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Blind person here, happy to answer any questions. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone born blind, so whatever ends up working well for me might not wor

Blind person here, happy to answer any questions. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone born blind, so whatever ends up working well for me might not work as well for someone just losing their sight, though I tried to take that fact into account. The most immediate suggestions that come to mind are: 1. Learn to use a screen reader. You don't need an expensive one. NVDA on Windows, Voice Over on the Mac and Orca on Linux are the way to go. NVDA is probably the least quirky and easiest to find resources for. I'd recommend against Orca, while it can be used, we all know how tricky Linux on the desktop can get, and throwing a screen reader into the mix doesn't help. 2. Forget about the mouse. Screen reader users use the keyboard exclusively. Try disabling the screen too, many sighted users who practice with a screen reader end up relying on what they can see, which makes things more difficult. 3. Accept that inaccessibility is a fact of life, and it has to be worked around. Not all tools are accessible, and some are more accessible than others. If you're looking for an accessible IDE, Vs Code is great and constantly improving. Emacspeak exists, but I don't actually know anyone who uses it, and I know quite a few blind people in tech. Some things that you're now doing through a GUI are best done via the command line, Git is a good example. Programming tools usually aren't the problem, it's everything else that causes issues. Slack and Zoom work great, for example, but many smaller collaboration tools don't. 4. Not all areas of programming are equally accessible. I can't imagine a blind dev working exclusively on the front end, where there's a lot of CSS involved, and where you have to look at Figma designs and debug issues solely based on screenshots. Backend stuff is much more accessible, same with lower-level systems programming. Dev Ops is very much a mixed bag. I'm happy to answer any further questions either here or via email, my HN username at gmail dot com.

