47 ms·

How I, as someone who is visually impaired, use my iPhone (2020)

832 points by eevilspock 5y ago

einpoklum 5y ago
So, we see: * Braille-keyboard emulation with regular keyboard tie-in * Different responses to different touch and gestures, oriented towards the blind. Is this iPhone-specific or is that available on Android phones as well? proper-Linux phones?
- duckson 5y ago
  > Different responses to different touch and gestures, oriented towards the blind That's VoiceOver on iOS. It's a screen reader that's also available on the Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch. Android has a similar screenreader called TalkBack. I work with visually impaired people on accessible apps, and the large majority of them prefer Apple's devices because they have more advanced accessibility features.
  - fullstop 5y ago
    VoiceOver for the iOS camera is on another level entirely.
    - domano 5y ago
      What does it do? I dont have an iPhone to test it.
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        I'm guessing it actually describes the content of the scene the camera is pointing at.
        duskwuff 5y ago
        It does! It goes beyond simply enumerating objects and can describe their properties or context as well -- for example, it'll describe a husky as "a black and white dog lying on a wooden floor", or a soft drink as "a transparent cup with brown liquid in it". VoiceOver also works with another accessibility tool called Magnifier, allowing it to be used as a general "what am I looking at" tool.
      - brantonb 5y ago
        Here’s a post on the topic from a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153244
      - fullstop 5y ago
        It describes the scene, tells you how many faces are visible, whether or not the image is focused, lighting conditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CAafjodkyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CAafjodkyE They can also generate alt text for photos which do not have that information already. Here's a video of the person in the original article describing this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLBJUHkLTTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLBJUHkLTTA
      - hundchenkatze 5y ago
        > When you use Camera, VoiceOver describes objects in the viewfinder. To take a photo or start, pause, or resume a video recording, double-tap the screen with two fingers. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-voiceover-in-apps-iphe4ee74be8/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-voiceover-in-apps...
jeanlucas 5y ago
I've been talking to some visually impaired people here in Brazil, and despite being much more expensive due to taxes it is the most used phone between visually impaired people.
surfsvammel 5y ago
I’m curious, is there a way for someone who is visually impaired to have the screen totally turned off and still use it like this? Would make sense and save some battery.
- JshWright 5y ago
  Yep, the display can be turned off. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Would make sense and save some battery. Privacy as well: a blind user can not notice that someone is looking over their shoulder. So yes there is a built-in feature called “screen curtain” which turns the display off. By default it’s a triple 3-fingers tap when VoiceOver is active to toggle.
- sysstemlord 5y ago
  Interstingly, my cousin, a visually impaired 25 years old girl, never liked using the screen off feature. Her argument was that if someone sees her typing on a phone when its screen is off, they would automatically assume that the poor girl doesn't know the phone is off, someone should tell her :)
- some-guy 5y ago
  I believe you can--maybe she had it on this time for the sake of demonstration?
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I saw this several months ago and shared it with my friends. Remarkable.
cerved 5y ago
Braille keyboard looks dope
- afry1 5y ago
  I know, I want to learn how to use it now!
  - pg_bot 5y ago
    It's not hard to learn if you've got some spare time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille
  - disabled 5y ago
    It’s extremely easy to learn, and takes a day of practice, at most. This is the place to learn how to do this as a sighted individual (type literary UEB [Unified English Braille] here): https://uebonline.org/ https://uebonline.org/ To start out, you use your normal QWERTY/QWERTZ physical keyboard instead of a virtual braille keyboard (screen braille keyboard) or a true Bluetooth braille keyboard [1][2] (also known as a Perkins keyboard or Perkins brailler) to learn this. Seriously, if you do the lessons on UEB online with a physical keyboard you will learn this 100% solidly and will have absolutely zero learning curve with the iPhone/iOS braille keyboard or Android braille keyboard. The iOS/Android braille keyboards are aware of your fingers, their positions, and your hand orientation, so it translates pretty much perfectly when you transition your learning onto iOS/Android braille keyboards. This is because your individual fingers are assigned a “braille dot” (excluding thumbs). UEB literary braille uses six dots per braille cell. However, some braille codes have eight dots per cell. As I said, all you have to do is learn UEB literary braille. You can learn it in a day by doing the practice lessons at the link I provided above. Braille dot finger assignment (for braille chords): LEFT HAND Dot 1: (left index finger, “F” key on physical keyboard) Dot 2: (left middle finger, “D” key on physical keyboard) Dot 3: (left ring finger, “S” key on physical keyboard) [If the braille code uses 8-dot cells] Dot 7: (left pinky finger, “A” key on physical keyboard) RIGHT HAND Dot 4: (right index finger, “J” key on physical keyboard) Dot 5: (right middle finger, “K” key on physical keyboard) Dot 6: (right ring finger, “L” key on physical keyboard) [If the braille code uses 8-dot cells] Dot 8: (right pinky finger, “;” key on physical keyboard) _________________ So a 6-dot braille cell using all 6 fingers would spatially “look” like this, linearly: (bottom to top of cell) LEFT HAND SIDE|RIGHT HAND SIDE (top to bottom of cell) dot 3-dot 2-dot 1|dot 4-dot 5-dot 6 The easiest way to remember this is: 3-2-1|4-5-6 Where dots 1 and 4 are the top two dots, and dots 3 and 6 are the bottom two dots if this is represented spatially as a Unicode braille cell. If this was 8 cell braille, it would be 7-3-2-1|4-5-6-8 Where dots 1 and 4 are the top two dots and dots 7 and 8 are the bottom two dots. Anyways once you practice the lessons on the UEB braille website there is no learning curve whatsoever for the iOS/Android braille keyboards. For typing a space you use your thumb. You can also get a physical Bluetooth braille keyboard, if you were really into it. Many blind people, who do not regularly use braille, not only prefer to type on the virtual braille keyboard, but also like to use a physical braille keyboard with their mobile device for typing ABC letters. [1] Orbit Braille Writer (physical Bluetooth braille keyboard) http://www.orbitresearch.com/product/orbit-writer/ http://www.orbitresearch.com/product/orbit-writer/ [2] BraillePen Slim (manufacturer link with specifications: https://int.harpo.com.pl/products/braillepen-slim/ https://int.harpo.com.pl/products/braillepen-slim/)
Tepix 5y ago
It's really remarkable what Apple has achieved here. Random thought: She could turn down the screen's brightness all the way to save battery and improve privacy... ;-)
- eevilspock 5y ago
  She probably has it turned up for the benefit of us who are utterly dependent on visible light ;)
- CJefferson 5y ago
  The first time I taught a blind student, I was teaching C. I walked up to them to find they were clearly irritated, and said something like "Nothing works, I don't understand". Looking at their computer, it appeared to be off. I said, delicately, that were they sure the computer was turned on. They laughed and turned their laptop's screen on, saying (as you say), they left it off to save battery life! The problem turned out to be they were using textedit, which while a nice light (and highly accessible) editor, by default turns "s into “”. Unfortunately, Apple's text-to-speech "helpfully" just described all these as speech quotes. This made it impossible to understand, from the compiler error, why the code wasn't working. A quick head into settings and the student was off (they soon changed to textmate, also very accessible).
  - vmception 5y ago
    I hate text editor assumptions Well only the ones that don’t work for me But i hate how hard it is to find an assumptionless and offline text editor these days
    - asddubs 5y ago
      pluma is pretty good
    - throwaway77112 5y ago
      What about SciTE or Geany? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geany
ameister14 5y ago
This is a good reminder to me that while sometimes it's a pain in the neck to make sure there are alt tags for every image, or make sure things are in text form rather than a pdf, that you can tab through a site, etc. - it makes it so everyone can use the internet more easily and that's important. I work with restaurants a lot as a part of my job, and there's been a big push to make sure all the websites are ADA compliant; it's something all front end devs and digital marketers should keep in mind.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  If anyone is aware of a good resource for how to write alt tags for photos I would be most appreciative. I never know how much detail is appropriate. Is it a photo of “pink flowers” or “pink chrysanthemums” or “pink chrysanthemums in a glass vase on a dining room table”? Or maybe something else entirely? I’m never sure how to balance descriptiveness vs brevity.
  - fullstop 5y ago
    I think that this would depend on whether or not the photo has a caption. Captions themselves should strive to answer the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why.
  - kuu 5y ago
    Why are you sharing the photo? Because of the kind of flower? the color? the general organization of the dining room table? Depending on why you share the photo, you just have to put that so others can understand it too.
