9 ms·

Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

250 points by silktide 14y ago

unimpressive 14y ago
It's currently on my to-do list to try going without sight for a month while I use my computer. I figured I'd try using a high pitched tone generator to produce different buzzes depending on where I am on the screen. EDIT: I am aware that using non-standard hardware will not help me develop accessible web pages. That's not the point of the exercise.
lmm 14y ago
Even as a fully healthy user, I often find the "mobile" versions of sites are much easier to use. They tend to have a lot less junk on them and make the actual content much more prominent.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  I think "sighted" is preferable to "healthy". Just for future reference.
  - lmm 14y ago
    I was trying to find a succinct way to express that I had no disabilities rather than just that I can see. I'm aware my phrasing was awkward but hope people would realise there is no offence intended.
    - GotAnyMegadeth 14y ago
      You could say "fully able".
    - ebiester 14y ago
      The politically correct term is "temporarily abled." This sounds goofy at first, until we realize that if we live long enough, nearly all of us lose our abilities in one way or another.
      - alanctgardner2 14y ago
        I've never heard this term, so far it looks like it has pretty niche use. In my experience I would just describe myself as "someone without a disability", "a person who does not have a disability".
      - ars 14y ago
        Have you never heard of the euphemism treadmill? It doesn't matter what you call it - nothing is going to change the reality. You might as well use the first word that was coined for it and stop. Every new word you find will eventually have the same emotional significance, since the underlying reality isn't going to change. And calling something by how you're not going to have it is ridiculous - yes, please walk into my charred pieces of wood, while I search for my soon to be lost keys and give you a ride in the crushed metal.
        tossacct 14y ago
        Regarding the "euphemism treadmill": sometimes it is necessary to coin a new euphemism. For example, if the common usage of a word is different from its original meaning. "Homosexual" was the name of a psychological disorder, "moron", "retard", and "idiot" were all clinical definitions of mental handicap. Times change, words continuously change meaning. Use the words that your audience understands, not the ones that your audience understood last week or one hundred years ago.
        ars 14y ago
        That's the whole reason it's a treadmill: The new words will rapidly take on the new, undesired but real, meaning.
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
        tossacct 14y ago
        I think we agree that the euphemism treadmill(ET) exists, and that (ET) means that our words constantly change meaning. Your original post used it as a reason not to coin a new word: >>>It doesn't matter what you call it - nothing is going to change the reality. You might as well use the first word that was coined for it and stop. I am saying that the (ET) is precisely the reason to coin a new word. Otherwise, your audience will not understand what you are talking about. If you speak a language your audience doesn't understand, your audience will not understand your language. This applies to all languages: french, english, perl, python, and the euphemism treadmill. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, including speaking the languages they understand if you would like them to understand your speech.
josscrowcroft 14y ago
As great as this article is, the title should be "10 things I learned about accessibility by pretending..." I was hoping it might be about somebody who was 'blind' for a week in everyday life, and the potential shifts in their subjective perception of reality this might have caused.. it's something I've wanted to do for a while – anyone know of anything like that, actually?
- nathell 14y ago
  Whenever you have the chance of being in Central Europe -- Budapest, Prague or Warsaw -- don't miss the Invisible Exhibition. http://invisibleexhibition.com/ http://invisibleexhibition.com/ I've been there, and it's been one of the most deeply touching experiences I've ever had. Highly recommended.
  - chime 14y ago
    I visited "Dialog in the Dark" exhibit in Atlanta with my wife a few years ago. It appears that is permanently closed but they opened a new one in NYC - http://www.dialognyc.com/ http://www.dialognyc.com/ - however due to Sandy, it appears that is temporarily closed.
    - opminion 14y ago
      There is one in Hamburg [1], highly recommended. It consists of a tour with several rooms modelling a variety of features of everyday life, including a boat trip. There is also a bar at the end, where you buy a drink (paying for it was rather humbling for me) and sit down around the guide for a final chat. You never get to see the guide. You are given a walking stick but for me it was pretty useless, I was stumbling on everything and everyone the same. They also offer dinners in the dark. The best part of the experience for me was realising that you are in the blind person's (admittedly fake) world, some form of opposite of when the blind person is in your world when walking down the street and bumping against a car parked in the middle of the street crossing. [1] http://www.dialog-im-dunkeln.de/ http://www.dialog-im-dunkeln.de/
- jimmytucson 14y ago
digitalengineer 14y ago
Here is a tip from someone who lost his sight last year: If you suddenly see little black spots, don't f&##^ing wait and get your eye(s) checked out by a specialist at once! Have a deadline? A demanding client? Or perhaps it's just a really bad headache? Don't wait. I literally waited a whole week and thats waaaay to long and saw the curtain close (literally, that's what it looks like: a curtain closing). Finally (and only thanks to my experience with inplant-contactlenses that made the doctor confident I would be able to hold still like a statue when they insert 3 or 4 metal tubes in your freaking eye with only local anesthetics). My eye was fully drained and I was operated at midnight. The nice thing about local anestetics is you'll get to see everything. After 4 weeks I was able to see again. Another 4 weeks and my brain had made the new 'connections' linking my left and right eye. When I started seeing little black spots with my other eye (half a year later) I took immediate action and dropped everything. The doctors were able to use a laser to burn/isolate the distortion and prefented my retina from ripping up. TLDR: DO - NOT - WAIT. Drop everything when you see black spots that remain constant. Regular doctors can't help you, even specialists have difficulty finding the little holes in your eye.
