How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

https://iinteractive.com/resources/blog/read-only

by fortyseven • 23 days ago

93 80 23 days ago

iinteractive.com

edu• 20 days ago

It took 18 hours of work.

So a couple of days plus a few hours. Seems reasonable.

harvey9• 20 days ago

Originally expected to take 2 hours. I think the writer is just saying it was a lot more than expected.

jaffa2• 20 days ago

Where I had control, I made changes. Unnecessary labels removed. Accurate alt text added — not filed-in-for-compliance alt text, actually descriptive alt text. The heading structure was cleaned up where I could reach it. For this project's SharePoint tracking page, I rerouted entirely: instead of asking users to fight through the noise, the system now sends an email update at every stage of the approval.

seems to be the only bit of text that actually details anything that was done. I would liked to have read about the actual changes and steps taken to improve accessibility instead of some kind of low key rant about MS

cwmoore• 20 days ago

Not to your critique, but from the quote, I’m alerted to the idea that filled-in-for-compliance is malicious compliance or non-compliance. I can’t imagine the frustration multiplier it must be. So much is frustrating enough on the intended mass-audience happy path.

Tepix2• 20 days ago

While the content was interesting, the AI-slop-stench was repelling.

Talking about AI (sorry!), perhaps an AI assisted screen reader could remove repetitive elements (it appends "(read only)" to every. single. field.) in a smart fashion? Does this already exist?

We're seeing AI being used to improve a11y in quite a few places: (Live) transcripts for video conferences, image to text (VQA, visual question answering) etc.

zersiax7• 19 days ago

No. There are certainly AI-generated accessibility solutions for single, existing applications, games and websites but no outright AI-powered screen reader. I'd think the token cost alone would make such a project prohibitively expensive, although one-off AI features are starting to sneak into JAWS and NVDA as we spaek, so who knows.

fc417fc8022• 19 days ago

It's not as though the task requires a frontier size LLM. A small on device model should suffice for most clean up.

But if you did want to run a full size model deepseek v4 flash is so cheap that I doubt even many hours of web browsing would have a noticeable cost.

RobMurray• 19 days ago

latency would be the killer. a very tiny delay between pressing a key and hearing a response can make a screen reader feel unresponsive.

Tepix2• 19 days ago

A relatively small and fast LLM (30b MoE) would probably suffice. It‘s something you can run locally with a nice GPU.

Planktonne6• 20 days ago

revealed invisible

Interesting that the language of sight is so prevalent that it appears in this very title twice.

Echoing other comments, this would be a stronger article if it went into more specifics, but the AI voice precludes that meaningfully.

thaumasiotes• 20 days ago

Interesting that the language of sight is so prevalent that it appears in this very title twice.

Well, it appears once in "invisible", and once in "blind"... but I don't see why "blind" is a surprise when talking about someone blind.

There is no reference to sight in "reveal".

Planktonne6• 19 days ago

Not an immediately explicit one, but to reveal is to unveil [1] is to remove a covering that blocks sight specifically.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/reveal

TimByte5• 19 days ago

Yeah, blind seems unavoidable there, since it's literally about a blind client

TimByte5• 19 days ago

The "invisible" point is interesting, although I'm not sure I'd read too much into it. Visual metaphors are so baked into English that avoiding all of them can start to feel a bit performative unless the wording is actually excluding someone

Planktonne6• 19 days ago

Visual metaphors are so baked into English

This is the point I am making.

singpolyma32• 19 days ago

I thought of it as a pun

bebe9494i4• 20 days ago

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 remove my noise cancelling headphones, just to hear their slurs!

Cyclists on bike have no priority, they are not allowed to cycle on sidewalks! They should be using roads! I am allowed to wear my noise cancelling headphones on sidewalk! I looked it up!

jmyeet3• 20 days ago

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 think it is. Do I close my eyes and walk blindly in public there are blind people? No.

Accomodations are for people who need them not a shield for hyper-selfishness.

I cycle and I either don't wear any headphones or I use the open ones where I can still hear my surroundings. I assume every driver is eitehr an oblivious idiot or is out to kill me. I assume it's every pedestrian's first day on Earth because that's how it seems. The level of entitlement I see on a daily basis is insane. Runners who refuse to get out of dedicated bike lanes, people who park in dedicated bike lanes, people who get annoyed that I go onto the road when I'm allowed to, people that get annoyed that I go onto the sidewalk or road because I have to (often because the bike path is blocked), people who walk 5 abreast on a shared pedestrian bike path, etc etc etc.

But what really gets me is people who have elevated their own hyper-selfishness into some kind of virtue. "I'm going to block out all noise in a public space because that's what deaf people have to deal with" is a new one for me.

Oh and as an aside, people who are deaf often aren't completely deaf. Deafness (and blindness) is a spectrum.

Retric• 19 days ago

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.

Planktonne6• 19 days ago

Making sure you are fully aware of your surroundings is prudent, in case someone is acting recklessly or maliciously, but it shouldn't be a requirement.

You're not to blame at all when a cyclist runs you down on the pavement (that they shouldn't be on). Yes, you might have heard the bell without the headphones, but they're the one acting recklessly, and they're the one responsible for ensuring that they don't harm people acting normally.

