6 ms·

Surviving public school as a blind girl in 1955

57 points by akharris 13y ago

peterwwillis 13y ago
I remember when I was learning web development how "Accessibility" was kind of a feature to enhance your product. I wonder if anyone even considers it these days. Seems like the mad rush to push out a barely-working product would leave people with disabilities on the sidelines.
- Zikes 13y ago
  While there are a number of things that must be done especially for accessibility purposes, for the large part the web is trying to evolve towards natural accessibility. The best example I can think of is SEO, as we attempt to make our sites readable by the various search engine crawlers we also make them more readable by software for the blind.
  - mwcampbell 13y ago
    For content-oriented web sites, you're correct. There are even workarounds for the often-discussed problem of image tags without ALT attributes, so IMO that one isn't a big deal. Rich web applications are more challenging, since they often invent their own UI widgets (or build on top of toolkits that do this), in addition to or even instead of using standard links and form controls. For these, the W3C has a standard called Accessible Rich Internet Applications (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria). But in my experience, ARIA is often subject to misinterpretation by the browser, the assistive technology, the application/toolkit developer, or some combination of the three.
    - Zikes 13y ago
      Agreed, in general rich web applications still have a long way to go in regards to accessibility.
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  To gauge the likelihood of minimum viable products being accessible, I think these are some of the most important questions: 1. How common is it for web application developers to directly make part of a page clickable without using an appropriate semantic tag or ARIA role? 2. How common is it for web application developers to roll their own widgets, e.g. buttons, menus, or sliders? One has to assume that most such widgets implemented directly by the application developer won't have proper ARIA support. 3. Which reusable UI components and toolkits are most common among web application developers, particularly those working on a minimum viable product? How accessible are these?
- jimbobimbo 13y ago
  It's quite a big deal actually: http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/twenty-first-century-communications-and-video-accessibility-act-0 http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/twenty-first-century-communi...
mwcampbell 13y ago
I don't buy the claim that the Web is 80% inaccessible. Does anyone have a citation for that study?
- jacalata 13y ago
  It might be from this 2004 study of UK government sites [http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticle/website-access-denied-to-disabled-people http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticl...]. A 2007 study found 'less than half' but doesn't try and give a specific number [http://staff.washington.edu/tft/research/international/ http://staff.washington.edu/tft/research/international/]. That study also refers to a UN snapshot study in 2006 that found <10% of a small group of sites were accessible, and I also found this 2006 analysis of British commercial sites saying that 75% of them had accessability problems [http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nomensa+claims+75%25+of+UK%27s+FTSE+100+companies+fail+to+meet+DDA...-a0145071395 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nomensa+claims+75%25+of+UK%27s...]
  - jacalata 13y ago
    And while plain text sites have hopefully improved in six-eight years, I suspect that the rise of rich web apps (as mentioned in other comments) would mean that overall percentages of accessible sites could have remained the same or even fallen since then.
    - malandrew 13y ago
      Depending how the rich web app is made, I reckon it has the possibility of making things more accessible. With many jQuery based sites it's not uncommon to load all the content for the site in one go, leaving content with visibility hidden or with 0 opacity, meaning that people with screen readers may have tons and tons of content to sort through to figure out what is relevant. Newer template engines make this better since templates are likely to be stored as Javascript objects/functions that are written to the DOM when they are relevant.
      - 13y ago
softbuilder 13y ago
Schools - public schools anyway - seem to stumble the most with accommodating children with disability. No one wants to deal with it. Sometimes budgets and staffing get blamed, but most often it seems to just boil down to people being forced out of their comfort zone and not wanting to deal with the "tards". Happily the societal trend seems to be toward inclusion. Progress is just very slow, with parents (and students) fighting for it every day.
- Shivetya 13y ago
  they also used to penalize kids who were multilingual too. Some might still do that. It can be a detriment if your child speaks something other than English when young.
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  In the song "Subdivisions", Rush refers to suburbs -- or was it suburban high schools -- as "the mass production zone". Regardless of what they meant, I think that phrase is apt for public schools in general. Mass production works best when the raw materials and the processes are homogeneous across all units. Needless to say, talking about schools and children this way is dehumanizing. But when we look at it this way, is it any wonder that public schools stumble with accommodating children with disabilities? I have no idea what to do about it; just rambling about a possible reason why the problem exists.
fennecfoxen 13y ago
"Nowadays, we have the digital tools to make information available to people with vision loss almost instantaneously." No, we can't let the Kindle read books aloud with text-to-speech; it'll deprive publishers of audiobook revenue!
- Ma8ee 13y ago
  Works with my Kindle touch. Not sure what you are talking about.
  - fennecfoxen 13y ago
    Do you remember this escapade? That's what I mean. http://news.cnet.com/amazon-retreats-on-kindles-text-to-speech-issue/ http://news.cnet.com/amazon-retreats-on-kindles-text-to-spee... ... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/arizona-state-settles-kindle-lawsuit/3540 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/arizona-state-settles-ki... Don't know the latest on it but it was totally a legal battle.
    - jareds 13y ago
      Kindle has gotten a lot better. They finally made there iphone app accessible a couple months ago which makes me happy. Now I'm no longer stuck with ibooks.
jareds 13y ago
I’m a totally blind individual who graduated high school in the United States in 2004. I was fortunate that I grew up just as assistive technology was becoming widely available and fairly easy to use. In 1955 a translator would have to spend a lot of time learning to read and write braille. They would then have to read a print book and manually retype it in braille. Given this it’s understandable why Braille was not something that was pushed in the public school system. By the time I started school anyone with basic computer literacy could scan in a book, open the file in a translation program and print a braille copy out using a braille embosser. While this technology isn’t cheap I was fortunate enough to go to a school that could afford it as well as having parents who advocated for me. I think some of the issues this person had were caused by having some vision. Because I’m totally blind it’s pretty clear that print won’t do me any good and major accommodations have to be made. When you have some vision it’s difficult for others to understand what you can and can’t do, especially if that changes as your vision gets worse. I have an issue with the only 10% of legally blind people can read braille statistic because it is not made clear what the population of legally blind people consists of. Often times being blind is in addition to severe mental handicaps. If someone can’t use the bathroom on their own then learning to read books is low on the list of things that are important. In addition braille may not make sense to elderly people who recently lost their vision. If their fingers are no longer sensitive enough to read braille then should they still count in the statistic? Older people who have lost their vision also have prior experience reading print material. This means that with the prevalence of text to speech software it may not be worth learning braille if they already know how words are spelled and how to construct a sentence.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience. A significant problem with your post that I'm assuming you don't realize because you are blind is that there is only one paragraph. It would be easier to read if you put two carriage returns or line breaks before "I think some of the issues", and another two before "Often times being blind". Currently it seems like a wall of text. edit: much better!
- epochwolf 13y ago
  Sorry if this is an insensitive question, I am merely curious. How do you navigate hacker news?
ars 13y ago
If you want to know more about what it's like for a blind person read "Do You Remember the Color Blue?" by Sally Hobart Alexander. It's aimed at children, but I found it interesting.

