7 ms·

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

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]
  - klabb3 5y ago
    Off topic and feel free to ignore but here goes: do you know of any low hanging fruit stuff I can do on web/front-end UIs that will help me get my sites/apps more accessible, that many developers miss? And secondly, do you know of a way to quickly simulate the experience a visually impaired person has without learning/using a screen reader? (As a solo developer, I don't have the time to dive too deep)
    - cobertos 5y ago
      Take with a grain of alt b/c I'm not blind and my accessibility training is not formal, just learned from a job. The built in mobile screen readers are not hard to setup. Enable in the settings and you can play around with it to grok how it works and how to navigate the UI tree with it. Lowest hanging fruit always seemed to be making sure all the controls you wanted on your page were reachable with accessibility navigation (ie tabindex/focusable) and that the spoken labels were sufficient without sighted context.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      If you're on a mac of course the easiest screenreader to use is voiceover, if on windows NVDA - problem there is not wide consensus among screenreaders about functionality, so you will read about a way to do something and think that is the way to do this but when you actually start doing it you find it isn't going to work the way you thought, if at all. This means if you do anything good you will need to test on different screenreaders, I like https://assistivlabs.com/ https://assistivlabs.com/ for a service to allow you to do screenreader testing also because the developer who runs it is really helpful. It also means the best ways of doing things tend to be the ones that have been around longest because every screenreader / browser combo has implemented different parts of newer specifications - that is to say it will feel like your chosen screenreader is Chrome, but all the other ones are IE11. I personally find that what helps you most about understanding when a site is not accessible enough is, after you have read a bit about problems people with screenreaders have, imagine using your site if you were blind. Because you are blind things happen atomically, you do not have an context clues that you can see about what something is, so actions you can do on stuff should probably say not just what they are doing - like a button that says Delete - but what they are doing it to - like a button that says Delete and has an aria-label that says Delete user account. Really - being willing to sit still for 20 minutes looking at your site and thinking but what if I couldn't see will probably help you find a bunch of obvious problems. Also when you have a sort of good fundament to your sites assistive usage, it means that things will be a lot easier when you do start testing on different screen readers. on edit: obviously when I say because you are blind things happen atomically, I mean that in the context of using a screen reader on a webpage
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    this reply articulates what I was trying to say.
  - samplatt 5y ago
    >sometimes be seen in the blind community. HAH! Love it. Side note: I constantly make fun of the English phrase "I see what you're saying", meaning "I understand", often swapping it out with "I hear what you're seeing", sometimes swapping it multiple times in one sentence. People almost never notice unless I follow it up with "I smell what you're feeling" or "taste what you're smelling", because this creeps them out.
    - sammorrowdrums 5y ago
      Interestingly in the Netherlands they do express things via taste words. Lekker (meaning tasty) can describe an experience, doing something well and more. Heerlijk (meaning delicious) can also be used. I found a gravestone with the translation: “we thank you God for your great deliciousness”.
      - mdemare 5y ago
        Not quite - "heerlijk" used to mean "lordly", so "heerlijk voedsel" means "food eaten by lords". This also explains the gravestone reference (de Heer == the Lord).
        sammorrowdrums 5y ago
        Thanks for clarification! Good to know. I often find it hard to learn and retain the multiple meanings / history of words in a second language. I do know de Heer, and Herengracht etc. I just hadn’t put that together that it’s same origin.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        These words have shifted similarly but subtly differently in Norwegian too. Lekker = lekker, heerlijk = herlig.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        That last example is wrong as translated. In that context 'heerlijkheid' has nothing to do with taste words, it simply means 'glory'.
  - Johnsel 5y ago
    So, you are not even a native English speaker then? Oof. You have my respect.
    - martopix 5y ago
      It's really common for educated non-native speakers to spell better than native speakers. Because non-natives learn the language already with a written support, so they have worse pronunciation but better spelling compared to people who learn the language exclusively orally as kids. My partner is a native speaker and I'm not, yet he often asks me how to spell.
  - sicariusnoctis 5y ago
    In programming, it's important to structure correctly, format correctly, and spell consistently. This might explain why.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    Makes me wonder if for blind people forms of phonetic typing would be more useful. Like chord keyboards. Or maybe some other less wide spread but also less complex to use phonetic input methods?
shp0ngle 5y ago
This is a weird compliment. He is blind, not mentally challenged.
- gwill 5y ago
  I thought so at first, too. Read mikis reply and you'll see why it was a good compliment.
  - shp0ngle 5y ago
    Ah OK!
- matthewfcarlson 5y ago
  I got what he meant. It was a complex reply with many parts and it seems like it would be harder to dictate or type without having that feedback loop of being able to see what you're doing.
  - nnoitra 5y ago
    Why though, can't you keep a paragraph of text in short-term memmory?
    - tempestn 5y ago
      I can imagine it would be more difficult, although would presumably improve with practice.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      I already would find it taxing to write a well structured and complex answer like the original comment. I would need to go back and forth, edit, change the order of sentences and the like. And I am perfectly capable of doing this with my eyes. But: I would never assume anything about the experience, challenges and abilities of the OP. I was fascinated by the depth of the recommendations and was reminded that I very much need to work on making my sites more accessible. But I would personally probably refrain from asking if they couldn't just keep a paragraph of text in memory. But that is just me.
gugagore 5y ago
A sibling comment mentioned this comment being weird. It strikes me as "weird" too. That doesn't mean it is not relatable. But if you are also struck by what is weird about this comment, you might enjoy taking a look at: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/inspiration-porn-c08b419d35c9 https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/inspiration-porn-c08b419... (which links to Stella Young's TEDx presentation).

