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How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

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Re: How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

#21

Post by jmyeet »

Retric wrote: post #14
jmyeet wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This went from "deaf people should be allowd to function in society", which is absolutely fair, to "I don't want to take any responsibility for being aware of my surroundings", which is what wearing noise-cancelling headphones in public is. You can do that but you then share some of the blame when things go wrong. Saying "well, deaf people have to deal with this so it's not my fault" isn't the defence I think you thi…

People have zero obligation to be able to hear their surroundings. Listening to music on a walk is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. It’s very slightly less safe for them, but they aren’t risking other people so that’s fine.

That's simply not true and bad advice. This comes up in distracted driving cases. If you play music so loud that you can't hear your surroundings, you can become partially (or wholly) at fault for an accident [1]. I guarantee you there are situations where your intentional sensory deprivation will lead to legal liability so you have to be extra careful if you choose to do that.

You have an affirmative responsibility to act in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risks for yourself and others.

[1]: https://naqvilaw.com/las-vegas-impaired-driving-attorney/lou...

Re: How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

#22

Post by Planktonne »

jmyeet wrote: post #21
Retric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have zero obligation to be able to hear their surroundings. Listening to music on a walk is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. It’s very slightly less safe for them, but they aren’t risking other people so that’s fine.

That's simply not true and bad advice. This comes up in distracted driving cases. If you play music so loud that you can't hear your surroundings, you can become partially (or wholly) at fault for an accident [1]. I guarantee you there are situations where your intentional sensory deprivation will lead to legal liability so you have to be extra careful if you choose to do that. You have an affirmative responsibility…

In distracted driving cases, you're behind the wheel of a vehicle that is capable of harming others; that's why it leads to legal liability. In situations where you are not likely to cause harm, "act[ing] in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risks for yourself and others" does not require anything from you.

Re: How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

#23

Post by codingdave »

jmyeet wrote: post #21
Retric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have zero obligation to be able to hear their surroundings. Listening to music on a walk is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. It’s very slightly less safe for them, but they aren’t risking other people so that’s fine.

That's simply not true and bad advice. This comes up in distracted driving cases. If you play music so loud that you can't hear your surroundings, you can become partially (or wholly) at fault for an accident [1]. I guarantee you there are situations where your intentional sensory deprivation will lead to legal liability so you have to be extra careful if you choose to do that. You have an affirmative responsibility…

You seem to be misunderstanding the difference between what someone driving a car is responsible for vs. a pedestrian.

Re: How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

#25

Post by DuperPower »

bebe9494i4 wrote: post #8

It is revealing how people with disabilities are treated, just to walk on sidewalk as a deaf person. Most cyclicts assume they have a priority on sidewalks, and will ring bell to enforce it. If you do not jump out of their way in 2 seconds, you get rammed. Cyclists know I can not hear them (I am wearing big noise cancelling headphones). Yet they still insist on their imaginary priority on sidewalks. I was forced to r…

is this a netherlands post? because normal countries dont assume human on bike IS the default

Re: How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

#26

Post by scragz »

bebe9494i4 wrote: post #8

It is revealing how people with disabilities are treated, just to walk on sidewalk as a deaf person. Most cyclicts assume they have a priority on sidewalks, and will ring bell to enforce it. If you do not jump out of their way in 2 seconds, you get rammed. Cyclists know I can not hear them (I am wearing big noise cancelling headphones). Yet they still insist on their imaginary priority on sidewalks. I was forced to r…

and then you ride in the street and drivers yell "get on the sidewalk" and try to hit you.

Re: How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

#27

Post by miki123211 »

The annoying and counterintuitive part of accessibility work is that there are some architectural decisions that are very hard to undo, don't seem that significant, but will absolutely bite you when you need to implement accessibility.

If you decide on a GUI framework which doesn't communicate semantics to the underlying APIs properly, you have no good options. Either you rewrite your entire project in a different framework just to deliver one feature, dive deep into framework guts to fix the issue (which may be written in an entirely different language and outside your area of expertise), or do some ugly hack on top to sort-of make it work.

A lot of accessibility issues, especially historically, essentially boiled down to "developer chose the wrong approach and didn't know how to get themselves out of the situation later."

It's better now because we went from desktop frameworks drawing their own pixels on screen to web frameworks creating div soup, and div soup is much easier to fix than having pixels instead of native OS controls, but it still happens occasionally. The most recent one I personally ran into was WindScribe, who made a desktop GUI framework of their own for no good reason, and now they can't fix accessibility without a whole lot of work.

Re: How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

#28

Post by thrtythreeforty »

DuperPower wrote: post #25
bebe9494i4 wrote: post #8

It is revealing how people with disabilities are treated, just to walk on sidewalk as a deaf person. Most cyclicts assume they have a priority on sidewalks, and will ring bell to enforce it. If you do not jump out of their way in 2 seconds, you get rammed. Cyclists know I can not hear them (I am wearing big noise cancelling headphones). Yet they still insist on their imaginary priority on sidewalks. I was forced to r…

is this a netherlands post? because normal countries dont assume human on bike IS the default

Cyclists doing whatever they feel like is status quo everywhere. Now I'm most important sidewalk user! Now I'm a car! Now the traffic rules don't apply to me!

(Not all cyclists do this. But the rude ones are common enough that "cyclists" have gotten this reputation.)

Re: How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

#29

Post by jmyeet »

Planktonne wrote: post #22
jmyeet wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply not true and bad advice. This comes up in distracted driving cases. If you play music so loud that you can't hear your surroundings, you can become partially (or wholly) at fault for an accident [1]. I guarantee you there are situations where your intentional sensory deprivation will lead to legal liability so you have to be extra careful if you choose to do that. You have an affirmative responsibility…

In distracted driving cases, you're behind the wheel of a vehicle that is capable of harming others; that's why it leads to legal liability. In situations where you are not likely to cause harm, "act[ing] in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risks for yourself and others" does not require anything from you.

All of this is really making my point. Being a pedestrian does not absolve you of all responsibility to mitigate harm. If you cycled at all you’d quickly learn just how entitled and oblivious so many pedestrians act.

Cyclists do stupid and dangerous things too. Believe me I am aware. I have to anticipate those too.

But, in my experience, nobody acts with more carelessness and selfishness than pedestrians. And I say that as one of them too.

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