tyre 5y ago
Do you have experience with Google docs? I’ve heard that it is more accessible than Dropbox Paper and am interested to know if that’s been your experience. We have a heavy documentation culture at Stripe so as a developer these tools matter a lot.
- miki123211 5y ago
  No idea about Dropbox paper, but those tools are hard to make accessible, so I wouldn't be hopeful. Google Docs works, there are two accessibility modes, none of which is enabled by default. The old, standard mode hides all content from screen readers and uses a built-in micro screen-reader that outputs whatever is needed to a live region, which your screen reader then reads. The newer one, called braille mode, actually shows you the content, only relying on ARIA when absolutely necessary. Both have their pros and cons, but I'd recommend using Braille Mode for most things, unless you run into use cases that the legacy mode handles better. I've heard people say that some really advanced docs features have accessibility issues, but I haven't used it that extensively to confirm that. As always, Etherpad, the open source / non-proprietary / privacy-friendly alternative boasts about being accessible but has so many a11y bugs that it's basically unusable. As always, markdown over git works better than any web-based solution ever could.
  - nunez 5y ago
    I have my gripes with Google, but from working there, I can definitely give them props for how much they cared about accessibility. It’s in their mission statement, and they take that seriously.
    - jscholes 5y ago
      > I have my gripes with Google, but from working there, I can definitely give them props for how much they cared about accessibility. Accessibility at Google suffers in the same way as most UX-related things suffer at Google. Namely, the fact that everything is constantly reinvented from scratch, rather than there being one unified way to do it. As a screen reader user, I can say that in some Google products, there can be instances of what, on the surface, should be exactly the same component, but was apparently developed in multiple different ways. This leads to the constant need to work out how accessible each instance is (and e.g. what keyboard support it has), even though I dealt with the same UI pattern minutes ago.
MathCodeLove 5y ago
This is all fantastic! Thank you so much!!
johnx5c 5y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm curious how changes in graphical user interfaces of programs and operating systems over the years have impacted your workflows. Do you develop on Windows or the command line?
- miki123211 5y ago
  I'm a Mac user these days, before that, it was Windows with WSL, Notepad++, Windows Explorer and remote VS Code for bigger projects. I use the command line a lot, but some things are best done with a GUI. I'm not a fan of command line editors, for example, as screen readers don't always deal well with TUIs. They can be used, but they bring their own set of headaches which I just don't want to deal with. Updates definitely affect your workflow, you need to be careful about what updates you install. This is less of a problem with coding-related tools, but definitely a nightmare when mobile apps are concerned, for example. Web apps are even worse, as you can't avoid updates that completely break accessibility. I've heard stories of people getting in big trouble because a web app that was critical for their job suddenly had a UI overhaul and stopped being accessible. OS updates can cause trouble, in fact, Windows constantly breaking things with their forced updates was one of the major reasons why I switched to Mac OS. It wasn't even accessibility-related, most of it was basic stuff like sound.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    Which OSes and devices have the best accessibility in your experience?
    - miki123211 5y ago
      This is not an easy question to answer. iOS and Mac OS definitely win in terms of what's built-in, the screen reader they come with is more than enough. JAWS, a paid screen reader for Windows, is perfect for enterprise environments, as it works well with Microsoft Office and Common productivity applications and lets IT administrators enforce security policies. At also has a vibrant market for scripts, both free and paid. Those scripts add accessibility to third-party apps. Companies can even hire script developers to implement accessibility for the internal apps employees need, which is often important in big corp / government, and it is in those environments where JAWS thrives. NVDA, the free Windows screen reader, is more suited to software development work than JAWS in my opinion. It's written in Python, which makes it much more flexible, but also much harder to learn script development. There's a big collection of addons and plugins of all kinds, from speech synthesizers and braille display drivers to full on remote access suites (which no enterprise security policy can block), but all of those addons need to be released as GPL, which discourages any development on addons for internal and professional applications. In many countries, NVDA has replaced JAWS entirely, even in the enterprise. Narrator, the built-in Windows screen reader, is getting better with each year, but it still isn't on par with other solutions that we have. It's great for installing another screen reader or figuring out why your existing one doesn't work, but that's about it. Linux is a shitshow, free software zealots will claim it's perfectly accessible, while many problems still remain. It can be used, but it's probably the least accessible out of the big three, at least when the GUI is concerned. Android works, people use it, but iOS works much better. IPhones are much more popular in the blind community, even in countries where they're extremely expensive, even considering the fact that blind people are often unemployed or have low-wage jobs. Android has quite a few rough edges and thinks might not work the same way on different phones. It's been getting better over the years, but even something as simple as accessibility on first setup isn't guaranteed, something that Apple has basically figured out more than 10 years ago. It's much more common for an Android phone or a Windows PC to fail in a way that requires sighted assistance than it is for a device running iOS or Mac OS.
User23 5y ago
I worked with a totally blind developer at a top tier tech company. He used a braille terminal. It was really interesting to watch him work. There’s no denying blind persons face unique challenges, but I’ve been seriously impressed with the fortitude and adaptability I’ve seen them display. As an aside I wish more developers would think about accessibility. It helps everyone. I highly recommend participating in dining in the dark or a similar program to learn real sympathy for the challenges blind persons face and to see how capable they are of overcoming them.
- atarian 5y ago
  Braille hardware seems pretty expensive for what you get. Last time I looked most of the devices costed $800+ USD for a single row of 24 letters.
  - User23 5y ago