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]
- klabb3 5y ago
  Off topic and feel free to ignore but here goes: do you know of any low hanging fruit stuff I can do on web/front-end UIs that will help me get my sites/apps more accessible, that many developers miss? And secondly, do you know of a way to quickly simulate the experience a visually impaired person has without learning/using a screen reader? (As a solo developer, I don't have the time to dive too deep)
  - cobertos 5y ago
    Take with a grain of alt b/c I'm not blind and my accessibility training is not formal, just learned from a job. The built in mobile screen readers are not hard to setup. Enable in the settings and you can play around with it to grok how it works and how to navigate the UI tree with it. Lowest hanging fruit always seemed to be making sure all the controls you wanted on your page were reachable with accessibility navigation (ie tabindex/focusable) and that the spoken labels were sufficient without sighted context.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    If you're on a mac of course the easiest screenreader to use is voiceover, if on windows NVDA - problem there is not wide consensus among screenreaders about functionality, so you will read about a way to do something and think that is the way to do this but when you actually start doing it you find it isn't going to work the way you thought, if at all. This means if you do anything good you will need to test on different screenreaders, I like https://assistivlabs.com/ https://assistivlabs.com/ for a service to allow you to do screenreader testing also because the developer who runs it is really helpful. It also means the best ways of doing things tend to be the ones that have been around longest because every screenreader / browser combo has implemented different parts of newer specifications - that is to say it will feel like your chosen screenreader is Chrome, but all the other ones are IE11. I personally find that what helps you most about understanding when a site is not accessible enough is, after you have read a bit about problems people with screenreaders have, imagine using your site if you were blind. Because you are blind things happen atomically, you do not have an context clues that you can see about what something is, so actions you can do on stuff should probably say not just what they are doing - like a button that says Delete - but what they are doing it to - like a button that says Delete and has an aria-label that says Delete user account. Really - being willing to sit still for 20 minutes looking at your site and thinking but what if I couldn't see will probably help you find a bunch of obvious problems. Also when you have a sort of good fundament to your sites assistive usage, it means that things will be a lot easier when you do start testing on different screen readers. on edit: obviously when I say because you are blind things happen atomically, I mean that in the context of using a screen reader on a webpage
- andrew_ 5y ago
  this reply articulates what I was trying to say.
- samplatt 5y ago
  >sometimes be seen in the blind community. HAH! Love it. Side note: I constantly make fun of the English phrase "I see what you're saying", meaning "I understand", often swapping it out with "I hear what you're seeing", sometimes swapping it multiple times in one sentence. People almost never notice unless I follow it up with "I smell what you're feeling" or "taste what you're smelling", because this creeps them out.
  - sammorrowdrums 5y ago
    Interestingly in the Netherlands they do express things via taste words. Lekker (meaning tasty) can describe an experience, doing something well and more. Heerlijk (meaning delicious) can also be used. I found a gravestone with the translation: “we thank you God for your great deliciousness”.
    - mdemare 5y ago
      Not quite - "heerlijk" used to mean "lordly", so "heerlijk voedsel" means "food eaten by lords". This also explains the gravestone reference (de Heer == the Lord).
      - sammorrowdrums 5y ago
        Thanks for clarification! Good to know. I often find it hard to learn and retain the multiple meanings / history of words in a second language. I do know de Heer, and Herengracht etc. I just hadn’t put that together that it’s same origin.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      These words have shifted similarly but subtly differently in Norwegian too. Lekker = lekker, heerlijk = herlig.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      That last example is wrong as translated. In that context 'heerlijkheid' has nothing to do with taste words, it simply means 'glory'.
- Johnsel 5y ago
  So, you are not even a native English speaker then? Oof. You have my respect.
  - martopix 5y ago
    It's really common for educated non-native speakers to spell better than native speakers. Because non-natives learn the language already with a written support, so they have worse pronunciation but better spelling compared to people who learn the language exclusively orally as kids. My partner is a native speaker and I'm not, yet he often asks me how to spell.
- sicariusnoctis 5y ago
  In programming, it's important to structure correctly, format correctly, and spell consistently. This might explain why.
- dathinab 5y ago
  Makes me wonder if for blind people forms of phonetic typing would be more useful. Like chord keyboards. Or maybe some other less wide spread but also less complex to use phonetic input methods?

shp0ngle 5y ago

This is a weird compliment. He is blind, not mentally challenged.

gwill 5y ago
I thought so at first, too. Read mikis reply and you'll see why it was a good compliment.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  Ah OK!
matthewfcarlson 5y ago
I got what he meant. It was a complex reply with many parts and it seems like it would be harder to dictate or type without having that feedback loop of being able to see what you're doing.
- nnoitra 5y ago
  Why though, can't you keep a paragraph of text in short-term memmory?
  - tempestn 5y ago
    I can imagine it would be more difficult, although would presumably improve with practice.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    I already would find it taxing to write a well structured and complex answer like the original comment. I would need to go back and forth, edit, change the order of sentences and the like. And I am perfectly capable of doing this with my eyes. But: I would never assume anything about the experience, challenges and abilities of the OP. I was fascinated by the depth of the recommendations and was reminded that I very much need to work on making my sites more accessible. But I would personally probably refrain from asking if they couldn't just keep a paragraph of text in memory. But that is just me.

gugagore 5y ago

A sibling comment mentioned this comment being weird. It strikes me as "weird" too. That doesn't mean it is not relatable. But if you are also struck by what is weird about this comment, you might enjoy taking a look at: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/inspiration-porn-c08b419d35c9 https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/inspiration-porn-c08b419... (which links to Stella Young's TEDx presentation).