181–190 of 620 posts
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So I take it you're opposed to the ADA in general?
Absolutely except for federal buildings. The powers not expressly given to the federal government in the constitution are reserved to the states. At worse it should be a states rights issue with each state deciding their own way.
Small personal story: My father is an amazing salesman. He used to sell for Schwan's food in the 90's (those big yellow trucks that delivered frozen food to your door every 2 weeks). He had a blind couple (husband and wife) that were on one of his routes, and they bought a little bit of food every time he came by. But they could never read the menu, because Schwan's only had printed brochures. One day, he had me and…
Blind programmer here. Just a glimpse of my life. Blind people have to live in an environment where X% of web sites and programs are not accessible, where X varies somewhere from 20% (for web sites) to 50% (for desktop applications). That's just my approximation of the state of accessibility these days. Now imagine that you live in the world where you don't know which printer or wi-fi router to buy, since maybe half…
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Is there some kind of "Yelp for websites for blind people"? In other words, a web site for blind people that lets you know whether a given site works with your screen reader? It seems like it could be a big time saver.
None that I'm aware of. The problem is checking whether a web site is accessible is a manual operation and therefore time-consuming. And it often happens that companies break accessibility, and then they fix it, and then they break it again...
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Are screen readers still as terrible as that article makes them sound? Regretfully, I've never actually tried to use one, nor worked with anyone who needed one. I imagine they are basically horrific to use on almost any modern website. My inexpert suspicion is that investment in better screen reading technology could make millions of sites accessible which currently are not, and that there should be some way to meet…
Mac OS X has one built in, if you are looking to play around with one.
Windows also has a built-in screen reader called Narrator. On Windows 10 version 1703 or later, you can turn it on with Control+Windows+Enter. As of version 1903, it works reasonably well with Chrome, Edge (both Chromium-based and legacy), and IE. Another popular option on Windows is the open-source NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/).
Disclosure: I'm a developer at Microsoft, on the Narrator team, but as usual, I'm posting on my own behalf.
Blind programmer here. Just a glimpse of my life. Blind people have to live in an environment where X% of web sites and programs are not accessible, where X varies somewhere from 20% (for web sites) to 50% (for desktop applications). That's just my approximation of the state of accessibility these days. Now imagine that you live in the world where you don't know which printer or wi-fi router to buy, since maybe half…
Ironically (I cannot seem to word this in my mind without sounding like an ass so please don't take offense), your comment is about 10 lines long on my 15 inch laptop making it somewhat difficult to read for us vision readers. A double new line every few sentences which causes a paragraph on hacker news makes it much easier.
If you make the browser window narrower the eye has a lot less trouble moving from the end of one line back to the start of the next.
I like wide screens because they make it better for having two apps side by side, rather than one app full width .
https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o...
Blind programmer here. Just a glimpse of my life. Blind people have to live in an environment where X% of web sites and programs are not accessible, where X varies somewhere from 20% (for web sites) to 50% (for desktop applications). That's just my approximation of the state of accessibility these days. Now imagine that you live in the world where you don't know which printer or wi-fi router to buy, since maybe half…
Ironically (I cannot seem to word this in my mind without sounding like an ass so please don't take offense), your comment is about 10 lines long on my 15 inch laptop making it somewhat difficult to read for us vision readers. A double new line every few sentences which causes a paragraph on hacker news makes it much easier.
And long lines are trivially helped by making the window less wide.
So you've provided a good demonstration about how vastly easier things are to adjust for someone that can see.