    Many (most?) states offer grants to help pay for adaptive hardware. And I’m completely certain any company worth working for will spring for it too. I’m a sighted person and I’m not going to pretend I know what the right technology for any particular blind person is, but computer braille really is fascinating. Edit: I’m not a hardware guy, but it feels like an 80x24 or larger computer braille display is well within the capabilities of today’s hardware hackers. Imagine a reverse mechanical keyswitch with 8 dots that can be put on a PCB of arbitrary size in whatever configuration to understand what I have in mind. There’s probably not much money to be made, but someone with a passion and existing financial success could really make a difference.
    - beecafe 5y ago
      The issue is that to move 80x24 dots independently you need 80*24 physical actuators (or an enormous mechanical multiplexer), which is very expensive. Industrial looms and knitting machines have that but nothing much else does. However, the technology to solve computer braille without needing width*height mechanical actuators actually exists - the fluidistor, or liquid transistor - but is only just now getting serious development, and it's mostly in haptic feedback labs.
umvi 5y ago
Do you play computer games? What are some good blind accessible ones?
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  I would get very heavily into Inform / Interactive Fiction / Old School Text Adventures, for sure
- miki123211 5y ago
  Go to audio games.net. That's a whole website dedicated to accessible gaming. From the more mainstream ones, The Last of Us 2 has famously implemented accessibility. I haven't played it, as it's one of the only games for the PS4 that is accessible, but people are saying that it almost plays itself when accessibility is enabled, taking away part of the enjoyment. Other mainstream games are getting accessibility mods, Hearthstone has a really great one. Audio Quake, an accessibility mod for Quake, was also quite popular back in its day. Text based games, from Infocom's interactive fiction to MUDS and MOOs are also pretty accessible, a significant portion of people still playing them are blind.
  - tempestn 5y ago
    Card games like Hearthstone seem like they'd be great options, but the turn time limits sure would be challenging! It can be hard enough to keep up at times when you can take in game state at a glance and take actions in an instant with with mouse.
  - aurelius12 5y ago
    Can confirm! I run a company that has five MUDs, and we have quite a few blind players as well as at least a couple of blind employees. I'm not visually-impaired, but I like knowing that our players who are are "seeing" the same game world in their heads as fully sighted players, or at least seeing the world from an equal perspective.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    > but people are saying that it almost plays itself when accessibility is enabled, taking away part of the enjoyment. I don't envy anyone trying to solve this problem, seems next to impossible to do a live action game above a certain level of accessibility. Just the time you have to communicate what's on the screen (much less being able to quickly communicate what's on screen) is so tight on a shooter for example. Found a neat video [0] of TLoU2's accessibility features. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHN5v3NJ9ko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHN5v3NJ9ko
akomtu 5y ago
Has anybody tried to use mouse to 'echo-locate' parts of the screen? Bats, with far simpler brains, can see complex scenery and prey in real time, so I'm sure a small portion of the visual cortex could figure echo location. The idea is to generate sound based on close surroundings of the cursor, in real time. To an inexperienced user, this sound would be meaningless, but witj practice that sound would let the user see.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  There have definitely been attempts for mapping the real world, but the ones I've seen have been quite primitive. I started my own project around this, but I never had the time to finish anything useful.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Why would that be better than using a keyboard to navigate between discrete units on the screen? There are a set number of clickable points on the screen, why make a game for the blind user to try to echo-locate those spots instead of just letting them cycle through them? The point of a screen for a sighted user is to make a concise way to transmit existing information... it is only a good way if you are sighted.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    Well, how do you screen-read a geometric shape?
    - gugagore 5y ago
      how do you echolocate a shape? It seems you are suggesting some mapping of a 2D visual scene to audio. If that is useful in practice, it is one of many possible interfaces that blind people could use. It wouldn't supplant screen readers.
- ajb 5y ago
  Third hand report, but apparently academics have tried to simulate what an echo locating person would hear from a 3d world, but not yet managed to convey the experience to a blind person over audio. IE there is some effect that they haven't captured yet So Doom for echo locators not yet possible.
andrew_ 5y ago
I'd like to say, as someone who has not been exposed at any degree to those who are blind and use computers/internet; I am very taken aback with the composition and vocabulary you're able to convey in written form having not been sighted. It's truly impressive.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I agree that blind people are impressive in their ability to navigate a sighted world, but it seems strange to find the written word part to be the impressive part... the language part of their brain is fine. I don't see anything they wrote that seems like only a sighted person would be able to understand...
  - miki123211 5y ago
    The written word is (kind of) the impressive part. The spelling rules of English are not easy to master, and blind people have much fewer reading opportunities than the sighted. You don't see labels on the products you buy, you don't see the billboards from a passing car, you often don't even read books or articles, as listening to synthesized speech is much faster, cheaper and more comfortable than reading Braille. The only reason my spelling is as good as it is is the fact that I used to listen to English text with a Polish speech synthesizer for most of my life, as I was too lazy to switch languages. Polish is (almost) phonetically perfect, so I was hearing things almost exactly as they were written. This made my spelling much better than that of most blind Americans. Words like cystom (system), keybored or even polotission (politician) can sometimes be seen in the blind community.
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      That is super interesting! Thanks for sharing
    - nunez 5y ago
      Absolutely incredible. Thank you for sharing this.