- kevinconroy 14y ago
  Seriously everyone, heed that advice. Don't wait. Both of my father's retina detached and the only reason he can see today is because he got to the specialist in time for them to fix it. A matter of days can make the difference of vision for the rest of your life. Persistent black spots that "float" around your field of vision need to get checked out ASAP.
  - Sargis 14y ago
    I've had several black spots that float around in my vision for over a year now. Is that a sign of retinal detachment? I visited the doctor and he said eye floaters were normal and people with myopia were prone to getting eye floaters.
    - ontheroadagain 14y ago
      Might be worth seeking a second opinion, or maybe that of a specialist? Certainly can't hurt given what's at stake!
Mahn 14y ago
Am I the only one who thought this has startup potential? It sounds like a problem in search of a solution. I can picture for instance a service that would take a page, scan it, remove all the unnecesary clutter and make it as much screen reader friendly as possible.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Isn't that the job of the screen reader?
  - weego 14y ago
    Screen readers aren't exactly hives of innovation, but yes this is exactly what they are for, so the startup idea is "make a better screenreader."
- user24 14y ago
  I thought it has startup potential too, but in a different direction; a league of blind people you can hire to give feedback on your website.
  - DigitalJack 14y ago
    Yes, exactly. But you could go even further: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5021748 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5021748
- ZoFreX 14y ago
  > I can picture for instance a service that would take a page, scan it, remove all the unnecesary clutter and make it as much screen reader friendly as possible. If this was technologically achievable, it would be in screen readers already ;)
  - shurane 14y ago
    That sounds like something that Readability, Pocket, or Instapaper could very well implement. Considering they already declutter webpages as it is.
jareds 14y ago
As a totally blind software developer everything he has in the article is accurate. There are two things he did not do though which I do on a regular basis and assume most other blind users do as well. First is using the feature of screen readers that allow you to view all links on a page as one giant list. While this isn’t helpful when initially browsing a page if you use a site on a regular basis and know where you need to go it’s easy to bring up a list of links and start typing to use first letter navigation to jump to the link you need out of the 150 that may be on the page. An example of this is typing “pri” to bring up the print link in order to view stories on a single page. Second is the ability to use a find feature of a screen reader to search for specific text on the page. Once again this is not useful for general browsing but if you visit a site on a regular basis and need to repeatedly access a section of the page that isn’t easily findable by links or headings searching for a text string you know will be there is a god send.
- chewxy 14y ago
  I don't mean to be insensitive, but I am morbidly curious about your condition (mainly because 23andme said I am prone to macular degeneration, a thought that terrifies me). How does one program without sight? I have done something similar to OP on my latest project (I tried to use my product blindfolded + screenreader), and I found that it was a terrible experience. My site was absolute shite. It was only through my own familiarity with it that I was able to navigate it. I would imagine trying to develop sightless itself would be a feat, so my question is: how? were you sighted before you lost your vision? Tactile feedback from the keyboard or voice commands?
  - jareds 14y ago
    I was born blind so have never known any different and have always done everything on the computer with speech and brail. From talking to people who have lost their vision later in life it generally seems the older you are when you lose your vision the harder it is to adapt and live a normal life after vision loss. Since you know it may be a possibility though I assume may have some time to at least cope with the fact that you could lose your vision and have a longer time to acclimate yourself to this fact rather than losing it all in a hunting accident. If you have a MAC play with voiceover which is built into the OS, it has a nice getting started tutorial. As for how I program see the following stackoverflow question. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-progra...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
bauc 14y ago
Very interesting experiment. Sighted people often take their vision for granted. I know I do and I try to think of what I would do if I lost my vision but we can all work on improving accessibility in general.
hamidnazari 14y ago
By W3C validator do you mean the Markup Validation Service or the Web Accessibility Initiative aka WAI? I think WAI validators were introduced to address the issue you raised in your experiment. Is this true? Anyhow, I can't agree more, "being W3C valid means jack".
- kjhughes 14y ago
  While being "W3C valid" (passing validation according to a DTD or schema for the HTML) is insufficient, it's still useful in that tools, including screen readers, can more reliably process the content of a valid page than an invalid page.
  - silktide 14y ago
    Yeah I agree, it's useful as an absolute bare minimum. But you shouldn't just get the green tick and rest on your laurels
dmlorenzetti 14y ago
As a similar, but easier, experiment, try listening to Adobe Acrobat read a PDF file out loud-- especially if the PDF contains anything at all interesting, like mathematics, figures, tables, or any kind of "float" that pegs to the top of a page as the text flows around it. While tools are available to let the PDF creator tag the document in order to facilitate reading, in practice they don't seem to be used much, and even then the experience is painful at best.
embplat 14y ago