  - fluix 5y ago
    Don't have a good resource of my own either, but I think I would prefer more descriptiveness. Reading the various options you've written gives me totally different ideas of the image in my mind so, especially if it's important to the website, more descriptiveness seems appropriate for higher accuracy.
  - inamiyar 5y ago
    I recommend https://www.nngroup.com/reports/usability-guidelines-accessible-web-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/reports/usability-guidelines-accessi... If you want to really get into. A general note is the context around the image is just as important as the alt text.
fullstop 5y ago
Speaking of visually impaired people, please consider joining Be My Eyes [1], if you are a sighted person or if you have impaired vision. It is a fantastic idea and I get a lot out of using technology to help people "see" even though it happens so rarely. 1. https://www.bemyeyes.com/ https://www.bemyeyes.com/
- werber 5y ago
  I’ve had the app for a year or so and the few times I’ve gotten a call have been really interesting. I honestly look forward to them popping up
  - fullstop 5y ago
    I've had it installed for a few years and have only received two calls. On two other occasions, though, I was notified but someone answered before I did. Both calls that I did answer were great, though!
- 72deluxe 5y ago
  What a brilliant idea. I wish they'd do "be my ears" for most of the overly compressed albums that get released these days!!
josephg 5y ago
I think about this whenever someone posts about yet another new immediate mode UI library, or a custom layout engine they’ve built on top of HTML canvas. Generally all these kind of approaches make your app invisible to screen readers. The amount of work Apple, Google and others have put into making all this work is staggering, and life changing for people who are blind. Please don’t throw all that work away in your apps just because you think some UI toolkit is shiny.
- inamiyar 5y ago
  This as of now also applies to most Rust UI libs, hence why I don't use them. At least in that community each UI kit has an 'accessibility' issue though so hopefully improvements to come.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I was recently shopping for cross-platform desktop GUI toolkits, and discovered that there are really very few options that work well with screen readers. The only ones that seemed at all viable were Electron and JavaFX. .NET MAUI also seems very promising, and I like that they're actively blogging about it[1], but it hasn't been officially released yet. Anyway, it seemed to me that basically all the others either aren't accessible at all, or are only accessible on one or two of the target platforms, or have long-standing accessibility bugs that seem like they would render the UI unusable. [1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/the-journey-to-accessible-apps-screen-readers/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/the-journey-to-access...
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Does QT not work with screen readers?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      According to the information I was able to gather, it seemed that the answer to that question depends on whether you ask Qt, or a visually impaired user of Qt applications. I decided the latter opinion was the one I cared more about. I'm admittedly trying to play it very safe. I have zero proficiency with screen readers, so I'm not really able to independently verify any of this. All I know is that the GUI toolkit is one of the most expensive things to have to change later, so I want to be as close as I can possibly be to 100% sure that I won't end up in a situation where my projects have accessibility issues that I can't fix without changing the GUI toolkit.
roebk 5y ago
Even the accessibility features of the Apple Watch are impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXX1bMqe_gU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXX1bMqe_gU
twobitshifter 5y ago
How much do the vocal visually impaired use keyboards like the Braille keyboard shown and how much do they use voice to speech? A lot of people don’t want to talk to their phone, is the same resistance there for someone whose phone is always talking to them?
- lukastyrychtr 5y ago
  Personally, i mostly use braille input for longer messages and for shorter ones speech recognition or the standard keyboard.
wimagguc 5y ago
Interesting that she located the elements by tapping on the screen at certain positions, instead of using the left/right swipe _anywhere_ on the screen, which selects and reads the previous/next element. Having seen a lot of these videos before (we've been working on making apps truly accessible), I never actually came across someone who didn't use the left/right swipe as a first plan of action, but hey ho, you always learn. (I wonder if it depends on mental models, and whether you prefer building a 2D map of the screen to moving up and down in a 1-dimensional vector.)
- miki123211 5y ago
  I usually use left/right flicks for screens I haven't interacted with before, but I use taps to find elements I use often, particularly when they're easy to find. I sometimes use a mixture of both, i.e. tapping somewhere near the bottom of the screen to focus on the tab bar, then flicking left or right to find the right tab.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Left/right flicks are difficult to use on screens with lots of content on them, unfortunately.
cletus 5y ago
It really seems to me that people like to be mad, get upset about marginal things that would only affect a small percentage of users (eg inability to side load apps on non-jailbroken iOS) and generally just focus on the negative. Maybe you could call it Outrage Addiction? So it's refreshing to see something like this where a modern smartphone has such a positive (even life-changing) impact on someone's life. This is also one of the things I find depressing about a significant chunk of Americans. Many will dismiss things like public transit as "people want to drive". Of course we then design cities and subsidize driving so it becomes a vicious circle and any public transit become unviable (to retrofit). But what about the people who can't drive? Or even can't afford to drive? Basically the American response is "F em".
- fullstop 5y ago
  You might find this to be interesting: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/ Curb cuts, in the USA, are a relatively recent addition and they benefit far more people than just wheelchair riders. Accessibility features can help everyone.
  - cletus 5y ago
    This is mostly a good thing. I say "mostly" because it encourages scooter riders to use the sidewalk and pretty much anywhere I've been scooter-share riders are a public menace. One issue with these in NYC at least is the drainage just isn't designed for them. So anytime you get significant rain or snow melt you get pools of water that don't drain because the actual drains are elsewhere. If only the US could adopt Dutch junction design [1]. And don't get me started on the cyclist and pedestrian safety nightmare that is allowing people to turn right at red lights. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HDN9fUlqU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HDN9fUlqU8
    - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
      Funny how sidewalks are usually mentioned in terms of mobile people. Every economically disadvantaged wheelchair-bound person I have ever seen has not used the sidewalk. They use the road. It's much less likely to have huge broken up chunks and obstructions, and it's less problematic to have to haul yourself up the incline or potentially crash down the decline. I wish we could somehow force everyone to live as somebody else for a week.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I'm a big believer in assistive tech. It isn't particularly difficult to implement, and the rewards can be great. Nowadays, the apps I'm developing support things like accessibility labels (voiceover), high-contrast mode, and scaling, in addition to the localization that I've always had. I also suggest using tools like Sim Daltonism[0], to evaluate colorblind accessibility. [0] https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
avipars 5y ago
Is google's effort at accessibility up to par with apple's?
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
  No not really. If you put them in a list of features and compare them it seems pretty close, they have most of the same stuff. But if you actually learn and use both the android one is much worse.
- handrous 5y ago
  Not sure about Android, but ChromeOS' a11y features are embarrassingly poor, which surprised the hell out of me considering its primary audience is kids (some crazy-high percentage of Chromebook use must be in schools as student laptops, from what I've seen) and old people who have trouble with computers. And the settings menus are so terrible that it took me quite a while to convince myself they were as limited as they seemed and I wasn't just missing something (god knows my dad could never have found what they did have, on his own) but that part's just typical Google UI. Wish I'd gotten my dad to spring for an iPad w/ keyboard instead. Modern iOS may not be anywhere near as intuitive as in, say, iOS 6, but I could have configured it to be really good for him.
- techrat 5y ago
  Knowing people who work with others in accessibility, the discussion tends to be that Android and iOS are more or less on par... with Android having the edge in customization and iOS having the edge in consistency. So pretty much the same for everyone else...
- miki123211 5y ago
  Nope. In Poland where I live, most sighted people use Android, but the proportion of iPhone users is much higher amongst the blind population, despite the enormously high unemployment and bad social security. Apple's stuff is just way better. Those who have to use Android often replace Talkback with a Chinese screen reader called Commentary. That program apparently sends god knows what god knows where, and a screen reader has access to almost everything, but that's the price you have to pay for blindness, I guess.