    - deleted 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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cinntaile 5y ago
When you say that small tools are lacking. I assume this is more than a simple lack of hotkeys, perhaps you can elaborate a bit?
- miki123211 5y ago
  It's usually unlabeled buttons, unlabelled icons, divs that change color on click instead of actual honest to god native HTML checkboxes, inaccessible drag-and-drop, no heading structure which makes navigation harder, weird date pickers that screen readers cannot handle and so on.
grayfaced 5y ago
How do you deal with computer troubles? If your OS fails to boot, are you basically stuck getting help?
- miki123211 5y ago
  On the PC, yes, essentially yes. Using a mobile app to OCR what is on the screen (via the phone camera) sometimes helps. There are also some apps[1][2] where sighted people can connect to us via video call and help us with whatever we need at the moment. On the Mac, this is not an issue. The whole recovery environment is 100% accessible, at least on M1. I think it was more problematic on Intel, but you could still figure it out.
devoutsalsa 5y ago
Is multiple monitors a thing for blind people? I’m wondering if there’s a difference between switching between windows and switching between monitors.
- lproven 5y ago
  My one blind techie friend doesn't use a monitor at all. Why would he?
  - devoutsalsa 5y ago
    Is multiple screen readers a thing?
    - lproven 5y ago
      Define what you mean. As it stands the question is unanwerably vague. Yes, there are multiple screen readers. Screen readers do not need or particularly use a monitor; monitors are for sighted people. Screen readers read what is displayed at and following their cursor. This means screenreader users need to learn to control a system with 2 cursors: one for entering text, and a different one for reading it. People asking about multiple screens for blind users are basically asking which colour of monitor bezel blind people prefer. This is not a question. It's irrelevant. Some OSes will not boot or will not display a GUI unless they detect a monitor, although there are HDMI dummies that can fix that. So, some blind users may have an old monitor connected, just so their OS will boot.
ldoughty 5y ago
Amazing reply. Is there a community for blind developers? I could see that being a helpful resource.
hnbad 5y ago
How do you deal with HN itself? The site is remarkably inaccessible.
- miki123211 5y ago
  HN's accessibility issues can be worked around. The only big one that's actually pretty annoying is the lack of hierarchy, it's hard to figure out who is replying to whom.
  - pflanze 5y ago
    Do you have an example of a website with a comment hierarchy that works well for you? I'm pondering writing an alternative frontend for HN with accessibility in mind--I don't have experience with that, and am not affiliated with HN, but am willing to see if I could make this work. Would you also appreciate an easier way to find replies to your own comments?
    - miki123211 5y ago
      Not a website, but Dystopia for Reddit, an iOS client, does this well. It just announces the level of each comment, where direct replies to a post are l1, replies to those are l2 and so on. This is probably the easiest way.
    - jscholes 5y ago
      > Do you have an example of a website with a comment hierarchy that works well for you? I'm not the original commenter, but I am a screen reader user who works in accessibility. Unfortunately, I don't have too many good examples; the problem of hierarchical commenting systems being difficult to navigate is common across the web. There is a Reddit client for iOS, Dystopia[1], that does this extremely well for users of the built-in screen reader, VoiceOver[2], by allowing entire threads/subthreads to be collapsed and/or skipped over. On the web, you'd want to look into using hierarchical headings, nested lists and the like, to allow the structure to be conveyed semantically. HN is inexcusably bad at this, as there isn't a single heading anywhere on the site. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/ [2] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/turn-on-and-practice-voiceover-iph3e2e415f/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/turn-on-and-practice-...
thiht 5y ago
> I can't imagine a blind dev working exclusively on the front end That’s unfortunate! Clearly blind people are the most qualified to work on one specific frontend job: accessibility. The fact that it’s extremely hard to automate accessibility testing in a meaningful way would make it a full time job at most places that take accessibility seriously.
- miki123211 5y ago
  Yes and no. Screen reader testing is extremely important and that's something blind people do well. However, if there's a link on a website that the screen reader cannot see, a blind person won't report that as an accessibility issue because they won't even know it's there. Other things, such as testing with Zoom or high contrast mode, also require sight.
  - monkeynotes 5y ago
    If your test is broken if the test script leaves out the button. Sighted developers and QEs will miss testing elements if they aren't aware they should be there.
    - dathinab 5y ago
      Most tooling and test sites are in practice at least slightly broken.
      - monkeynotes 5y ago
        I'm talking about a level playing field between sighted and blind QA, they are both subject to missing problems if the test is poorly designed. The fact that "most" tests are broken is related but tangential to my observation.
  - jscholes 5y ago
    > if there's a link on a website that the screen reader cannot see, a blind person won't report that as an accessibility issue because they won't even know it's there. This is highly variable. As a screen reader user who works in accessibility with a software engineering focus, I don't consider a test to be complete if I've only evaluated what the page exposes to the accessibility API. Assessing the rendered DOM by hand, testing on different viewports where controls may be slightly or completely different, etc., are just as critical to the testing process as trying to simply use the page. But, I recognise that there are many accessibility testers out there without such a technical focus, and it is true to say that they may gloss over something if it is completely missing in the accessibility tree.
mhitza 5y ago
> Dev Ops is very much a mixed bag. Have any examples of issues while doing DevOps? For that type of work, in my own perception, I deal 100% of the time with text (be it error messages, or automation code).
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  One issue is the inaccessibility of graphs. I wonder if miki123211 had anything else in mind.
  - miki123211 5y ago
    That is one thing. Other issues might include having to use VNC or KVM, no sound by default on Windows server, captchas in the AWS cloud console etc. If you're doing normal Linux server administration via ssh or dealing with Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes or other command line tools, you should be fine though.