Read about WCAG (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag), that's what you need to follow to make web sites accessible, not markup validation, which really means "jack shit". Visual impairment does not necessarily equal total blindness. Accounting for text size, contrast level, etc. is a lot to consider. AA conformance level (middle level, so to speak) is very hard to achieve.
- nness 14y ago
  The Australian government made WCAG 2.0 a mandatory requirement of all government sites. Many claim to conform to the Double-A requirement, but very few bodies do accreditation and the standard itself is almost incomprehensible. A List Apart did a pretty good article on the issues with WCAG 2.0 in 2006: "To Hell with WCAG 2" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2 http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2
  - silktide 14y ago
    Many web devs use the W3C validator and assume the green tick means it's completely accessible. But they can only check for so much, which makes it almost useless. There's no substitute for actual user testing
  - embplat 14y ago
    The Canadian government is in the same boat. In fact, they are offering an open source framework that is modern, responsive and complies with WCAG requirements: https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew
    - embplat 14y ago
      Here's a Wired article on this subject from today: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/wet/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/wet/
vnorby 14y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo&feature=youtu... I was stunned by how fast the blind can "speed listen" in the linked video. Is this something anyone can learn?
- drstrangevibes 14y ago
  that is freaking awesome
- IvyMike 14y ago
  It's nothing close to that video, but I use VLC's "playback speed" settings to watch TV at around 160%. It is definitely something you adapt to...I used to have trouble at 130%, and now that seems slow. (If you do this, you also learn to appreciate good enunciation. Stephen Colbert is completely listen-to-able at 200%. His guests, not so much.)
ctoth 14y ago
I'm a blind software developer who's been lurking on HN now for a couple years. Every few months an article about the blind comes across and seems to generate some discussion. I tend to stay quiet here on HN, as I generally feel I have little to contribute to the latest discussion on whether or not software is like a Japanese restaurant. Now, a few points: First, and most importantly: your web sucks. I'm a very proficient computer user--the same gap between supertechnical and nontechnical users exists in the blind community, perhaps even magnified by other aspects such as secondary disabilities in a good chunk of the blind population. That aside, I've been doing this for around 13 years, using a variety of screen access solutions on Windows, OSX, and even the hellscape that is modern desktop Linux a11y. All of these solutions suffer from the same basic problem namely they are trying to squeeze a dynamic, multidimensional viewport into a linear text string for rapid communication. This don't work so hot, but like most things, you can adapt to it over time. So why does the web suck? First, a history lesson: Back in the halcyon days of the 1990's, when I was just getting started with this silly computer stuff, the problem that was desktop accessibility had already nearly been solved. Microsoft gave us MSAA, and several screen reader vendors implemented their own heuristics on top of it to give pretty good access to standard controls. Highlight detection worked ... reasonably-well to know when text changed on a form, screen readers would perform nasty little hacks including API hooking and other black magic to give a pretty good picture of what was going on at any one time. Then, along came the web. At first this wasn't too terrible. Several screen reader vendors made a stab at solving web accessibility, and thus the virtual buffer was born. The virtual buffer is where the story really gets interesting. You can follow along should you like -- I'm currently using the NVDA screen reader to compose this comment, and you can get it at http://nvda-project.org http://nvda-project.org (for those who do, no I don't listen to that dreadful voice all day, there are alternatives.) Okay: So, you have a tree, the DOM, and you need to render it linearly, and not only that, but it needs to make some kind of sense. Enter the virtual buffer. Each screen reader gets a hold of the DOM through whatever ugly hacks, then renders your beautiful website with lovely topography into a flat, basically plaintext representation. Links get prefixed with "link", headings with "heading 3", so on and so forth. The software developers in the audience probably already see the problem coming, when I learned how this worked I was rather offended. So, for the screen reader, there are two single points of truth: the DOM, and the virtual buffer representation. As we all know, when a complex system includes information in more than one place, the two have a tendency to get out of sync. Consider what happens when you update your DOM with some javascript magic. The screen reader needs to, hopefully without making me lose my current place on the page, diff your changes against its current buffer, update its buffer, and somehow indicate to me that the content has changed, without interrupting my current task. Complex DOM manipulations aside, let's just talk about how poorly-marked-up your content is: For those of you who got NVDA, I invite you to explore around HN a little. Note the unlabeled links for voting, for instance. Is there any indication that the first edit field on a submission's page is where one enters a comment? And HN is hardly a dynamic website. How can one tell nonvisually (or visually for that matter) who replied to whom in comment threads? That's something that's puzzled me for a while, I just have to heuristically separate conversation threads. Now, it's not all bad. Slowly, aria is being deployed to a variety of websites. Even more importantly, I've recently been looking into adding access at the UI toolkit level for some popular projects, especially Bootstrap.js (if a proficient web person would be interested in helping me with this it would be awesome, I'm primarily a desktop software guy (yes, the blind are one of the few subpopulations who haven't gone hole-hog for the web, and I'd argue a good reason for that is the web's lack of accessibility.)) Simple fixes -- adding aria-haspopup="true" to dropdown toggles, adding aria roles to various things can help, and I'm hopeful that work at the bootstrap and similar level will