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Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

blog.silktide.com

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Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#81

Post by nness »

embplat wrote: post #54

Read about 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.

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

Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#82

Post by kaybe »

ctoth wrote: post #78
ctoth wrote: post #66

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 profi…

Just a quick note to say that I did not mean to encourage replies to this comment by e-mail instead of using the comment system -- It's plenty useable enough for me to engage, and it's not until I reread my comment after the edit window had closed that I realized I gave that impression.

I find your long comment somewhat hard to read because there are so few breaks, especially in the second block.

(It's probably because the layout is not optimized for very long texts; it's hard to find the beginning of the next line when there are so many of them and the distance between them is small like this.)

Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#83

Post by silktide »

josscrowcroft wrote: post #4

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?

Haha yes you're right, but the title was getting quite long, and I was hoping that would be implied! I could have extended this further and written about how being blind affected other aspects of my life, but I'm a web developer and wanted to write something about my field of interest. I too would be interested in reading an article about how it affects other aspects of life. maybe you should write one!

Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#84

Post by silktide »

nness wrote: post #81
embplat wrote: post #54

Read about 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.

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

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

Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#85

Post by silktide »

baalexander wrote: post #77

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

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.

Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#86

Post by silktide »

kjhughes wrote: post #33
hamidnazari wrote: post #29

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".

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.

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

Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#87

Post by _ysng »

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!

Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#88

Post by leberwurstsaft »

_ysng wrote: post #87

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!

you missed to multiply by 2h. 86400 frames equal only 1h.

Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#89

Post by jareds »

DigitalJack wrote: post #52
jareds wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fac…

Have you found some programming languages to be easier to work with due to their syntax? For example, I was thinking I would have an easier time hearing Python vs hearing Clojure. I think that even if it were brail, something like Clojure would be more difficult to track. Although giving it some more thought, I suppose the indentation of python might be the more difficult thing to deal with.

I haven't used Clojure yet although have been meaning to give it a try at some point. indentation is the reason I've never seriously looked at Python, although I know there are blind programmers who use it effectively. What matters more to me then the actual language is the variable names. If the variable names read more like English or at least follow a standard it's much easier to just listen to the code. The shorter the variable names the more likely I am to read a lot of code using my braille display instead of listening to it.

Re: Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

#90

Post by jareds »

rogerbinns wrote: post #68
jareds wrote: post #22

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…

One thing I am curious about is what screen sizes you use. As a sighted developer having as much visible at once is most productive. I use two large screens and the only reason I don't have a third is lack of desk space. The laptop being used in one of the Youtube links on the page looks to be at least 14 inches. Does screen size affect your productivity? Do you care about resolution? Do you get the smallest screen s…

On a laptop screen size doesn't matter. In College when living space was limited I used a 13 inch 9 pound laptop that I'd lug everywhere since I needed the portability and performance. I then switched to a desktop with 6 cores and 8 gigs of ram as my main machine with a cheap netbook that I use when I'm traveling or want to do basic browsing or email from the couch. When I give into gadget lust or get a big enough raise that I don't feel so guilty spending $1500 when I still have two working computers I may get an 11 inch MacBook air with 8 gigs of ram. Ideally I'd prefer the 11 inch form factor but until recently I couldn't find an 11 inch laptop with good enough specs to be used as a main machine. As far as the phone goes the only touch screen phone I’ve ever had is an iPhone 4 so don’t know how screen size on phones would matter to me. I do know that on touch screen devices too much space can cause me issues since it’s hard to remember where things are. After playing with an iPad I decided to stick with an iPhone since it can do pretty much everything the iPad can without having so much screen space that I spend most of my time trying to find icons instead of the space separating them. I have heard of blind developers using iPads to get a spatial layout of web pages when they are doing web development. For that purpose I could see the bigger screen being an asset but since I don’t do much web development it’s not something I care about.
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