tyre 5y ago

Do you have experience with Google docs? I’ve heard that it is more accessible than Dropbox Paper and am interested to know if that’s been your experience. We have a heavy documentation culture at Stripe so as a developer these tools matter a lot.

miki123211 5y ago
No idea about Dropbox paper, but those tools are hard to make accessible, so I wouldn't be hopeful. Google Docs works, there are two accessibility modes, none of which is enabled by default. The old, standard mode hides all content from screen readers and uses a built-in micro screen-reader that outputs whatever is needed to a live region, which your screen reader then reads. The newer one, called braille mode, actually shows you the content, only relying on ARIA when absolutely necessary. Both have their pros and cons, but I'd recommend using Braille Mode for most things, unless you run into use cases that the legacy mode handles better. I've heard people say that some really advanced docs features have accessibility issues, but I haven't used it that extensively to confirm that. As always, Etherpad, the open source / non-proprietary / privacy-friendly alternative boasts about being accessible but has so many a11y bugs that it's basically unusable. As always, markdown over git works better than any web-based solution ever could.
- nunez 5y ago
  I have my gripes with Google, but from working there, I can definitely give them props for how much they cared about accessibility. It’s in their mission statement, and they take that seriously.
  - jscholes 5y ago
    > I have my gripes with Google, but from working there, I can definitely give them props for how much they cared about accessibility. Accessibility at Google suffers in the same way as most UX-related things suffer at Google. Namely, the fact that everything is constantly reinvented from scratch, rather than there being one unified way to do it. As a screen reader user, I can say that in some Google products, there can be instances of what, on the surface, should be exactly the same component, but was apparently developed in multiple different ways. This leads to the constant need to work out how accessible each instance is (and e.g. what keyboard support it has), even though I dealt with the same UI pattern minutes ago.

MathCodeLove 5y ago

This is all fantastic! Thank you so much!!

johnx5c 5y ago

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm curious how changes in graphical user interfaces of programs and operating systems over the years have impacted your workflows. Do you develop on Windows or the command line?

miki123211 5y ago
I'm a Mac user these days, before that, it was Windows with WSL, Notepad++, Windows Explorer and remote VS Code for bigger projects. I use the command line a lot, but some things are best done with a GUI. I'm not a fan of command line editors, for example, as screen readers don't always deal well with TUIs. They can be used, but they bring their own set of headaches which I just don't want to deal with. Updates definitely affect your workflow, you need to be careful about what updates you install. This is less of a problem with coding-related tools, but definitely a nightmare when mobile apps are concerned, for example. Web apps are even worse, as you can't avoid updates that completely break accessibility. I've heard stories of people getting in big trouble because a web app that was critical for their job suddenly had a UI overhaul and stopped being accessible. OS updates can cause trouble, in fact, Windows constantly breaking things with their forced updates was one of the major reasons why I switched to Mac OS. It wasn't even accessibility-related, most of it was basic stuff like sound.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  Which OSes and devices have the best accessibility in your experience?
  - miki123211 5y ago
    This is not an easy question to answer. iOS and Mac OS definitely win in terms of what's built-in, the screen reader they come with is more than enough. JAWS, a paid screen reader for Windows, is perfect for enterprise environments, as it works well with Microsoft Office and Common productivity applications and lets IT administrators enforce security policies. At also has a vibrant market for scripts, both free and paid. Those scripts add accessibility to third-party apps. Companies can even hire script developers to implement accessibility for the internal apps employees need, which is often important in big corp / government, and it is in those environments where JAWS thrives. NVDA, the free Windows screen reader, is more suited to software development work than JAWS in my opinion. It's written in Python, which makes it much more flexible, but also much harder to learn script development. There's a big collection of addons and plugins of all kinds, from speech synthesizers and braille display drivers to full on remote access suites (which no enterprise security policy can block), but all of those addons need to be released as GPL, which discourages any development on addons for internal and professional applications. In many countries, NVDA has replaced JAWS entirely, even in the enterprise. Narrator, the built-in Windows screen reader, is getting better with each year, but it still isn't on par with other solutions that we have. It's great for installing another screen reader or figuring out why your existing one doesn't work, but that's about it. Linux is a shitshow, free software zealots will claim it's perfectly accessible, while many problems still remain. It can be used, but it's probably the least accessible out of the big three, at least when the GUI is concerned. Android works, people use it, but iOS works much better. IPhones are much more popular in the blind community, even in countries where they're extremely expensive, even considering the fact that blind people are often unemployed or have low-wage jobs. Android has quite a few rough edges and thinks might not work the same way on different phones. It's been getting better over the years, but even something as simple as accessibility on first setup isn't guaranteed, something that Apple has basically figured out more than 10 years ago. It's much more common for an Android phone or a Windows PC to fail in a way that requires sighted assistance than it is for a device running iOS or Mac OS.