musesum 5y ago
Have been discussing with a visually impaired friend how to rethink Accessibility. Over the last 20 years, I've seen him use Accessibility on Windows and then moving over to the Mac and finally the iPhone. The main problem is that VoiceOver is a speech+touch interface slapped onto a visual+touch interface. So, roughly 1/3rd speed. Moreover, 3rd party developers need to label elements, which they rarely do. I remember walking out of an Accessibility meetup at SalesForce waiting for a ride and seeing an attendee struggling with hailing an Uber. She was an experienced user but still struggling with her new iPhone. It had a larger screen, so all her muscle memory was foiled; the buttons had shifted. So, my friend and I are looking into rethinking the interface starting with 1st principles, like Fitt's Law. My guess is maybe a 9X improvement for visually impaired and 3X for folks with regular vision. Reserved the name touch.ai for that purpose.
- zepto 5y ago
  > Moreover, 3rd party developers need to label elements, which they rarely do. Seems like your approach would require 3rd party developers to build a completely new UI, so this doesn’t seem like a valid criticism of the current paradigm. It’s also the case that existing designs take into account Fitt’s law. Apple and Google are well aware of these. That said, I do share the intuition that an information architecture built around cognitive efficiency could be a lot better than we currently have. I’m skeptical you’ll find particularly easy to achieve - a lot of the complexity of current UI is incidental, but equally a lot is not.
  - musesum 5y ago
    > Seems like your approach would require 3rd party developers to build a completely new UI Nope; no changes to existing UIs. Instead a driver, which has its own problems of deployment, as that requires convincing the hardware OEMs. > It’s also the case that existing designs take into account Fitt’s law. Apple and Google are well aware of these. Hmmmm ... I don't think so. I remember Bruce Tognazzini wrote about how Apple messed up Fitt's law in a version of OSX, where it was one pixel away from supporting an infinite target. More recently was Apple's addition of "reachability" which is an incredible kludge. Apple and Google may have usability research, but that is nothing compared to the deep research done at Xerox Parc. I recall seeing studies on the D* machines which measured the efficiency of several text editors, broken down by select, cut, paste, etc. Xerox first tested and measured alternatives before deciding on the best one. At the first WWDC for the iPhone (2007?), I went a design lab to review our first app. The designer suggest I put navigation at the top, out of reach. I asked him "What about Fitt's Law?" His reply was "who's that?" > I’m skeptical you’ll find particularly easy to achieve I agree; this is incredibly hard to achieve. It involves integrating several moving parts, leveraging: TPUs, crypto, and negotiating with OEMs like Apple. I believe the payoff is worth it.
junon 5y ago
Needs (2020) in the title.
jhallenworld 5y ago
Well I have a related question, maybe someone here has an answer. How can a paralyzed person hang up the phone / end a call? They can initiate a call using voice, but no way to hang up. So now, either the other end has to hang up. Or there is a long timeout, like 10 minutes or something.
- microtherion 5y ago
  Apple devices support "Switch Control", which stands for a family of devices that translate some signal that the user is capable of providing (blinking, tongue clicks, etc) into a button press. This can be used to select from a menu of options that the OS presents: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201370 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201370 Imagine a high tech version of Hector Salamanca's bell in "Breaking Bad": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWso-qRaIlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWso-qRaIlM I believe there are various levels of such control, depending on how much mobility the user has.
  - jhallenworld 5y ago
    Do you know if a single button press can be mapped to "end call"? It's not clear from the pages. I wish Apple would have a mode which allowed you to do this with voice during a call...
goda90 5y ago
I remember watching a blind man teach a group and he had in one earbud to his phone and was just using his thumb to flip back and forth quickly through his notes as he was speaking, and taking comments and questions. I was impressed at the multitasking. I don't think I could listen to two different things so well, or talk while also processing audio notes.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Humans can get good at most things pretty quickly. You have no skill at listening to two audio tracks at once because you’ve never tried. You’ve never tried because you have no need. If you were blind, or a forensic audio analyst, or a music producer, you’d get pretty good pretty quickly.
taywrobel 5y ago
Having several friends on the Apple a11y team, they really do work tirelessly to make the accessibility experience amazing. A lot of the engineers on that team have visual, audiotory, or other physical impairment as well, which is really cool to see and as a result they’re all really invested in making the product accessibility awesome. Personal favorite “Easter egg” in their accessibility utilities is the baroque voiceover descriptions for the built-in wallpapers. A current colleague of mine shared it last week as part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day - https://twitter.com/mattt/status/1395439320652148736?s=21 https://twitter.com/mattt/status/1395439320652148736?s=21
- pxc 5y ago
  > A lot of the engineers on that team have visual, audiotory, or other physical impairment as well Imo this is really the only way to get accessibility right in practice. It makes sense that Apple has a reputation for good accessibility integration.
  - bbarn 5y ago
    With that attitude, only the most elite and large companies would even consider it. It's not that you need someone with a handicap, it's simply that you need to consider them when you're building something.
    - atty 5y ago
      Almost any product that is built without input from the people who are going to use it is going to be inherently worse. Imagine a team creating a camera from scratch who are not photographers, and who never included any photographers in the design process. It would be a functioning camera, I’m sure, but it’s usability for real-world use would almost certainly be worse than those developed by teams that include professional photographers. The effect may be less for accessibility features, but it would still be there. I’d highly suggest anyone building out accessibility features to at least consult with disability advocates and other end users.
    - pxc 5y ago
jgauth 5y ago
This kind of thing is really inspiring to me. Are there any similar projects I can contribute to? I would love to work on software that has such a clear positive impact on someone's life, like in this video.
- miki123211 5y ago
  https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda If there's one open source project that changed blind people's lives, that's it. It made screen readers go from about $1000 to practically free, at least if you're an individual, not a corporation. Alternatively, learn accessibility APIs for <platform>, and then start fixing bugs in open source apps. The meetings/messaging space could definitely use some work, for example. Stuff like Signal/Telegram, accessibility wise, is much worse than WhatsApp, same with Zoom vs. Jitsi.
open-source-ux 5y ago
I recently posted this video playlist of quick accessibility tips for websites (each tip is just 1 minute). Many websites don't follow these best practices. However, you might be surprised by how simple and low-effort it is to incorporate these tips into any website. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTqm2yVMMUKWTr9XWdW5hJ9tk512Ow0SE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTqm2yVMMUKWTr9XWdW5h...
Dah00n 5y ago
I'm not visually impaired but have been doing some work at a local institute for visually impaired people and did setup some phones for WiFi there. I have never tested these accessibility settings on smartphones myself so I have no idea why but ever single phone I saw there were Android phones. Now I'm curious why since it seems people here see iPhones as a better choice.
- radley 5y ago
  If it's academic, Android makes sense because it's easy to side-load experimental apps. iPhone appears to be better for consumers due to native solutions.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Language could be the one. Android supports vastly more. It's quite sad how behind Apple is. If you happen to be from a "small" country with under 10 million people - forget it.
nojs 5y ago
The Braille typing is amazing. She interacts so smoothly and quickly with the keyboard. I wonder why she doesn’t use voice input though?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  It's surely amazing when you account for the fact that she's poking at a frickin' touchscreen with no visual closed-loop feedback. But as a UX mode it sucks. Why not just pair a physical Bluetooth gamepad with actual buttons?
  - throwaway77112 5y ago
    Touchscreens have vibration feedback when clicking buttons etc
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      That doesn't help with picking the right button, though. She's sort of coping with it by hovering her fingers on the intended portions of the screen but the way she's doing it seems highly unergonomic, and a physical device could also be more efficient.
- csomar 5y ago
  She's writing on that Braille keyboard faster than your average. Voice input is not a quite private method, too.
- toast0 5y ago
