermost ?
    - ptman 9y ago
      Mattermost is open core. So I guess that means mattermost has lots of paid features thay relay will have to reimplement. And I wonder if those will be available in the selfhosted version. https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/ https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/
azinman2 9y ago
Just curious — how do you effectively program blind? Seems to me like a really difficult problem because coding is about jumping around so quickly and needing to be able to scroll and grok at high speeds. You also have the issue of all kinds of specialized characters that are difficult for any kind of text-to-speech. Are there specialized Braille displays for this kind of stuff? How do you go back and forth between keyboard and such a thing effortlessly?
- mikekchar 9y ago
  Not the OP and not blind, but I've worked with a blind programmer before. You move your cursor in the code and it reads you the line. The screen readers can be adjusted so that the speed of reading is really fast. To someone who is not used to it, it sounds like gibberish. But it's pretty amazing how fast the speech can be. After that, it depends on the editor. My colleague used vi (this is a long time ago -- before there was a vim) and was at least as productive as me. The main thing is that you have to remember the code. I've occasionally tried to set up a workable system so that I could program blind. I have vision problems where I get ocular migraines unless I have my system set up with a huge font and very high contrast anyway, so I often think that it would be nice to program without looking at the screen. However, I have yet to get my system set up in any way that works. Accessibility has a long way to go. Every time I've tried to set things up I wonder how a blind person can possibly get to the point where they can even start. It's so frustrating. Actually if anyone in the know is reading this, I'd appreciate a pointer to the easiest to set up Linux system. I wouldn't mind giving it a try again.
  - azinman2 9y ago
    But how does it sanely pronounce things with abbreviations or even something like: NSDictionary *myCompoundedWord = @{@“key: [NSNumber numberWithInt: 7] }; And know that it’s missing the terminal “ in the string and has an extra space after the ]? Seems very difficult. Would be great if it could understand the language enough to verbalize it at a higher level.
    - 9y ago
yAnonymous 9y ago
Do you need a ridiculously good memory and visualization skills for that? I can't imagine writing code without looking at it.
- blindgeek 9y ago
  I do have a very good memory, but I cannot really visualize. I've never had any sight. I'm so bad at visualization that I'm baffled by the concept of a picture. How do people manage to cram three dimensions of reality into two? It must be very lossy. Anyway I do have a knack for understanding how all the pieces fit together and keeping it in my head.

DrJokepu 9y ago

Out of curiosity, what is your toolstack?

blindgeek 9y ago
I use emacs with emacspeak for programming and a good many other things. For pure terminal interaction outside of emacs I use a console-based screen reader called Speakup. For graphical applications, I use a screenreader called Orca. I don't use a whole lot of graphical applications, but I need Firefox for most of the "modern" web. I've also used Chrome with Chromevox over the years. Honestly I prefer text-mode browsers when I can use them, but that ship has mostly sailed. I've been involved with the development of edbrowse; the author is a friend of mine.

welder 9y ago

Besides building accessibility into frontend/React component toolkits, how do we automate testing for accessibility? I've turned on text dictation and tested apps with a blindfold, but that doesn't scale and I'm not even sure if it's how people really use an app without sight.

abugher 9y ago
Tangent: I think you should really have someone who hasn't seen the app test with the blindfold. Is that double blind, or just single blind plus literally blind?
- fludlight 9y ago
  In a medical context, double blind means neither the patient or the doctor knows if the patient is receiving the drug being tested or a placebo. I'm not sure how that would work for software, but it sounds like a much larger experiment than is currently customary.
hedora 9y ago
I’d think regression testing is easier than with a GUI. Just interpose between the app and the screen reader, and check for expected strings in the output.
frio 9y ago
After years of trying, I've still not found a reliable way to automate accessibility testing. The only really workable way to manage it currently is: bake it into your entire dev process. When designing an application, forget the visuals: design the flow of information, and the interactions. This is a surprisingly good facsimile for mobile-first thinking, as it follows similar principles: in both cases, you have a restricted amount of information to display, and have to design to deal with that. Once you've got the information flow, step from there to visual elements, and ensure that as you build, you're baking in ARIA support and your testers are interacting with it using VoiceOver/JAWS. At the end, the fact is you won't have anything perfect, but you'll have something better than the majority of sites out there. The reality is that perfection is impossible, but if you bake inclusive thinking into your app from the get-go, it's pretty straightforward, and you usually end up with an application that is less confusing and overloaded with information for your visual users too. If you leave it as something to slap on at the end, it's almost always impossible.
- steveax 9y ago
  All good points there, and agreed about automated testing, I think the most you can hope for in that department is linting level testing (color contrast, valid html, associated labels and form controls, etc.) The hard things like focus control require manual testing, ideally by a skilled user of AT.
darekkay 9y ago
> how do we automate testing for accessibility Have you looked into pa11y and its CI integration [1]? It's a good start but it cannot replace properly testing your UI with accessibility in mind. [1] https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y-ci https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y-ci