User23 5y ago

I worked with a totally blind developer at a top tier tech company. He used a braille terminal. It was really interesting to watch him work. There’s no denying blind persons face unique challenges, but I’ve been seriously impressed with the fortitude and adaptability I’ve seen them display. As an aside I wish more developers would think about accessibility. It helps everyone. I highly recommend participating in dining in the dark or a similar program to learn real sympathy for the challenges blind persons face and to see how capable they are of overcoming them.

atarian 5y ago
Braille hardware seems pretty expensive for what you get. Last time I looked most of the devices costed $800+ USD for a single row of 24 letters.
- User23 5y ago
  Many (most?) states offer grants to help pay for adaptive hardware. And I’m completely certain any company worth working for will spring for it too. I’m a sighted person and I’m not going to pretend I know what the right technology for any particular blind person is, but computer braille really is fascinating. Edit: I’m not a hardware guy, but it feels like an 80x24 or larger computer braille display is well within the capabilities of today’s hardware hackers. Imagine a reverse mechanical keyswitch with 8 dots that can be put on a PCB of arbitrary size in whatever configuration to understand what I have in mind. There’s probably not much money to be made, but someone with a passion and existing financial success could really make a difference.
  - beecafe 5y ago
    The issue is that to move 80x24 dots independently you need 80*24 physical actuators (or an enormous mechanical multiplexer), which is very expensive. Industrial looms and knitting machines have that but nothing much else does. However, the technology to solve computer braille without needing width*height mechanical actuators actually exists - the fluidistor, or liquid transistor - but is only just now getting serious development, and it's mostly in haptic feedback labs.

umvi 5y ago

Do you play computer games? What are some good blind accessible ones?

Eric_WVGG 5y ago
I would get very heavily into Inform / Interactive Fiction / Old School Text Adventures, for sure
miki123211 5y ago
Go to audio games.net. That's a whole website dedicated to accessible gaming. From the more mainstream ones, The Last of Us 2 has famously implemented accessibility. I haven't played it, as it's one of the only games for the PS4 that is accessible, but people are saying that it almost plays itself when accessibility is enabled, taking away part of the enjoyment. Other mainstream games are getting accessibility mods, Hearthstone has a really great one. Audio Quake, an accessibility mod for Quake, was also quite popular back in its day. Text based games, from Infocom's interactive fiction to MUDS and MOOs are also pretty accessible, a significant portion of people still playing them are blind.
- tempestn 5y ago
  Card games like Hearthstone seem like they'd be great options, but the turn time limits sure would be challenging! It can be hard enough to keep up at times when you can take in game state at a glance and take actions in an instant with with mouse.
- aurelius12 5y ago
  Can confirm! I run a company that has five MUDs, and we have quite a few blind players as well as at least a couple of blind employees. I'm not visually-impaired, but I like knowing that our players who are are "seeing" the same game world in their heads as fully sighted players, or at least seeing the world from an equal perspective.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  > but people are saying that it almost plays itself when accessibility is enabled, taking away part of the enjoyment. I don't envy anyone trying to solve this problem, seems next to impossible to do a live action game above a certain level of accessibility. Just the time you have to communicate what's on the screen (much less being able to quickly communicate what's on screen) is so tight on a shooter for example. Found a neat video [0] of TLoU2's accessibility features. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHN5v3NJ9ko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHN5v3NJ9ko