take the onus off of individual web developers. I'm typically pretty difficult to offend, but I must say it's just a tad bit jarring to find the top comment thread on this submission be about how terrible it is to lose one's vision and how one should do absolutely anything to avoid it. Isn't this Hacker News? Where hackers talk about technical things? Mreh. As for the article itself, a couple rather important things: Yes, I'm certain that it is extremely difficult to navigate the web as a newly-blinded person, and this is partially because of many of the issues that I outlined above. That said, if you people want to know how a blind person sees the web, don't ask a sighted person to wear a blindfold for a week and expect it to be at all representative of how someone who's been doing it their entire life does. Why not just ask a blind person? Just a few examples: Where as the author of the submission refers to headings as the primary navigation mechanism, modern screen reader users are quite lucky in that most screen reader developers have mapped hotkeys to nearly every type of HTML element. For instance, I hit f to navigate to the next form field on a page, shift+f to navigate to the previous. Similar keystrokes are available for all the levels of headings, for links both visited and unvisited, for landmarks, for tables, so on and so forth. The title attribute of a link is read in a few cases: 1: when the link is explicitly tabbed to, and 2: when the link does not have text. A perfect example of where the title attribute should* be used is for the HN voting links. Anyhow, I think that's enough rambling for now. Anyone who would like to discuss this, my e-mail is in my profile.
septerr 14y ago
Shouldn't websites start having an accessible version, like they have mobile versions of their sites? These would be free of too much JavaScript fu and go directly to the meat of the matter. In fact it is possible people with no physical challenges would start preferring these simpler faster versions too. Maybe in near future, the latest trend in web will be less JS, less graphics, less animation and more matter.
- ctoth 14y ago
  This is an absolutely terrible idea that seems to refuse to die. No, it is not reasonable to put the accessible content in some sort of blind-only ghetto. Amazon do this, for instance, with a text-based version of their website. It makes it more difficult to maintain unless you've architected from the absolute beginning for it, and over time the text-based version becomes useless. Think of it from the perspective of someone adding new features to your webapp. Let's put it in HN terms -- you're building your MVP, launching in three days or something absurd... Are you really going to go build a text-based version of your website? Are you going to keep that updated? No. The only solution is to make the actual web, the one we all use, accessible. This doesn't mean changing what individual developers do so much as making sure that it's harder to be inaccessible than to be accessible with technical fixes, I.E. fixing Bootstrap so all Bootstrap sites are more accessible.
  - septerr 14y ago
    Why shouldn't companies (their developers) put in the extra effort needed to keep both versions up to date? They can come up with a framework for it. It may not necessarily mean two totally separate code base. You could design your framework so that both versions feed off the same backend. And don't they have to put in that extra effort to make sure their mobile versions are up to date? Startups have a good chance to start their framework with accessibility in mind. An MVP could ignore this aspect, because it is not the final product yet.
    - ctoth 14y ago
      Because they won't. I'm commenting from the perspective of a blind user--I know of what I speak. Note that I explicitly said you would have to architect for it, which you reiterated in your point. Doesn't it make far more sense to make the underlying tooling accessible rather than ghettoizing the content? My main point here is, if there's extra work to be done to make content accessible, that work simply won't be done. Hell, I wouldn't do it either -- a whole extra site template's worth for what? 1% of users? and I am totally blind.
daniel13 14y ago
I agree with some earlier comments about watching out for black spots. I lost my sight in a grizzly bear mauling and learning to use adaptive technology was a critical part of my recovery which lead me back into the work place. The technology available is very helpful, but definitely has its limits and can indeed be quite frustrating at times. Agree with the article that Facebook is really not accessible in a meaningful way at all. While the mobile site is slightly better, it has no structure and is essentially made up of approximately 99 links on my mobile homepage. Like all skills though, you do get better at using a screen reader with practice. I believe the brain's neural pathways actually adapt to accommodate the way a blind user interfaces with the screen reader much in the same way it does for other tasks such as orientation and mobility (travelling blind). So, blind users actually do get used to the super fast speech that may be unintelligible to most people. With that said, I appreciate the article because there are very simple ways to make websites user friendly to the blind. Headings that are not over used and well labeled and having all controls on a site well labeled alone can make a huge difference. The other key is really simplicity. Less is more for the blind user for sure. I've tried to do that with my website (danbigley.com), but it can be difficult to test and ensure accessibility.
baalexander 14y ago
Has anyone had experience with newer versions of Chrome Vox (http://www.chromevox.com/ http://www.chromevox.com/)? Would that improve the experience over the other screen readers for web browsing?
- silktide 14y ago
  I did look at this before doing testing for this article, but I assume not many blind users will use this setup. When I tested websites I tried to make my experience match the majority of blind users.
zplesivcak 14y ago
Just a note of marginal importance: I'm pretty sure that speeding up movie 1.5 times would bring its runtime from 2hrs to 1hr:20mins (not 1.5hrs as mentioned). With 24 frames per second 2hr movie has 172800 frames. Speedup brings framerate to 36 fps, and dividing we get 4800 seconds, or 80 minutes. Edit: Thank your for pointing that out leberwurstsaft!
- leberwurstsaft 14y ago
  you missed to multiply by 2h. 86400 frames equal only 1h.