ndarilek 9y ago

Oh man, makes me so happy to see the accessibility concerns at the top of this thread. I hate Slack so much. Nothing has made me say "is 10 AM too early for a beer?" quite so much as that absolute pile of uselessness. I thought they'd actually improved their accessibility story when my screen reader read various elements as buttons. Later I discovered that, while they'd likely added the correct ARIA role to a <div/>, they didn't bother adding expected keyboard behaviors. I'm fortunate enough to work with co-ops, and the company I'm founding hosts its own tools specifically because those I can control, and I can pick the more accessible open source chat solution. But I can't count how many times I've had to be some company's special snowflake because I can't use Slack, can't use Toggl, can only use parts of Basecamp, and as such can't participate in a bunch of their processes. Now I'll encourage companies further away from Slack than I already do. Forget not touching it with a 10-foot pole. The 100-footer is coming out for this one. I'm sorry to post such an unproductive comment, but if you're working for a silicon valley company and not doing accessibility then you're doing it wrong, and you can pay me or any number of other talented blind developers with some of that investor capital if you want us to show you how to do it right. There is no excuse for being so exclusionary.

Cambridgeport90 9y ago
I couldn't agree more!
ankitank 9y ago
Go host your own messaging tool: Relay is an alternative to slack. Relay is open source, built on top of Mattermost. This means you can host Relay yourself. https://relay-chat.com/ https://relay-chat.com/
- nqzero 9y ago
  i see the comparison to slack, but how does it compare to mattermost ?
  - ptman 9y ago
    Mattermost is open core. So I guess that means mattermost has lots of paid features thay relay will have to reimplement. And I wonder if those will be available in the selfhosted version. https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/ https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/

azinman2 9y ago

Just curious — how do you effectively program blind? Seems to me like a really difficult problem because coding is about jumping around so quickly and needing to be able to scroll and grok at high speeds. You also have the issue of all kinds of specialized characters that are difficult for any kind of text-to-speech. Are there specialized Braille displays for this kind of stuff? How do you go back and forth between keyboard and such a thing effortlessly?

mikekchar 9y ago
Not the OP and not blind, but I've worked with a blind programmer before. You move your cursor in the code and it reads you the line. The screen readers can be adjusted so that the speed of reading is really fast. To someone who is not used to it, it sounds like gibberish. But it's pretty amazing how fast the speech can be. After that, it depends on the editor. My colleague used vi (this is a long time ago -- before there was a vim) and was at least as productive as me. The main thing is that you have to remember the code. I've occasionally tried to set up a workable system so that I could program blind. I have vision problems where I get ocular migraines unless I have my system set up with a huge font and very high contrast anyway, so I often think that it would be nice to program without looking at the screen. However, I have yet to get my system set up in any way that works. Accessibility has a long way to go. Every time I've tried to set things up I wonder how a blind person can possibly get to the point where they can even start. It's so frustrating. Actually if anyone in the know is reading this, I'd appreciate a pointer to the easiest to set up Linux system. I wouldn't mind giving it a try again.
- azinman2 9y ago
  But how does it sanely pronounce things with abbreviations or even something like: NSDictionary *myCompoundedWord = @{@“key: [NSNumber numberWithInt: 7] }; And know that it’s missing the terminal “ in the string and has an extra space after the ]? Seems very difficult. Would be great if it could understand the language enough to verbalize it at a higher level.
  - 9y ago

yAnonymous 9y ago

Do you need a ridiculously good memory and visualization skills for that? I can't imagine writing code without looking at it.

blindgeek 9y ago
I do have a very good memory, but I cannot really visualize. I've never had any sight. I'm so bad at visualization that I'm baffled by the concept of a picture. How do people manage to cram three dimensions of reality into two? It must be very lossy. Anyway I do have a knack for understanding how all the pieces fit together and keeping it in my head.