akomtu 5y ago

Has anybody tried to use mouse to 'echo-locate' parts of the screen? Bats, with far simpler brains, can see complex scenery and prey in real time, so I'm sure a small portion of the visual cortex could figure echo location. The idea is to generate sound based on close surroundings of the cursor, in real time. To an inexperienced user, this sound would be meaningless, but witj practice that sound would let the user see.

Grustaf 5y ago
There have definitely been attempts for mapping the real world, but the ones I've seen have been quite primitive. I started my own project around this, but I never had the time to finish anything useful.
cortesoft 5y ago
Why would that be better than using a keyboard to navigate between discrete units on the screen? There are a set number of clickable points on the screen, why make a game for the blind user to try to echo-locate those spots instead of just letting them cycle through them? The point of a screen for a sighted user is to make a concise way to transmit existing information... it is only a good way if you are sighted.
- akomtu 5y ago
  Well, how do you screen-read a geometric shape?
  - gugagore 5y ago
    how do you echolocate a shape? It seems you are suggesting some mapping of a 2D visual scene to audio. If that is useful in practice, it is one of many possible interfaces that blind people could use. It wouldn't supplant screen readers.
ajb 5y ago
Third hand report, but apparently academics have tried to simulate what an echo locating person would hear from a 3d world, but not yet managed to convey the experience to a blind person over audio. IE there is some effect that they haven't captured yet So Doom for echo locators not yet possible.

andrew_ 5y ago

I'd like to say, as someone who has not been exposed at any degree to those who are blind and use computers/internet; I am very taken aback with the composition and vocabulary you're able to convey in written form having not been sighted. It's truly impressive.

cortesoft 5y ago
I agree that blind people are impressive in their ability to navigate a sighted world, but it seems strange to find the written word part to be the impressive part... the language part of their brain is fine. I don't see anything they wrote that seems like only a sighted person would be able to understand...
- miki123211 5y ago
  The written word is (kind of) the impressive part. The spelling rules of English are not easy to master, and blind people have much fewer reading opportunities than the sighted. You don't see labels on the products you buy, you don't see the billboards from a passing car, you often don't even read books or articles, as listening to synthesized speech is much faster, cheaper and more comfortable than reading Braille. The only reason my spelling is as good as it is is the fact that I used to listen to English text with a Polish speech synthesizer for most of my life, as I was too lazy to switch languages. Polish is (almost) phonetically perfect, so I was hearing things almost exactly as they were written. This made my spelling much better than that of most blind Americans. Words like cystom (system), keybored or even polotission (politician) can sometimes be seen in the blind community.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    That is super interesting! Thanks for sharing
  - nunez 5y ago
    Absolutely incredible. Thank you for sharing this.
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cinntaile 5y ago

When you say that small tools are lacking. I assume this is more than a simple lack of hotkeys, perhaps you can elaborate a bit?

miki123211 5y ago
It's usually unlabeled buttons, unlabelled icons, divs that change color on click instead of actual honest to god native HTML checkboxes, inaccessible drag-and-drop, no heading structure which makes navigation harder, weird date pickers that screen readers cannot handle and so on.

grayfaced 5y ago

How do you deal with computer troubles? If your OS fails to boot, are you basically stuck getting help?

miki123211 5y ago
On the PC, yes, essentially yes. Using a mobile app to OCR what is on the screen (via the phone camera) sometimes helps. There are also some apps[1][2] where sighted people can connect to us via video call and help us with whatever we need at the moment. On the Mac, this is not an issue. The whole recovery environment is 100% accessible, at least on M1. I think it was more problematic on Intel, but you could still figure it out.

devoutsalsa 5y ago

Is multiple monitors a thing for blind people? I’m wondering if there’s a difference between switching between windows and switching between monitors.