57 points by akharris 13y ago

I remember when I was learning web development how "Accessibility" was kind of a feature to enhance your product. I wonder if anyone even considers it these days. Seems like the mad rush to push out a barely-working product would leave people with disabilities on the sidelines.

Zikes 13y ago
While there are a number of things that must be done especially for accessibility purposes, for the large part the web is trying to evolve towards natural accessibility. The best example I can think of is SEO, as we attempt to make our sites readable by the various search engine crawlers we also make them more readable by software for the blind.
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  For content-oriented web sites, you're correct. There are even workarounds for the often-discussed problem of image tags without ALT attributes, so IMO that one isn't a big deal. Rich web applications are more challenging, since they often invent their own UI widgets (or build on top of toolkits that do this), in addition to or even instead of using standard links and form controls. For these, the W3C has a standard called Accessible Rich Internet Applications (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria). But in my experience, ARIA is often subject to misinterpretation by the browser, the assistive technology, the application/toolkit developer, or some combination of the three.
  - Zikes 13y ago
    Agreed, in general rich web applications still have a long way to go in regards to accessibility.
mwcampbell 13y ago
To gauge the likelihood of minimum viable products being accessible, I think these are some of the most important questions: 1. How common is it for web application developers to directly make part of a page clickable without using an appropriate semantic tag or ARIA role? 2. How common is it for web application developers to roll their own widgets, e.g. buttons, menus, or sliders? One has to assume that most such widgets implemented directly by the application developer won't have proper ARIA support. 3. Which reusable UI components and toolkits are most common among web application developers, particularly those working on a minimum viable product? How accessible are these?
jimbobimbo 13y ago
It's quite a big deal actually: http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/twenty-first-century-communications-and-video-accessibility-act-0 http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/twenty-first-century-communi...

mwcampbell 13y ago

I don't buy the claim that the Web is 80% inaccessible. Does anyone have a citation for that study?