  > She interacts so smoothly and quickly with the keyboard. I wonder why she doesn’t use voice input though? Presumably because interactimg with the keyboard is smooth and quick. A keyboard is also private and works in noisy environments. Some people (including me) would prefer not to speak when avoidable, jusr as some would prefer not to type when avoidable. It may be easier (or higher throughput) to use audio feedback from the computer while providing touch inputs than if both feedback and input are audio. Personally, while I've spent lots of time training typing, the learning curve on speech to text is too high and the apparenr reward too meager for me to go much beyond the bare minimum (I can cancel many accidental summonings of speech interfaces)
spoonjim 5y ago
Deleted
- lalos 5y ago
  It's also a side effect of good abstractions, so since they own all the stack they are able to iterate on their own APIs. I would even argue it helps debug those abstractions, you are basically swapping the last layer of user-computer interaction.
cafed00d 5y ago
There will come a day when Apple will lean in heavily on Accessibility just like they've recently amped up Privacy in ads lately. I, for one, absolutely love this about Apple! Accessibility is a beautiful core value to strive for (Privacy and others too). But I particularly appreciate Accessibility. Good designs/affordances such as gestural trackpads or mouse cursor support on iPads are all accessibility features, except they cover a major swath of humanity rather than those traditionally considered "less-abled". Disclaimer: I work at Apple so I'm biased. More likely, my heroes at Apple such as Sue Booker are accessibility experts -- so I'm always fan-boying over these features!
- escapologybb 5y ago
  I would just like to say that there isn't a company on the planet making consumer electronics that leans in harder than Apple does, as a quadriplegic I can get an able-bodied monkey to take my new iShiny out-of-the-box and from then on I can do everything you can do on that device. They really are world leaders at this stuff, I can use my right index finger and my mouth and with just that I can use Apple products to run my own company and talk to people on HN (you know, the important stuff!). ---
- escapologybb 5y ago
  edited to add: over the past few weeks Apple and their accessibility approach has come up a few times on HN, and when I responded there have been so many questions that I really really wanted to answer. However, not had the energy to be able to respond in a timely manner and certainly not quickly enough and set the article is still on the front page of HN. Basically because quadriplegia. So I know that there are are a lot of questions about use my computer, and that's largely because The people on HN are genuinely and wonderfully curious. The question that seems to fascinate able-bodied engineers goes something like this: "imagine coming home and finding somebody had removed every switch, button and lever from every device in your environment; What would you do?" That's the question I had to answer before I could get to where I don't get a job and have to start my own company as a result! So my question is how best do people think I should share this information? Blog post, Twitter thread (eww) or messenger pigeon?
econnors 5y ago
One thing I've thought about – how much harm did the Chrome team do by adding default outlines to focused elements? Although well intentioned, I think making it the default for all users resulted in pretty much every website adding "outline: 0" to their css: https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+remove+blue+border https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+remove+blue+border, which ultimately harmed the ecosystem for keyboard only users.
- bubbab 5y ago
  Hopefully this will start to go away soon. I learned recently that Chrome 90 (released April 2021) replaced :focus with :focus-visible in the default UA style sheet, so the focus ring will only show when using the keyboard now. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/gv69rSngHDY/m/B_p8K21kAgAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/gv69r...
symisc_devel 5y ago
Shameless plug: One of our engineer developed a Vision Impaired OCR app that scan and read text aloud in the user favorite language and accent with built-in TTS and translation service. Basically, the app is voice driven and require minimal interaction. All the user has to do is take a picture and the scan process starts immediately and TTS takes place after scan. App homepage: https://i2s.symisc.net https://i2s.symisc.net https://apps.apple.com/us/app/talkie-ocr-image-to-speech/id1512795289 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/talkie-ocr-image-to-speech/id1...
0xedb 5y ago
Really helpful resource for web devs: https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.2/ https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.2/
teekert 5y ago
Wow very impressive! She could probably save a lot of battery too, there is no reason for that screen to be on. Sort of mind blowing when you think about it as a seeing person.
mcbutterbunz 5y ago
I think its pretty cool how quickly the audio is spoken too. I bet that saves quite a bit of time over a slower natural tempo.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  This person probably slowed it down, many users have it ramped up to even more insane speeds.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  This is with really slow audio. The default setting is much faster, and can be turned up even further than that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
uses 5y ago
A couple years ago we were able to hire someone with a visual impairment to do some testing on our website. I consider myself to be very knowledgeable about accessibility, I use a screen reader to test, etc. But watching someone use something I made, and struggle to complete the task because of a fairly straightforward disability they overcome every day in many ways, but they couldn’t get that thing I made to work? That’s an incredibly humbling experience. Never felt anything like that before. I’d highly recommend doing some testing with a real user if you ever have the opportunity.
imhoguy 5y ago
Could vibration be enhanced so that would create another dimention(s) of haptic feedback? Kind of vary on pitch, length, strength, and Morse-like patterns to augument voice over.
feudalism 5y ago
Well, what a nice ad for Apple!
SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
> To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please email licensing@storyful.com Is this an undisclosed ad?
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  It means the tweet went viral (9.5M views of the video alone), licensing company noticed and contacted the OP to serve as a licensing middle-man, which OP accepted and publicised.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
    I see, that's an interesting model and impressively fast turnaround.
eevilspock 5y ago
I just asked Kristy if she might "pop" by. https://twitter.com/vassudanagunta/status/1398017781040361482 https://twitter.com/vassudanagunta/status/139801778104036148...
jordanmorgan10 5y ago
If you want to get level with the user in that video, turn on Screen Curtain on your iPhone and try to use it. Very, very humbling experience as an iOS dev. Here's how to turn it on: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443
kordlessagain 5y ago
I can barely read this because I forgot my glasses.
major505 5y ago
I worked many months making a couple of bank app accessible to visually impared people. Hard work. Luckly I had a team that would test every version until they could themselfs use the app correctly. In the end I was so used to test apps in this mode,that I put a shortcut in my phone so I could used it with headphones while the phone was in my pocket in the subway, or while I'm driving so I don't take the eyes of the road.
jaimex2 5y ago
Funny, I thought all iPhone users were impaired.
logbiscuitswave 5y ago
When talking with my colleagues about accessibility I like to propose an exercise: “turn off your monitor and now try to use your feature.” After getting some uncomfortable laughs or overall confusion, it presents a great opportunity to demonstrate things like screen readers and keyboard navigation. A lot of people don’t even realize just how many accessibility features are built into operating systems these days. These days if you’re a Windows developer Microsoft has some great a11y tools like Accessibility Insights that will do a lot of automated testing for you as well. While I don’t rely on AT (even though I am an a keyboard navigation enthusiast) it’s an area I’m passionate about. I like to encourage others to not think of a11y as an afterthought.
Technomaniacz 5y ago
hey, quick question. can't iPhones for visually impaired users fix their brightness to ultra low(beyond standard lowest)? since everything is being read out, it'd probably save a lot of battery and make sure the phone lasts longer.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305040
teekert 5y ago
Imagine she would have the screen off, just holding a black glass slab... Sort of makes me feel like I am touch and hearing impaired in stead of her being visually impaired.
ChrisRR 5y ago
On the flip side, I have a blind friend who is in the market for a new phone right now to replace her old nokia with custom text to speech software. Half the buttons have fallen off. It's very difficult to find phones with physical buttons nowadays and the specialist ones cost the earth. As nice as touch screens are, remember that physical buttons are more helpful for blind people. She knows that text messages are 2 clicks down in the menu, calls are one click, contacts are 3 clicks, etc. rather than having to swipe around and find the app There in lies another issue with iphones for the blind, you can't remove all the other gumpf you don't need. If there were just 3 big screen filling buttons with phone, texts and contacts, that would be easier to use than smaller icons.

