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I worked at a company making devices for blind and visually impaired users - screen magnifiers and OCR devices that scan whatever you put there and read it out
by ajuc 4y ago
I worked at a company making devices for blind and visually impaired users - screen magnifiers and OCR devices that scan whatever you put there and read it out to you. There are some very low hanging fruits in that domain. It was a very small family company, we had like 20 people total and just 2 developers, and none of us was blind, so we made some UI decisions that were very stupid in hindsight. Fortunately the company also has a distribution network for blind/visually impaired people stuff and we got feedback pretty quickly.
But I think that's one place where a blind developer would be more productive than average.
What I found surprising is the realization that computer hardware gets less accessible for blind people over time - touch screens are much worse than knobs and buttons, and graphical interfaces are much worse than text interfaces.
Web clients could help, but they also evolved from simple semantic DOM + some styling to dynamic js+virtual dom hybrid and "div-34gs34grtt" says nothing to the blind user.
- flangola7 4y agoThe div-34gs34grtt isn't supposed to be read literally. The name isn't even exposed unless you're poking at the console or something.
- jackcviers3 4y agoAll of the visual and hierarchical information abstracted away for visual users in a website that conveys information. Abstracted visual semantic clues: * the type of data in said div * the indentation * the typography * the animations the layout on the page * the interactivity with touch and mouse and keyboard events These clues arw completely lost to blind users. Semantic attributes can help build up that hierarchical information for non-visual users. And yes, the name of a division is semantic information. It serves the purpose of defining an identifier for a section of a document, much like the title of the list above.
- unix_fan 4y agoUnfortunately true. My biggest gripe with cars is the move to touchscreens. I remember being able to train myself to use a normal car radio with buttons. Now, the only way for me to do that would be to use my iPhone with my screen reader, and I usually need the driver to put the car stereo into Bluetooth mode for me