jacalata 13y ago
It might be from this 2004 study of UK government sites [http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticle/website-access-denied-to-disabled-people http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticl...]. A 2007 study found 'less than half' but doesn't try and give a specific number [http://staff.washington.edu/tft/research/international/ http://staff.washington.edu/tft/research/international/]. That study also refers to a UN snapshot study in 2006 that found <10% of a small group of sites were accessible, and I also found this 2006 analysis of British commercial sites saying that 75% of them had accessability problems [http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nomensa+claims+75%25+of+UK%27s+FTSE+100+companies+fail+to+meet+DDA...-a0145071395 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nomensa+claims+75%25+of+UK%27s...]
- jacalata 13y ago
  And while plain text sites have hopefully improved in six-eight years, I suspect that the rise of rich web apps (as mentioned in other comments) would mean that overall percentages of accessible sites could have remained the same or even fallen since then.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    Depending how the rich web app is made, I reckon it has the possibility of making things more accessible. With many jQuery based sites it's not uncommon to load all the content for the site in one go, leaving content with visibility hidden or with 0 opacity, meaning that people with screen readers may have tons and tons of content to sort through to figure out what is relevant. Newer template engines make this better since templates are likely to be stored as Javascript objects/functions that are written to the DOM when they are relevant.
    - 13y ago

softbuilder 13y ago

Schools - public schools anyway - seem to stumble the most with accommodating children with disability. No one wants to deal with it. Sometimes budgets and staffing get blamed, but most often it seems to just boil down to people being forced out of their comfort zone and not wanting to deal with the "tards". Happily the societal trend seems to be toward inclusion. Progress is just very slow, with parents (and students) fighting for it every day.

Shivetya 13y ago
they also used to penalize kids who were multilingual too. Some might still do that. It can be a detriment if your child speaks something other than English when young.
mwcampbell 13y ago
In the song "Subdivisions", Rush refers to suburbs -- or was it suburban high schools -- as "the mass production zone". Regardless of what they meant, I think that phrase is apt for public schools in general. Mass production works best when the raw materials and the processes are homogeneous across all units. Needless to say, talking about schools and children this way is dehumanizing. But when we look at it this way, is it any wonder that public schools stumble with accommodating children with disabilities? I have no idea what to do about it; just rambling about a possible reason why the problem exists.

fennecfoxen 13y ago

"Nowadays, we have the digital tools to make information available to people with vision loss almost instantaneously." No, we can't let the Kindle read books aloud with text-to-speech; it'll deprive publishers of audiobook revenue!

Ma8ee 13y ago
Works with my Kindle touch. Not sure what you are talking about.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  Do you remember this escapade? That's what I mean. http://news.cnet.com/amazon-retreats-on-kindles-text-to-speech-issue/ http://news.cnet.com/amazon-retreats-on-kindles-text-to-spee... ... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/arizona-state-settles-kindle-lawsuit/3540 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/arizona-state-settles-ki... Don't know the latest on it but it was totally a legal battle.
  - jareds 13y ago
    Kindle has gotten a lot better. They finally made there iphone app accessible a couple months ago which makes me happy. Now I'm no longer stuck with ibooks.

jareds 13y ago

I’m a totally blind individual who graduated high school in the United States in 2004. I was fortunate that I grew up just as assistive technology was becoming widely available and fairly easy to use. In 1955 a translator would have to spend a lot of time learning to read and write braille. They would then have to read a print book and manually retype it in braille. Given this it’s understandable why Braille was not something that was pushed in the public school system. By the time I started school anyone with basic computer literacy could scan in a book, open the file in a translation program and print a braille copy out using a braille embosser. While this technology isn’t cheap I was fortunate enough to go to a school that could afford it as well as having parents who advocated for me. I think some of the issues this person had were caused by having some vision. Because I’m totally blind it’s pretty clear that print won’t do me any good and major accommodations have to be made. When you have some vision it’s difficult for others to understand what you can and can’t do, especially if that changes as your vision gets worse. I have an issue with the only 10% of legally blind people can read braille statistic because it is not made clear what the population of legally blind people consists of. Often times being blind is in addition to severe mental handicaps. If someone can’t use the bathroom on their own then learning to read books is low on the list of things that are important. In addition braille may not make sense to elderly people who recently lost their vision. If their fingers are no longer sensitive enough to read braille then should they still count in the statistic? Older people who have lost their vision also have prior experience reading print material. This means that with the prevalence of text to speech software it may not be worth learning braille if they already know how words are spelled and how to construct a sentence.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. A significant problem with your post that I'm assuming you don't realize because you are blind is that there is only one paragraph. It would be easier to read if you put two carriage returns or line breaks before "I think some of the issues", and another two before "Often times being blind". Currently it seems like a wall of text. edit: much better!
epochwolf 13y ago
Sorry if this is an insensitive question, I am merely curious. How do you navigate hacker news?

ars 13y ago

If you want to know more about what it's like for a blind person read "Do You Remember the Color Blue?" by Sally Hobart Alexander. It's aimed at children, but I found it interesting.