832 points by eevilspock 5y ago

So, we see: * Braille-keyboard emulation with regular keyboard tie-in * Different responses to different touch and gestures, oriented towards the blind. Is this iPhone-specific or is that available on Android phones as well? proper-Linux phones?

duckson 5y ago
> Different responses to different touch and gestures, oriented towards the blind That's VoiceOver on iOS. It's a screen reader that's also available on the Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch. Android has a similar screenreader called TalkBack. I work with visually impaired people on accessible apps, and the large majority of them prefer Apple's devices because they have more advanced accessibility features.
- fullstop 5y ago
  VoiceOver for the iOS camera is on another level entirely.
  - domano 5y ago
    What does it do? I dont have an iPhone to test it.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      I'm guessing it actually describes the content of the scene the camera is pointing at.
      - duskwuff 5y ago
        It does! It goes beyond simply enumerating objects and can describe their properties or context as well -- for example, it'll describe a husky as "a black and white dog lying on a wooden floor", or a soft drink as "a transparent cup with brown liquid in it". VoiceOver also works with another accessibility tool called Magnifier, allowing it to be used as a general "what am I looking at" tool.
    - brantonb 5y ago
      Here’s a post on the topic from a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153244
    - fullstop 5y ago
      It describes the scene, tells you how many faces are visible, whether or not the image is focused, lighting conditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CAafjodkyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CAafjodkyE They can also generate alt text for photos which do not have that information already. Here's a video of the person in the original article describing this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLBJUHkLTTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLBJUHkLTTA
    - hundchenkatze 5y ago
      > When you use Camera, VoiceOver describes objects in the viewfinder. To take a photo or start, pause, or resume a video recording, double-tap the screen with two fingers. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-voiceover-in-apps-iphe4ee74be8/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-voiceover-in-apps...

jeanlucas 5y ago

I've been talking to some visually impaired people here in Brazil, and despite being much more expensive due to taxes it is the most used phone between visually impaired people.

surfsvammel 5y ago

I’m curious, is there a way for someone who is visually impaired to have the screen totally turned off and still use it like this? Would make sense and save some battery.

JshWright 5y ago
Yep, the display can be turned off. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443
masklinn 5y ago
> Would make sense and save some battery. Privacy as well: a blind user can not notice that someone is looking over their shoulder. So yes there is a built-in feature called “screen curtain” which turns the display off. By default it’s a triple 3-fingers tap when VoiceOver is active to toggle.
sysstemlord 5y ago
Interstingly, my cousin, a visually impaired 25 years old girl, never liked using the screen off feature. Her argument was that if someone sees her typing on a phone when its screen is off, they would automatically assume that the poor girl doesn't know the phone is off, someone should tell her :)
some-guy 5y ago
I believe you can--maybe she had it on this time for the sake of demonstration?

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I saw this several months ago and shared it with my friends. Remarkable.

cerved 5y ago

Braille keyboard looks dope

afry1 5y ago
I know, I want to learn how to use it now!
- pg_bot 5y ago
  It's not hard to learn if you've got some spare time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille
- disabled 5y ago
  It’s extremely easy to learn, and takes a day of practice, at most. This is the place to learn how to do this as a sighted individual (type literary UEB [Unified English Braille] here): https://uebonline.org/ https://uebonline.org/ To start out, you use your normal QWERTY/QWERTZ physical keyboard instead of a virtual braille keyboard (screen braille keyboard) or a true Bluetooth braille keyboard [1][2] (also known as a Perkins keyboard or Perkins brailler) to learn this. Seriously, if you do the lessons on UEB online with a physical keyboard you will learn this 100% solidly and will have absolutely zero learning curve with the iPhone/iOS braille keyboard or Android braille keyboard. The iOS/Android braille keyboards are aware of your fingers, their positions, and your hand orientation, so it translates pretty much perfectly when you transition your learning onto iOS/Android braille keyboards. This is because your individual fingers are assigned a “braille dot” (excluding thumbs). UEB literary braille uses six dots per braille cell. However, some braille codes have eight dots per cell. As I said, all you have to do is learn UEB literary braille. You can learn it in a day by doing the practice lessons at the link I provided above. Braille dot finger assignment (for braille chords): LEFT HAND Dot 1: (left index finger, “F” key on physical keyboard) Dot 2: (left middle finger, “D” key on physical keyboard) Dot 3: (left ring finger, “S” key on physical keyboard) [If the braille code uses 8-dot cells] Dot 7: (left pinky finger, “A” key on physical keyboard) RIGHT HAND Dot 4: (right index finger, “J” key on physical keyboard) Dot 5: (right middle finger, “K” key on physical keyboard) Dot 6: (right ring finger, “L” key on physical keyboard) [If the braille code uses 8-dot cells] Dot 8: (right pinky finger, “;” key on physical keyboard) _________________ So a 6-dot braille cell using all 6 fingers would spatially “look” like this, linearly: (bottom to top of cell) LEFT HAND SIDE|RIGHT HAND SIDE (top to bottom of cell) dot 3-dot 2-dot 1|dot 4-dot 5-dot 6 The easiest way to remember this is: 3-2-1|4-5-6 Where dots 1 and 4 are the top two dots, and dots 3 and 6 are the bottom two dots if this is represented spatially as a Unicode braille cell. If this was 8 cell braille, it would be 7-3-2-1|4-5-6-8 Where dots 1 and 4 are the top two dots and dots 7 and 8 are the bottom two dots. Anyways once you practice the lessons on the UEB braille website there is no learning curve whatsoever for the iOS/Android braille keyboards. For typing a space you use your thumb. You can also get a physical Bluetooth braille keyboard, if you were really into it. Many blind people, who do not regularly use braille, not only prefer to type on the virtual braille keyboard, but also like to use a physical braille keyboard with their mobile device for typing ABC letters. [1] Orbit Braille Writer (physical Bluetooth braille keyboard) http://www.orbitresearch.com/product/orbit-writer/ http://www.orbitresearch.com/product/orbit-writer/ [2] BraillePen Slim (manufacturer link with specifications: https://int.harpo.com.pl/products/braillepen-slim/ https://int.harpo.com.pl/products/braillepen-slim/)

Tepix 5y ago

It's really remarkable what Apple has achieved here. Random thought: She could turn down the screen's brightness all the way to save battery and improve privacy... ;-)

eevilspock 5y ago
She probably has it turned up for the benefit of us who are utterly dependent on visible light ;)
CJefferson 5y ago
The first time I taught a blind student, I was teaching C. I walked up to them to find they were clearly irritated, and said something like "Nothing works, I don't understand". Looking at their computer, it appeared to be off. I said, delicately, that were they sure the computer was turned on. They laughed and turned their laptop's screen on, saying (as you say), they left it off to save battery life! The problem turned out to be they were using textedit, which while a nice light (and highly accessible) editor, by default turns "s into “”. Unfortunately, Apple's text-to-speech "helpfully" just described all these as speech quotes. This made it impossible to understand, from the compiler error, why the code wasn't working. A quick head into settings and the student was off (they soon changed to textmate, also very accessible).
- vmception 5y ago
  I hate text editor assumptions Well only the ones that don’t work for me But i hate how hard it is to find an assumptionless and offline text editor these days
  - asddubs 5y ago
    pluma is pretty good
  - throwaway77112 5y ago
    What about SciTE or Geany? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geany

ameister14 5y ago

This is a good reminder to me that while sometimes it's a pain in the neck to make sure there are alt tags for every image, or make sure things are in text form rather than a pdf, that you can tab through a site, etc. - it makes it so everyone can use the internet more easily and that's important. I work with restaurants a lot as a part of my job, and there's been a big push to make sure all the websites are ADA compliant; it's something all front end devs and digital marketers should keep in mind.