250 points by silktide 14y ago

It's currently on my to-do list to try going without sight for a month while I use my computer. I figured I'd try using a high pitched tone generator to produce different buzzes depending on where I am on the screen. EDIT: I am aware that using non-standard hardware will not help me develop accessible web pages. That's not the point of the exercise.

lmm 14y ago

Even as a fully healthy user, I often find the "mobile" versions of sites are much easier to use. They tend to have a lot less junk on them and make the actual content much more prominent.

alanctgardner2 14y ago
I think "sighted" is preferable to "healthy". Just for future reference.
- lmm 14y ago
  I was trying to find a succinct way to express that I had no disabilities rather than just that I can see. I'm aware my phrasing was awkward but hope people would realise there is no offence intended.
  - GotAnyMegadeth 14y ago
    You could say "fully able".
  - ebiester 14y ago
    The politically correct term is "temporarily abled." This sounds goofy at first, until we realize that if we live long enough, nearly all of us lose our abilities in one way or another.
    - alanctgardner2 14y ago
      I've never heard this term, so far it looks like it has pretty niche use. In my experience I would just describe myself as "someone without a disability", "a person who does not have a disability".
    - ars 14y ago
      Have you never heard of the euphemism treadmill? It doesn't matter what you call it - nothing is going to change the reality. You might as well use the first word that was coined for it and stop. Every new word you find will eventually have the same emotional significance, since the underlying reality isn't going to change. And calling something by how you're not going to have it is ridiculous - yes, please walk into my charred pieces of wood, while I search for my soon to be lost keys and give you a ride in the crushed metal.
      - tossacct 14y ago
        Regarding the "euphemism treadmill": sometimes it is necessary to coin a new euphemism. For example, if the common usage of a word is different from its original meaning. "Homosexual" was the name of a psychological disorder, "moron", "retard", and "idiot" were all clinical definitions of mental handicap. Times change, words continuously change meaning. Use the words that your audience understands, not the ones that your audience understood last week or one hundred years ago.
        ars 14y ago
        That's the whole reason it's a treadmill: The new words will rapidly take on the new, undesired but real, meaning.
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
        tossacct 14y ago
        I think we agree that the euphemism treadmill(ET) exists, and that (ET) means that our words constantly change meaning. Your original post used it as a reason not to coin a new word: >>>It doesn't matter what you call it - nothing is going to change the reality. You might as well use the first word that was coined for it and stop. I am saying that the (ET) is precisely the reason to coin a new word. Otherwise, your audience will not understand what you are talking about. If you speak a language your audience doesn't understand, your audience will not understand your language. This applies to all languages: french, english, perl, python, and the euphemism treadmill. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, including speaking the languages they understand if you would like them to understand your speech.

josscrowcroft 14y ago

As great as this article is, the title should be "10 things I learned about accessibility by pretending..." I was hoping it might be about somebody who was 'blind' for a week in everyday life, and the potential shifts in their subjective perception of reality this might have caused.. it's something I've wanted to do for a while – anyone know of anything like that, actually?

nathell 14y ago
Whenever you have the chance of being in Central Europe -- Budapest, Prague or Warsaw -- don't miss the Invisible Exhibition. http://invisibleexhibition.com/ http://invisibleexhibition.com/ I've been there, and it's been one of the most deeply touching experiences I've ever had. Highly recommended.
- chime 14y ago
  I visited "Dialog in the Dark" exhibit in Atlanta with my wife a few years ago. It appears that is permanently closed but they opened a new one in NYC - http://www.dialognyc.com/ http://www.dialognyc.com/ - however due to Sandy, it appears that is temporarily closed.
  - opminion 14y ago
    There is one in Hamburg [1], highly recommended. It consists of a tour with several rooms modelling a variety of features of everyday life, including a boat trip. There is also a bar at the end, where you buy a drink (paying for it was rather humbling for me) and sit down around the guide for a final chat. You never get to see the guide. You are given a walking stick but for me it was pretty useless, I was stumbling on everything and everyone the same. They also offer dinners in the dark. The best part of the experience for me was realising that you are in the blind person's (admittedly fake) world, some form of opposite of when the blind person is in your world when walking down the street and bumping against a car parked in the middle of the street crossing. [1] http://www.dialog-im-dunkeln.de/ http://www.dialog-im-dunkeln.de/
jimmytucson 14y ago

digitalengineer 14y ago

Here is a tip from someone who lost his sight last year: If you suddenly see little black spots, don't f&##^ing wait and get your eye(s) checked out by a specialist at once! Have a deadline? A demanding client? Or perhaps it's just a really bad headache? Don't wait. I literally waited a whole week and thats waaaay to long and saw the curtain close (literally, that's what it looks like: a curtain closing). Finally (and only thanks to my experience with inplant-contactlenses that made the doctor confident I would be able to hold still like a statue when they insert 3 or 4 metal tubes in your freaking eye with only local anesthetics). My eye was fully drained and I was operated at midnight. The nice thing about local anestetics is you'll get to see everything. After 4 weeks I was able to see again. Another 4 weeks and my brain had made the new 'connections' linking my left and right eye. When I started seeing little black spots with my other eye (half a year later) I took immediate action and dropped everything. The doctors were able to use a laser to burn/isolate the distortion and prefented my retina from ripping up. TLDR: DO - NOT - WAIT. Drop everything when you see black spots that remain constant. Regular doctors can't help you, even specialists have difficulty finding the little holes in your eye.

