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I'm genuinely curious: Do you use video chat a lot? If you do, is that a personal preference or something of a standard workflow at your job / you agreeing to s

I'm genuinely curious: Do you use video chat a lot? If you do, is that a personal preference or something of a standard workflow at your job / you agreeing to someone else's preferences? My sample size of blind people I know and feel close enough with to discuss limitations/day to day issues is tiny unfortunately, so the question of whether video chats are a thing never came up (We did watch(?) movies before though). The reason I'm asking is that I do agree with the article, but I'd phrase it slightly different: The technology right now makes video chats ~different~ and awkward due to the lack of eye contact, IFF you're used to eye contact in face to face conversations in the first place, because video chats are supposed to allow f2f over remote distances.

mwcampbell 7y ago
Thanks for asking. No, I don't use video chat much at all. Really, I only do it occasionally with my family when I can't be there for somebody's birthday (I'm in Washington state but the rest of my family are in Kansas). And of course, I only use video for their benefit, not mine. I currently work in an on-site office environment, and only a small number of us are blind or low-vision. When I'm initiating a real-time conversation with someone, I'll often do it by IM. We may do it face-to-face if the other person is right there, but to me that's just like an audio call with 3D positioning, perfect fidelity, and no latency. To be fair, that is indeed still better than current VoIP, but not enough so that I would insist on being in the same building as my coworkers. Indeed, with an online audio group chat, I always know when someone joins or leaves the group; that's not always the case in person. At my previous job, by contrast, we were an all-distributed team made up almost entirely of blind or low-vision people. As you would expect, we never used video. But we did use audio a lot, both one-on-one and group chats. (Our favorite voice chat system ended up being TeamTalk [1].) I never met most of my coworkers in person, and I never felt that this was a problem. It only just now occurred to me that the few sighted people on our team might have been uncomfortable with the way the rest of us worked. As for the rest of us, as far as I know, none of us ever wanted to be together in an office building. At least not for the sake of communication; having a shared pool of test hardware would have been nice from time to time. [1]: http://bearware.dk/ http://bearware.dk/

mwcampbell 7y ago

Thanks for asking. No, I don't use video chat much at all. Really, I only do it occasionally with my family when I can't be there for somebody's birthday (I'm in Washington state but the rest of my family are in Kansas). And of course, I only use video for their benefit, not mine. I currently work in an on-site office environment, and only a small number of us are blind or low-vision. When I'm initiating a real-time conversation with someone, I'll often do it by IM. We may do it face-to-face if the other person is right there, but to me that's just like an audio call with 3D positioning, perfect fidelity, and no latency. To be fair, that is indeed still better than current VoIP, but not enough so that I would insist on being in the same building as my coworkers. Indeed, with an online audio group chat, I always know when someone joins or leaves the group; that's not always the case in person. At my previous job, by contrast, we were an all-distributed team made up almost entirely of blind or low-vision people. As you would expect, we never used video. But we did use audio a lot, both one-on-one and group chats. (Our favorite voice chat system ended up being TeamTalk [1].) I never met most of my coworkers in person, and I never felt that this was a problem. It only just now occurred to me that the few sighted people on our team might have been uncomfortable with the way the rest of us worked. As for the rest of us, as far as I know, none of us ever wanted to be together in an office building. At least not for the sake of communication; having a shared pool of test hardware would have been nice from time to time. [1]: http://bearware.dk/ http://bearware.dk/