elliekelly 5y ago
If anyone is aware of a good resource for how to write alt tags for photos I would be most appreciative. I never know how much detail is appropriate. Is it a photo of “pink flowers” or “pink chrysanthemums” or “pink chrysanthemums in a glass vase on a dining room table”? Or maybe something else entirely? I’m never sure how to balance descriptiveness vs brevity.
- fullstop 5y ago
  I think that this would depend on whether or not the photo has a caption. Captions themselves should strive to answer the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why.
- kuu 5y ago
  Why are you sharing the photo? Because of the kind of flower? the color? the general organization of the dining room table? Depending on why you share the photo, you just have to put that so others can understand it too.
- fluix 5y ago
  Don't have a good resource of my own either, but I think I would prefer more descriptiveness. Reading the various options you've written gives me totally different ideas of the image in my mind so, especially if it's important to the website, more descriptiveness seems appropriate for higher accuracy.
- inamiyar 5y ago
  I recommend https://www.nngroup.com/reports/usability-guidelines-accessible-web-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/reports/usability-guidelines-accessi... If you want to really get into. A general note is the context around the image is just as important as the alt text.

fullstop 5y ago

Speaking of visually impaired people, please consider joining Be My Eyes [1], if you are a sighted person or if you have impaired vision. It is a fantastic idea and I get a lot out of using technology to help people "see" even though it happens so rarely. 1. https://www.bemyeyes.com/ https://www.bemyeyes.com/

werber 5y ago
I’ve had the app for a year or so and the few times I’ve gotten a call have been really interesting. I honestly look forward to them popping up
- fullstop 5y ago
  I've had it installed for a few years and have only received two calls. On two other occasions, though, I was notified but someone answered before I did. Both calls that I did answer were great, though!
72deluxe 5y ago
What a brilliant idea. I wish they'd do "be my ears" for most of the overly compressed albums that get released these days!!

josephg 5y ago

I think about this whenever someone posts about yet another new immediate mode UI library, or a custom layout engine they’ve built on top of HTML canvas. Generally all these kind of approaches make your app invisible to screen readers. The amount of work Apple, Google and others have put into making all this work is staggering, and life changing for people who are blind. Please don’t throw all that work away in your apps just because you think some UI toolkit is shiny.

inamiyar 5y ago
This as of now also applies to most Rust UI libs, hence why I don't use them. At least in that community each UI kit has an 'accessibility' issue though so hopefully improvements to come.
mumblemumble 5y ago
I was recently shopping for cross-platform desktop GUI toolkits, and discovered that there are really very few options that work well with screen readers. The only ones that seemed at all viable were Electron and JavaFX. .NET MAUI also seems very promising, and I like that they're actively blogging about it[1], but it hasn't been officially released yet. Anyway, it seemed to me that basically all the others either aren't accessible at all, or are only accessible on one or two of the target platforms, or have long-standing accessibility bugs that seem like they would render the UI unusable. [1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/the-journey-to-accessible-apps-screen-readers/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/the-journey-to-access...
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Does QT not work with screen readers?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    According to the information I was able to gather, it seemed that the answer to that question depends on whether you ask Qt, or a visually impaired user of Qt applications. I decided the latter opinion was the one I cared more about. I'm admittedly trying to play it very safe. I have zero proficiency with screen readers, so I'm not really able to independently verify any of this. All I know is that the GUI toolkit is one of the most expensive things to have to change later, so I want to be as close as I can possibly be to 100% sure that I won't end up in a situation where my projects have accessibility issues that I can't fix without changing the GUI toolkit.

roebk 5y ago

Even the accessibility features of the Apple Watch are impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXX1bMqe_gU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXX1bMqe_gU

twobitshifter 5y ago

How much do the vocal visually impaired use keyboards like the Braille keyboard shown and how much do they use voice to speech? A lot of people don’t want to talk to their phone, is the same resistance there for someone whose phone is always talking to them?

lukastyrychtr 5y ago
Personally, i mostly use braille input for longer messages and for shorter ones speech recognition or the standard keyboard.

wimagguc 5y ago

Interesting that she located the elements by tapping on the screen at certain positions, instead of using the left/right swipe _anywhere_ on the screen, which selects and reads the previous/next element. Having seen a lot of these videos before (we've been working on making apps truly accessible), I never actually came across someone who didn't use the left/right swipe as a first plan of action, but hey ho, you always learn. (I wonder if it depends on mental models, and whether you prefer building a 2D map of the screen to moving up and down in a 1-dimensional vector.)

miki123211 5y ago
I usually use left/right flicks for screens I haven't interacted with before, but I use taps to find elements I use often, particularly when they're easy to find. I sometimes use a mixture of both, i.e. tapping somewhere near the bottom of the screen to focus on the tab bar, then flicking left or right to find the right tab.
saagarjha 5y ago
Left/right flicks are difficult to use on screens with lots of content on them, unfortunately.

cletus 5y ago

It really seems to me that people like to be mad, get upset about marginal things that would only affect a small percentage of users (eg inability to side load apps on non-jailbroken iOS) and generally just focus on the negative. Maybe you could call it Outrage Addiction? So it's refreshing to see something like this where a modern smartphone has such a positive (even life-changing) impact on someone's life. This is also one of the things I find depressing about a significant chunk of Americans. Many will dismiss things like public transit as "people want to drive". Of course we then design cities and subsidize driving so it becomes a vicious circle and any public transit become unviable (to retrofit). But what about the people who can't drive? Or even can't afford to drive? Basically the American response is "F em".

fullstop 5y ago
You might find this to be interesting: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/ Curb cuts, in the USA, are a relatively recent addition and they benefit far more people than just wheelchair riders. Accessibility features can help everyone.
- cletus 5y ago
  This is mostly a good thing. I say "mostly" because it encourages scooter riders to use the sidewalk and pretty much anywhere I've been scooter-share riders are a public menace. One issue with these in NYC at least is the drainage just isn't designed for them. So anytime you get significant rain or snow melt you get pools of water that don't drain because the actual drains are elsewhere. If only the US could adopt Dutch junction design [1]. And don't get me started on the cyclist and pedestrian safety nightmare that is allowing people to turn right at red lights. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HDN9fUlqU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HDN9fUlqU8
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    Funny how sidewalks are usually mentioned in terms of mobile people. Every economically disadvantaged wheelchair-bound person I have ever seen has not used the sidewalk. They use the road. It's much less likely to have huge broken up chunks and obstructions, and it's less problematic to have to haul yourself up the incline or potentially crash down the decline. I wish we could somehow force everyone to live as somebody else for a week.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I'm a big believer in assistive tech. It isn't particularly difficult to implement, and the rewards can be great. Nowadays, the apps I'm developing support things like accessibility labels (voiceover), high-contrast mode, and scaling, in addition to the localization that I've always had. I also suggest using tools like Sim Daltonism[0], to evaluate colorblind accessibility. [0] https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/

avipars 5y ago

Is google's effort at accessibility up to par with apple's?