kevinconroy 14y ago
Seriously everyone, heed that advice. Don't wait. Both of my father's retina detached and the only reason he can see today is because he got to the specialist in time for them to fix it. A matter of days can make the difference of vision for the rest of your life. Persistent black spots that "float" around your field of vision need to get checked out ASAP.
- Sargis 14y ago
  I've had several black spots that float around in my vision for over a year now. Is that a sign of retinal detachment? I visited the doctor and he said eye floaters were normal and people with myopia were prone to getting eye floaters.
  - ontheroadagain 14y ago
    Might be worth seeking a second opinion, or maybe that of a specialist? Certainly can't hurt given what's at stake!

Mahn 14y ago

Am I the only one who thought this has startup potential? It sounds like a problem in search of a solution. I can picture for instance a service that would take a page, scan it, remove all the unnecesary clutter and make it as much screen reader friendly as possible.

StavrosK 14y ago
Isn't that the job of the screen reader?
- weego 14y ago
  Screen readers aren't exactly hives of innovation, but yes this is exactly what they are for, so the startup idea is "make a better screenreader."
user24 14y ago
I thought it has startup potential too, but in a different direction; a league of blind people you can hire to give feedback on your website.
- DigitalJack 14y ago
  Yes, exactly. But you could go even further: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5021748 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5021748
ZoFreX 14y ago
> I can picture for instance a service that would take a page, scan it, remove all the unnecesary clutter and make it as much screen reader friendly as possible. If this was technologically achievable, it would be in screen readers already ;)
- shurane 14y ago
  That sounds like something that Readability, Pocket, or Instapaper could very well implement. Considering they already declutter webpages as it is.

jareds 14y ago

As a totally blind software developer everything he has in the article is accurate. There are two things he did not do though which I do on a regular basis and assume most other blind users do as well. First is using the feature of screen readers that allow you to view all links on a page as one giant list. While this isn’t helpful when initially browsing a page if you use a site on a regular basis and know where you need to go it’s easy to bring up a list of links and start typing to use first letter navigation to jump to the link you need out of the 150 that may be on the page. An example of this is typing “pri” to bring up the print link in order to view stories on a single page. Second is the ability to use a find feature of a screen reader to search for specific text on the page. Once again this is not useful for general browsing but if you visit a site on a regular basis and need to repeatedly access a section of the page that isn’t easily findable by links or headings searching for a text string you know will be there is a god send.

chewxy 14y ago
I don't mean to be insensitive, but I am morbidly curious about your condition (mainly because 23andme said I am prone to macular degeneration, a thought that terrifies me). How does one program without sight? I have done something similar to OP on my latest project (I tried to use my product blindfolded + screenreader), and I found that it was a terrible experience. My site was absolute shite. It was only through my own familiarity with it that I was able to navigate it. I would imagine trying to develop sightless itself would be a feat, so my question is: how? were you sighted before you lost your vision? Tactile feedback from the keyboard or voice commands?
- jareds 14y ago
  I was born blind so have never known any different and have always done everything on the computer with speech and brail. From talking to people who have lost their vision later in life it generally seems the older you are when you lose your vision the harder it is to adapt and live a normal life after vision loss. Since you know it may be a possibility though I assume may have some time to at least cope with the fact that you could lose your vision and have a longer time to acclimate yourself to this fact rather than losing it all in a hunting accident. If you have a MAC play with voiceover which is built into the OS, it has a nice getting started tutorial. As for how I program see the following stackoverflow question. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-progra...

deleted 14y ago

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bauc 14y ago

Very interesting experiment. Sighted people often take their vision for granted. I know I do and I try to think of what I would do if I lost my vision but we can all work on improving accessibility in general.

hamidnazari 14y ago

By W3C validator do you mean the Markup Validation Service or the Web Accessibility Initiative aka WAI? I think WAI validators were introduced to address the issue you raised in your experiment. Is this true? Anyhow, I can't agree more, "being W3C valid means jack".

kjhughes 14y ago
While being "W3C valid" (passing validation according to a DTD or schema for the HTML) is insufficient, it's still useful in that tools, including screen readers, can more reliably process the content of a valid page than an invalid page.
- silktide 14y ago
  Yeah I agree, it's useful as an absolute bare minimum. But you shouldn't just get the green tick and rest on your laurels

dmlorenzetti 14y ago

As a similar, but easier, experiment, try listening to Adobe Acrobat read a PDF file out loud-- especially if the PDF contains anything at all interesting, like mathematics, figures, tables, or any kind of "float" that pegs to the top of a page as the text flows around it. While tools are available to let the PDF creator tag the document in order to facilitate reading, in practice they don't seem to be used much, and even then the experience is painful at best.