lproven 5y ago
My one blind techie friend doesn't use a monitor at all. Why would he?
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  Is multiple screen readers a thing?
  - lproven 5y ago
    Define what you mean. As it stands the question is unanwerably vague. Yes, there are multiple screen readers. Screen readers do not need or particularly use a monitor; monitors are for sighted people. Screen readers read what is displayed at and following their cursor. This means screenreader users need to learn to control a system with 2 cursors: one for entering text, and a different one for reading it. People asking about multiple screens for blind users are basically asking which colour of monitor bezel blind people prefer. This is not a question. It's irrelevant. Some OSes will not boot or will not display a GUI unless they detect a monitor, although there are HDMI dummies that can fix that. So, some blind users may have an old monitor connected, just so their OS will boot.

ldoughty 5y ago

Amazing reply. Is there a community for blind developers? I could see that being a helpful resource.

hnbad 5y ago

How do you deal with HN itself? The site is remarkably inaccessible.

miki123211 5y ago
HN's accessibility issues can be worked around. The only big one that's actually pretty annoying is the lack of hierarchy, it's hard to figure out who is replying to whom.
- pflanze 5y ago
  Do you have an example of a website with a comment hierarchy that works well for you? I'm pondering writing an alternative frontend for HN with accessibility in mind--I don't have experience with that, and am not affiliated with HN, but am willing to see if I could make this work. Would you also appreciate an easier way to find replies to your own comments?
  - miki123211 5y ago
    Not a website, but Dystopia for Reddit, an iOS client, does this well. It just announces the level of each comment, where direct replies to a post are l1, replies to those are l2 and so on. This is probably the easiest way.
  - jscholes 5y ago
    > Do you have an example of a website with a comment hierarchy that works well for you? I'm not the original commenter, but I am a screen reader user who works in accessibility. Unfortunately, I don't have too many good examples; the problem of hierarchical commenting systems being difficult to navigate is common across the web. There is a Reddit client for iOS, Dystopia[1], that does this extremely well for users of the built-in screen reader, VoiceOver[2], by allowing entire threads/subthreads to be collapsed and/or skipped over. On the web, you'd want to look into using hierarchical headings, nested lists and the like, to allow the structure to be conveyed semantically. HN is inexcusably bad at this, as there isn't a single heading anywhere on the site. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/ [2] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/turn-on-and-practice-voiceover-iph3e2e415f/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/turn-on-and-practice-...

thiht 5y ago

> I can't imagine a blind dev working exclusively on the front end That’s unfortunate! Clearly blind people are the most qualified to work on one specific frontend job: accessibility. The fact that it’s extremely hard to automate accessibility testing in a meaningful way would make it a full time job at most places that take accessibility seriously.

miki123211 5y ago
Yes and no. Screen reader testing is extremely important and that's something blind people do well. However, if there's a link on a website that the screen reader cannot see, a blind person won't report that as an accessibility issue because they won't even know it's there. Other things, such as testing with Zoom or high contrast mode, also require sight.
- monkeynotes 5y ago
  If your test is broken if the test script leaves out the button. Sighted developers and QEs will miss testing elements if they aren't aware they should be there.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    Most tooling and test sites are in practice at least slightly broken.
    - monkeynotes 5y ago
      I'm talking about a level playing field between sighted and blind QA, they are both subject to missing problems if the test is poorly designed. The fact that "most" tests are broken is related but tangential to my observation.
- jscholes 5y ago
  > if there's a link on a website that the screen reader cannot see, a blind person won't report that as an accessibility issue because they won't even know it's there. This is highly variable. As a screen reader user who works in accessibility with a software engineering focus, I don't consider a test to be complete if I've only evaluated what the page exposes to the accessibility API. Assessing the rendered DOM by hand, testing on different viewports where controls may be slightly or completely different, etc., are just as critical to the testing process as trying to simply use the page. But, I recognise that there are many accessibility testers out there without such a technical focus, and it is true to say that they may gloss over something if it is completely missing in the accessibility tree.

mhitza 5y ago

> Dev Ops is very much a mixed bag. Have any examples of issues while doing DevOps? For that type of work, in my own perception, I deal 100% of the time with text (be it error messages, or automation code).

mwcampbell 5y ago
One issue is the inaccessibility of graphs. I wonder if miki123211 had anything else in mind.
- miki123211 5y ago
  That is one thing. Other issues might include having to use VNC or KVM, no sound by default on Windows server, captchas in the AWS cloud console etc. If you're doing normal Linux server administration via ssh or dealing with Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes or other command line tools, you should be fine though.