8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
No not really. If you put them in a list of features and compare them it seems pretty close, they have most of the same stuff. But if you actually learn and use both the android one is much worse.
handrous 5y ago
Not sure about Android, but ChromeOS' a11y features are embarrassingly poor, which surprised the hell out of me considering its primary audience is kids (some crazy-high percentage of Chromebook use must be in schools as student laptops, from what I've seen) and old people who have trouble with computers. And the settings menus are so terrible that it took me quite a while to convince myself they were as limited as they seemed and I wasn't just missing something (god knows my dad could never have found what they did have, on his own) but that part's just typical Google UI. Wish I'd gotten my dad to spring for an iPad w/ keyboard instead. Modern iOS may not be anywhere near as intuitive as in, say, iOS 6, but I could have configured it to be really good for him.
techrat 5y ago
Knowing people who work with others in accessibility, the discussion tends to be that Android and iOS are more or less on par... with Android having the edge in customization and iOS having the edge in consistency. So pretty much the same for everyone else...
miki123211 5y ago
Nope. In Poland where I live, most sighted people use Android, but the proportion of iPhone users is much higher amongst the blind population, despite the enormously high unemployment and bad social security. Apple's stuff is just way better. Those who have to use Android often replace Talkback with a Chinese screen reader called Commentary. That program apparently sends god knows what god knows where, and a screen reader has access to almost everything, but that's the price you have to pay for blindness, I guess.

musesum 5y ago

Have been discussing with a visually impaired friend how to rethink Accessibility. Over the last 20 years, I've seen him use Accessibility on Windows and then moving over to the Mac and finally the iPhone. The main problem is that VoiceOver is a speech+touch interface slapped onto a visual+touch interface. So, roughly 1/3rd speed. Moreover, 3rd party developers need to label elements, which they rarely do. I remember walking out of an Accessibility meetup at SalesForce waiting for a ride and seeing an attendee struggling with hailing an Uber. She was an experienced user but still struggling with her new iPhone. It had a larger screen, so all her muscle memory was foiled; the buttons had shifted. So, my friend and I are looking into rethinking the interface starting with 1st principles, like Fitt's Law. My guess is maybe a 9X improvement for visually impaired and 3X for folks with regular vision. Reserved the name touch.ai for that purpose.

zepto 5y ago
> Moreover, 3rd party developers need to label elements, which they rarely do. Seems like your approach would require 3rd party developers to build a completely new UI, so this doesn’t seem like a valid criticism of the current paradigm. It’s also the case that existing designs take into account Fitt’s law. Apple and Google are well aware of these. That said, I do share the intuition that an information architecture built around cognitive efficiency could be a lot better than we currently have. I’m skeptical you’ll find particularly easy to achieve - a lot of the complexity of current UI is incidental, but equally a lot is not.
- musesum 5y ago
  > Seems like your approach would require 3rd party developers to build a completely new UI Nope; no changes to existing UIs. Instead a driver, which has its own problems of deployment, as that requires convincing the hardware OEMs. > It’s also the case that existing designs take into account Fitt’s law. Apple and Google are well aware of these. Hmmmm ... I don't think so. I remember Bruce Tognazzini wrote about how Apple messed up Fitt's law in a version of OSX, where it was one pixel away from supporting an infinite target. More recently was Apple's addition of "reachability" which is an incredible kludge. Apple and Google may have usability research, but that is nothing compared to the deep research done at Xerox Parc. I recall seeing studies on the D* machines which measured the efficiency of several text editors, broken down by select, cut, paste, etc. Xerox first tested and measured alternatives before deciding on the best one. At the first WWDC for the iPhone (2007?), I went a design lab to review our first app. The designer suggest I put navigation at the top, out of reach. I asked him "What about Fitt's Law?" His reply was "who's that?" > I’m skeptical you’ll find particularly easy to achieve I agree; this is incredibly hard to achieve. It involves integrating several moving parts, leveraging: TPUs, crypto, and negotiating with OEMs like Apple. I believe the payoff is worth it.

junon 5y ago

Needs (2020) in the title.

jhallenworld 5y ago

Well I have a related question, maybe someone here has an answer. How can a paralyzed person hang up the phone / end a call? They can initiate a call using voice, but no way to hang up. So now, either the other end has to hang up. Or there is a long timeout, like 10 minutes or something.

microtherion 5y ago
Apple devices support "Switch Control", which stands for a family of devices that translate some signal that the user is capable of providing (blinking, tongue clicks, etc) into a button press. This can be used to select from a menu of options that the OS presents: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201370 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201370 Imagine a high tech version of Hector Salamanca's bell in "Breaking Bad": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWso-qRaIlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWso-qRaIlM I believe there are various levels of such control, depending on how much mobility the user has.
- jhallenworld 5y ago
  Do you know if a single button press can be mapped to "end call"? It's not clear from the pages. I wish Apple would have a mode which allowed you to do this with voice during a call...

goda90 5y ago

I remember watching a blind man teach a group and he had in one earbud to his phone and was just using his thumb to flip back and forth quickly through his notes as he was speaking, and taking comments and questions. I was impressed at the multitasking. I don't think I could listen to two different things so well, or talk while also processing audio notes.

spoonjim 5y ago
Humans can get good at most things pretty quickly. You have no skill at listening to two audio tracks at once because you’ve never tried. You’ve never tried because you have no need. If you were blind, or a forensic audio analyst, or a music producer, you’d get pretty good pretty quickly.

taywrobel 5y ago

Having several friends on the Apple a11y team, they really do work tirelessly to make the accessibility experience amazing. A lot of the engineers on that team have visual, audiotory, or other physical impairment as well, which is really cool to see and as a result they’re all really invested in making the product accessibility awesome. Personal favorite “Easter egg” in their accessibility utilities is the baroque voiceover descriptions for the built-in wallpapers. A current colleague of mine shared it last week as part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day - https://twitter.com/mattt/status/1395439320652148736?s=21 https://twitter.com/mattt/status/1395439320652148736?s=21

pxc 5y ago
> A lot of the engineers on that team have visual, audiotory, or other physical impairment as well Imo this is really the only way to get accessibility right in practice. It makes sense that Apple has a reputation for good accessibility integration.
- bbarn 5y ago
  With that attitude, only the most elite and large companies would even consider it. It's not that you need someone with a handicap, it's simply that you need to consider them when you're building something.
  - atty 5y ago
    Almost any product that is built without input from the people who are going to use it is going to be inherently worse. Imagine a team creating a camera from scratch who are not photographers, and who never included any photographers in the design process. It would be a functioning camera, I’m sure, but it’s usability for real-world use would almost certainly be worse than those developed by teams that include professional photographers. The effect may be less for accessibility features, but it would still be there. I’d highly suggest anyone building out accessibility features to at least consult with disability advocates and other end users.
  - pxc 5y ago

jgauth 5y ago

This kind of thing is really inspiring to me. Are there any similar projects I can contribute to? I would love to work on software that has such a clear positive impact on someone's life, like in this video.

miki123211 5y ago
https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda If there's one open source project that changed blind people's lives, that's it. It made screen readers go from about $1000 to practically free, at least if you're an individual, not a corporation. Alternatively, learn accessibility APIs for <platform>, and then start fixing bugs in open source apps. The meetings/messaging space could definitely use some work, for example. Stuff like Signal/Telegram, accessibility wise, is much worse than WhatsApp, same with Zoom vs. Jitsi.

open-source-ux 5y ago

I recently posted this video playlist of quick accessibility tips for websites (each tip is just 1 minute). Many websites don't follow these best practices. However, you might be surprised by how simple and low-effort it is to incorporate these tips into any website. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTqm2yVMMUKWTr9XWdW5hJ9tk512Ow0SE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTqm2yVMMUKWTr9XWdW5h...

Dah00n 5y ago

I'm not visually impaired but have been doing some work at a local institute for visually impaired people and did setup some phones for WiFi there. I have never tested these accessibility settings on smartphones myself so I have no idea why but ever single phone I saw there were Android phones. Now I'm curious why since it seems people here see iPhones as a better choice.

radley 5y ago
If it's academic, Android makes sense because it's easy to side-load experimental apps. iPhone appears to be better for consumers due to native solutions.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
Language could be the one. Android supports vastly more. It's quite sad how behind Apple is. If you happen to be from a "small" country with under 10 million people - forget it.

nojs 5y ago

The Braille typing is amazing. She interacts so smoothly and quickly with the keyboard. I wonder why she doesn’t use voice input though?