embplat 14y ago

Read about WCAG (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag), that's what you need to follow to make web sites accessible, not markup validation, which really means "jack shit". Visual impairment does not necessarily equal total blindness. Accounting for text size, contrast level, etc. is a lot to consider. AA conformance level (middle level, so to speak) is very hard to achieve.

nness 14y ago
The Australian government made WCAG 2.0 a mandatory requirement of all government sites. Many claim to conform to the Double-A requirement, but very few bodies do accreditation and the standard itself is almost incomprehensible. A List Apart did a pretty good article on the issues with WCAG 2.0 in 2006: "To Hell with WCAG 2" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2 http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2
- silktide 14y ago
  Many web devs use the W3C validator and assume the green tick means it's completely accessible. But they can only check for so much, which makes it almost useless. There's no substitute for actual user testing
- embplat 14y ago
  The Canadian government is in the same boat. In fact, they are offering an open source framework that is modern, responsive and complies with WCAG requirements: https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew
  - embplat 14y ago
    Here's a Wired article on this subject from today: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/wet/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/wet/

vnorby 14y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo&feature=youtu... I was stunned by how fast the blind can "speed listen" in the linked video. Is this something anyone can learn?

drstrangevibes 14y ago
that is freaking awesome
IvyMike 14y ago
It's nothing close to that video, but I use VLC's "playback speed" settings to watch TV at around 160%. It is definitely something you adapt to...I used to have trouble at 130%, and now that seems slow. (If you do this, you also learn to appreciate good enunciation. Stephen Colbert is completely listen-to-able at 200%. His guests, not so much.)

ctoth 14y ago

I'm a blind software developer who's been lurking on HN now for a couple years. Every few months an article about the blind comes across and seems to generate some discussion. I tend to stay quiet here on HN, as I generally feel I have little to contribute to the latest discussion on whether or not software is like a Japanese restaurant. Now, a few points: First, and most importantly: your web sucks. I'm a very proficient computer user--the same gap between supertechnical and nontechnical users exists in the blind community, perhaps even magnified by other aspects such as secondary disabilities in a good chunk of the blind population. That aside, I've been doing this for around 13 years, using a variety of screen access solutions on Windows, OSX, and even the hellscape that is modern desktop Linux a11y. All of these solutions suffer from the same basic problem namely they are trying to squeeze a dynamic, multidimensional viewport into a linear text string for rapid communication. This don't work so hot, but like most things, you can adapt to it over time. So why does the web suck? First, a history lesson: Back in the halcyon days of the 1990's, when I was just getting started with this silly computer stuff, the problem that was desktop accessibility had already nearly been solved. Microsoft gave us MSAA, and several screen reader vendors implemented their own heuristics on top of it to give pretty good access to standard controls. Highlight detection worked ... reasonably-well to know when text changed on a form, screen readers would perform nasty little hacks including API hooking and other black magic to give a pretty good picture of what was going on at any one time. Then, along came the web. At first this wasn't too terrible. Several screen reader vendors made a stab at solving web accessibility, and thus the virtual buffer was born. The virtual buffer is where the story really gets interesting. You can follow along should you like -- I'm currently using the NVDA screen reader to compose this comment, and you can get it at http://nvda-project.org http://nvda-project.org (for those who do, no I don't listen to that dreadful voice all day, there are alternatives.) Okay: So, you have a tree, the DOM, and you need to render it linearly, and not only that, but it needs to make some kind of sense. Enter the virtual buffer. Each screen reader gets a hold of the DOM through whatever ugly hacks, then renders your beautiful website with lovely topography into a flat, basically plaintext representation. Links get prefixed with "link", headings with "heading 3", so on and so forth. The software developers in the audience probably already see the problem coming, when I learned how this worked I was rather offended. So, for the screen reader, there are two single points of truth: the DOM, and the virtual buffer representation. As we all know, when a complex system includes information in more than one place, the two have a tendency to get out of sync. Consider what happens when you update your DOM with some javascript magic. The screen reader needs to, hopefully without making me lose my current place on the page, diff your changes against its current buffer, update its buffer, and somehow indicate to me that the content has changed, without interrupting my current task. Complex DOM manipulations aside, let's just talk about how poorly-marked-up your content is: For those of you who got NVDA, I invite you to explore around HN a little. Note the unlabeled links for voting, for instance. Is there any indication that the first edit field on a submission's page is where one enters a comment? And HN is hardly a dynamic website. How can one tell nonvisually (or visually for that matter) who replied to whom in comment threads? That's something that's puzzled me for a while, I just have to heuristically separate conversation threads. Now, it's not all bad. Slowly, aria is being deployed to a variety of websites. Even more importantly, I've recently been looking into adding access at the UI toolkit level for some popular projects, especially Bootstrap.js (if a proficient web person would be interested in helping me with this it would be awesome, I'm primarily a desktop software guy (yes, the blind are one of the few subpopulations who haven't gone hole-hog for the web, and I'd argue a good reason for that is the web's lack of accessibility.)) Simple fixes -- adding aria-haspopup="true" to dropdown toggles, adding aria roles to various things can help, and I'm hopeful that work at the bootstrap and similar level will take the onus off of individual web developers. I'm typically pretty difficult to offend, but I must say it's just a tad bit jarring to find the top comment thread on this submission be about how terrible it is to lose one's vision and how one should do absolutely anything to avoid it. Isn't this Hacker News? Where hackers talk about technical things? Mreh. As for the article itself, a couple rather important things: Yes, I'm certain that it is extremely difficult to navigate the web as a newly-blinded person, and this is partially because of many of the issues that I outlined above. That said, if you people want to know how a blind person sees the web, don't ask a sighted person to wear a blindfold for a week and expect it to be at all representative of how someone who's been doing it their entire life does. Why not just ask a blind person? Just a few examples: Where as the author of the submission refers to headings as the primary navigation mechanism, modern screen reader users are quite lucky in that most screen reader developers have mapped hotkeys to nearly every type of HTML element. For instance, I hit f to navigate to the next form field on a page, shift+f to navigate to the previous. Similar keystrokes are available for all the levels of headings, for links both visited and unvisited, for landmarks, for tables, so on and so forth. The title attribute of a link is read in a few cases: 1: when the link is explicitly tabbed to, and 2: when the link does not have text. A perfect example of where the title attribute should* be used is for the HN voting links. Anyhow, I think that's enough rambling for now. Anyone who would like to discuss this, my e-mail is in my profile.