zozbot234 5y ago
It's surely amazing when you account for the fact that she's poking at a frickin' touchscreen with no visual closed-loop feedback. But as a UX mode it sucks. Why not just pair a physical Bluetooth gamepad with actual buttons?
- throwaway77112 5y ago
  Touchscreens have vibration feedback when clicking buttons etc
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    That doesn't help with picking the right button, though. She's sort of coping with it by hovering her fingers on the intended portions of the screen but the way she's doing it seems highly unergonomic, and a physical device could also be more efficient.
csomar 5y ago
She's writing on that Braille keyboard faster than your average. Voice input is not a quite private method, too.
toast0 5y ago
> She interacts so smoothly and quickly with the keyboard. I wonder why she doesn’t use voice input though? Presumably because interactimg with the keyboard is smooth and quick. A keyboard is also private and works in noisy environments. Some people (including me) would prefer not to speak when avoidable, jusr as some would prefer not to type when avoidable. It may be easier (or higher throughput) to use audio feedback from the computer while providing touch inputs than if both feedback and input are audio. Personally, while I've spent lots of time training typing, the learning curve on speech to text is too high and the apparenr reward too meager for me to go much beyond the bare minimum (I can cancel many accidental summonings of speech interfaces)

spoonjim 5y ago

Deleted

lalos 5y ago
It's also a side effect of good abstractions, so since they own all the stack they are able to iterate on their own APIs. I would even argue it helps debug those abstractions, you are basically swapping the last layer of user-computer interaction.

cafed00d 5y ago

There will come a day when Apple will lean in heavily on Accessibility just like they've recently amped up Privacy in ads lately. I, for one, absolutely love this about Apple! Accessibility is a beautiful core value to strive for (Privacy and others too). But I particularly appreciate Accessibility. Good designs/affordances such as gestural trackpads or mouse cursor support on iPads are all accessibility features, except they cover a major swath of humanity rather than those traditionally considered "less-abled". Disclaimer: I work at Apple so I'm biased. More likely, my heroes at Apple such as Sue Booker are accessibility experts -- so I'm always fan-boying over these features!

escapologybb 5y ago
I would just like to say that there isn't a company on the planet making consumer electronics that leans in harder than Apple does, as a quadriplegic I can get an able-bodied monkey to take my new iShiny out-of-the-box and from then on I can do everything you can do on that device. They really are world leaders at this stuff, I can use my right index finger and my mouth and with just that I can use Apple products to run my own company and talk to people on HN (you know, the important stuff!). ---
escapologybb 5y ago
edited to add: over the past few weeks Apple and their accessibility approach has come up a few times on HN, and when I responded there have been so many questions that I really really wanted to answer. However, not had the energy to be able to respond in a timely manner and certainly not quickly enough and set the article is still on the front page of HN. Basically because quadriplegia. So I know that there are are a lot of questions about use my computer, and that's largely because The people on HN are genuinely and wonderfully curious. The question that seems to fascinate able-bodied engineers goes something like this: "imagine coming home and finding somebody had removed every switch, button and lever from every device in your environment; What would you do?" That's the question I had to answer before I could get to where I don't get a job and have to start my own company as a result! So my question is how best do people think I should share this information? Blog post, Twitter thread (eww) or messenger pigeon?

econnors 5y ago

One thing I've thought about – how much harm did the Chrome team do by adding default outlines to focused elements? Although well intentioned, I think making it the default for all users resulted in pretty much every website adding "outline: 0" to their css: https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+remove+blue+border https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+remove+blue+border, which ultimately harmed the ecosystem for keyboard only users.

bubbab 5y ago
Hopefully this will start to go away soon. I learned recently that Chrome 90 (released April 2021) replaced :focus with :focus-visible in the default UA style sheet, so the focus ring will only show when using the keyboard now. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/gv69rSngHDY/m/B_p8K21kAgAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/gv69r...

symisc_devel 5y ago

Shameless plug: One of our engineer developed a Vision Impaired OCR app that scan and read text aloud in the user favorite language and accent with built-in TTS and translation service. Basically, the app is voice driven and require minimal interaction. All the user has to do is take a picture and the scan process starts immediately and TTS takes place after scan. App homepage: https://i2s.symisc.net https://i2s.symisc.net https://apps.apple.com/us/app/talkie-ocr-image-to-speech/id1512795289 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/talkie-ocr-image-to-speech/id1...

0xedb 5y ago

Really helpful resource for web devs: https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.2/ https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.2/

teekert 5y ago

Wow very impressive! She could probably save a lot of battery too, there is no reason for that screen to be on. Sort of mind blowing when you think about it as a seeing person.

mcbutterbunz 5y ago

I think its pretty cool how quickly the audio is spoken too. I bet that saves quite a bit of time over a slower natural tempo.

ramraj07 5y ago
This person probably slowed it down, many users have it ramped up to even more insane speeds.
user-the-name 5y ago
This is with really slow audio. The default setting is much faster, and can be turned up even further than that.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

uses 5y ago

A couple years ago we were able to hire someone with a visual impairment to do some testing on our website. I consider myself to be very knowledgeable about accessibility, I use a screen reader to test, etc. But watching someone use something I made, and struggle to complete the task because of a fairly straightforward disability they overcome every day in many ways, but they couldn’t get that thing I made to work? That’s an incredibly humbling experience. Never felt anything like that before. I’d highly recommend doing some testing with a real user if you ever have the opportunity.

imhoguy 5y ago

Could vibration be enhanced so that would create another dimention(s) of haptic feedback? Kind of vary on pitch, length, strength, and Morse-like patterns to augument voice over.

feudalism 5y ago

Well, what a nice ad for Apple!

SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago

> To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please email licensing@storyful.com Is this an undisclosed ad?

AceJohnny2 5y ago
It means the tweet went viral (9.5M views of the video alone), licensing company noticed and contacted the OP to serve as a licensing middle-man, which OP accepted and publicised.
- SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
  I see, that's an interesting model and impressively fast turnaround.

eevilspock 5y ago

I just asked Kristy if she might "pop" by. https://twitter.com/vassudanagunta/status/1398017781040361482 https://twitter.com/vassudanagunta/status/139801778104036148...

jordanmorgan10 5y ago

If you want to get level with the user in that video, turn on Screen Curtain on your iPhone and try to use it. Very, very humbling experience as an iOS dev. Here's how to turn it on: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443

kordlessagain 5y ago

I can barely read this because I forgot my glasses.

major505 5y ago

I worked many months making a couple of bank app accessible to visually impared people. Hard work. Luckly I had a team that would test every version until they could themselfs use the app correctly. In the end I was so used to test apps in this mode,that I put a shortcut in my phone so I could used it with headphones while the phone was in my pocket in the subway, or while I'm driving so I don't take the eyes of the road.

jaimex2 5y ago

Funny, I thought all iPhone users were impaired.

logbiscuitswave 5y ago

When talking with my colleagues about accessibility I like to propose an exercise: “turn off your monitor and now try to use your feature.” After getting some uncomfortable laughs or overall confusion, it presents a great opportunity to demonstrate things like screen readers and keyboard navigation. A lot of people don’t even realize just how many accessibility features are built into operating systems these days. These days if you’re a Windows developer Microsoft has some great a11y tools like Accessibility Insights that will do a lot of automated testing for you as well. While I don’t rely on AT (even though I am an a keyboard navigation enthusiast) it’s an area I’m passionate about. I like to encourage others to not think of a11y as an afterthought.

Technomaniacz 5y ago

hey, quick question. can't iPhones for visually impaired users fix their brightness to ultra low(beyond standard lowest)? since everything is being read out, it'd probably save a lot of battery and make sure the phone lasts longer.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305040

teekert 5y ago

Imagine she would have the screen off, just holding a black glass slab... Sort of makes me feel like I am touch and hearing impaired in stead of her being visually impaired.

ChrisRR 5y ago

On the flip side, I have a blind friend who is in the market for a new phone right now to replace her old nokia with custom text to speech software. Half the buttons have fallen off. It's very difficult to find phones with physical buttons nowadays and the specialist ones cost the earth. As nice as touch screens are, remember that physical buttons are more helpful for blind people. She knows that text messages are 2 clicks down in the menu, calls are one click, contacts are 3 clicks, etc. rather than having to swipe around and find the app There in lies another issue with iphones for the blind, you can't remove all the other gumpf you don't need. If there were just 3 big screen filling buttons with phone, texts and contacts, that would be easier to use than smaller icons.