septerr 14y ago

Shouldn't websites start having an accessible version, like they have mobile versions of their sites? These would be free of too much JavaScript fu and go directly to the meat of the matter. In fact it is possible people with no physical challenges would start preferring these simpler faster versions too. Maybe in near future, the latest trend in web will be less JS, less graphics, less animation and more matter.

ctoth 14y ago
This is an absolutely terrible idea that seems to refuse to die. No, it is not reasonable to put the accessible content in some sort of blind-only ghetto. Amazon do this, for instance, with a text-based version of their website. It makes it more difficult to maintain unless you've architected from the absolute beginning for it, and over time the text-based version becomes useless. Think of it from the perspective of someone adding new features to your webapp. Let's put it in HN terms -- you're building your MVP, launching in three days or something absurd... Are you really going to go build a text-based version of your website? Are you going to keep that updated? No. The only solution is to make the actual web, the one we all use, accessible. This doesn't mean changing what individual developers do so much as making sure that it's harder to be inaccessible than to be accessible with technical fixes, I.E. fixing Bootstrap so all Bootstrap sites are more accessible.
- septerr 14y ago
  Why shouldn't companies (their developers) put in the extra effort needed to keep both versions up to date? They can come up with a framework for it. It may not necessarily mean two totally separate code base. You could design your framework so that both versions feed off the same backend. And don't they have to put in that extra effort to make sure their mobile versions are up to date? Startups have a good chance to start their framework with accessibility in mind. An MVP could ignore this aspect, because it is not the final product yet.
  - ctoth 14y ago
    Because they won't. I'm commenting from the perspective of a blind user--I know of what I speak. Note that I explicitly said you would have to architect for it, which you reiterated in your point. Doesn't it make far more sense to make the underlying tooling accessible rather than ghettoizing the content? My main point here is, if there's extra work to be done to make content accessible, that work simply won't be done. Hell, I wouldn't do it either -- a whole extra site template's worth for what? 1% of users? and I am totally blind.

daniel13 14y ago

I agree with some earlier comments about watching out for black spots. I lost my sight in a grizzly bear mauling and learning to use adaptive technology was a critical part of my recovery which lead me back into the work place. The technology available is very helpful, but definitely has its limits and can indeed be quite frustrating at times. Agree with the article that Facebook is really not accessible in a meaningful way at all. While the mobile site is slightly better, it has no structure and is essentially made up of approximately 99 links on my mobile homepage. Like all skills though, you do get better at using a screen reader with practice. I believe the brain's neural pathways actually adapt to accommodate the way a blind user interfaces with the screen reader much in the same way it does for other tasks such as orientation and mobility (travelling blind). So, blind users actually do get used to the super fast speech that may be unintelligible to most people. With that said, I appreciate the article because there are very simple ways to make websites user friendly to the blind. Headings that are not over used and well labeled and having all controls on a site well labeled alone can make a huge difference. The other key is really simplicity. Less is more for the blind user for sure. I've tried to do that with my website (danbigley.com), but it can be difficult to test and ensure accessibility.

baalexander 14y ago

Has anyone had experience with newer versions of Chrome Vox (http://www.chromevox.com/ http://www.chromevox.com/)? Would that improve the experience over the other screen readers for web browsing?

silktide 14y ago
I did look at this before doing testing for this article, but I assume not many blind users will use this setup. When I tested websites I tried to make my experience match the majority of blind users.

zplesivcak 14y ago

Just a note of marginal importance: I'm pretty sure that speeding up movie 1.5 times would bring its runtime from 2hrs to 1hr:20mins (not 1.5hrs as mentioned). With 24 frames per second 2hr movie has 172800 frames. Speedup brings framerate to 36 fps, and dividing we get 4800 seconds, or 80 minutes. Edit: Thank your for pointing that out leberwurstsaft!

leberwurstsaft 14y ago
you missed to multiply by 2h. 86400 frames equal only 1h.