There are all sorts of situations that it's possible to anticipate, but there's no moral fault ascribed for not acting defensively against every possible form of attack.

hnfong• 19 days ago

Not sure where you got the "I don't want to take any responsibility for being aware of my surroundings".

GP simply pointed out cyclists are apparently super unfriendly to deaf people, inferred from the experience where GP made himself temporarily deaf.

It doesn't matter whether GP takes responsibility or not. The issue is the social phenomenon where cyclists create danger for themselves and deaf pedestrians.

I cycle

I know it's bad to stereotype people but you're not helping it.

saidnooneever• 19 days ago

this sounds like a mess :') i am happy here in NL most people know the rules. occasionally you hear someone huffing and puffing about an oblivious tourist but thats about it. ofc there are anti social ppl still but the average is to know well the rules and follow them. it makes it so its pretty risk free in any mode of transport.

Only motorbikes is tough because people dont like them going past them in traffic jams :/ the last bastion of decency in our traffic xD... (lets forget about people who own racing bikes they dont count)

nstents• 19 days ago

"Accomodations are for people who need them not a shield for hyper-selfishness", namely people riding bicycles on sidewalks that are seen acting with an insane level entitlement while riding on dedicated walking lanes.

People act as people do regardless of their method of conveyance. A polite way of encountering a group walking where they should (and another should not ride) is to dismount the bicycle, say "excuse me" and walk through, then to remount and continue on the bike. In the case you mentioned, calling out in advance "excuse me, coming through" should just do it. If not, step up to bell ringing.

You should see what cyclists from Austin do on the Texas backroads, with their stopping in the middle of the lane at the top of a hill, doing the same on a tight curve, riding abreast... But again, people are people; they don't seem to realize road signs have a setback for a very good reason.

fizzynut• 19 days ago

A pedestrian has priority on the road, that doesn't mean you should walk into the road with your eyes closed wearing noise cancelling headphones.

DuperPower• 19 days ago

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

thrtythreeforty• 19 days ago

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.)

Jaxan• 19 days ago

No. In the Netherlands is not common to cycle on side walks. We have cycling lanes for that! Pedestrians and cyclists only meet at crossings. (The behaviour of cyclists in the big cities might be different though.)

scragz• 19 days ago

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

mikestew• 19 days ago

That isn’t the fault of the sidewalk users, don’t make it their problem.

TimByte5• 19 days ago

Sidewalks have to be usable by people who can't hear, people moving slowly, kids, older people etc. If a cyclist is on a sidewalk and can't safely pass without the pedestrian reacting instantly, they're the one creating the problem

estebank2• 19 days ago

We can't individual responsibility our way out of systemic problems. Cyclists on sidewalks generally signals terrible bike infrastructure.

There are people on bikes that ride like an asshole. There are people on cars that drive like an asshole. Both cause (different levels of) risk for pedestrians. There's only so much we can do about assholes, social ostracism works only so far and social change is much harder to accomplish than modifying our built environment to reduce or eliminate conflict points.

As an aside, I've noticed people get startled when I'm on my bike stopped but balancing on my bike while I wait for then to cross. I think some people intuitively model bikes on the same category as cars, so being anywhere close causes them to react as if a car hard crept close.

singpolyma32• 19 days ago

Cycling on sidewalks is illegal here in Canada. Surprised it's being allowed elsewhere

kps• 19 days ago

In my part of Canada it's illegal and allowed.

captainbland• 19 days ago

Generally it's more "overlooked" than allowed. In the UK for instance cycling on pavements (sidewalks) is unlawful but the guidance is to only enforce this if the cyclist is not giving consideration to pedestrians.

Realistically though I think it leads to the same state of play as everywhere else where pedestrians don't much fancy being hit by a faster moving and taller (if not larger) object so dodge out of the way even if they aren't necessarily obligated to.

estebank2• 19 days ago

In cycling threads you always have comments both telling cyclists to stay out of sidewalks and others telling cyclists that they "only* belong in sidewalks (and away from the road they drive in).

It is legal in some places, illegal in as many others, and has caveats almost everywhere (children are almost always allowed, in other places it is based on speed, etc.).

ryandrake2• 19 days ago

Living in the USA, I always thought cycling on sidewalks was illegal, too, but looking it up, it seems that the laws vary from street to street, city to city, and state to state, which is ridiculous IMO.

khurs• 19 days ago

Video any such interaction. They go viral easily and the culprit learns their lesson.

bradley132• 19 days ago

WTF? Bicycles on sidewalks? At least where I am, that's illegal, and I'm not moving.

analog313• 19 days ago

I'm a cyclist, and I sympathize with you. Also, my mom is stone deaf, and I've observed her experiences on paths that are shared with cyclists.

My town is one of the few places where cyclists are allowed on the sidewalks, but I don't do it except for very good reasons such as along dangerous roads. Those places also tend to have no pedestrians. And I give wide berth to people on foot, typically slowing down to walking pace or even getting off my bike and walking.

Also, the bell is for "announcing" not "enforcing." It's gentler than startling someone as you pass them, or making their dog freak out. And it doesn't preclude slowing down.

mslate• 19 days ago

What exactly does this have to do with the article?

monster_group• 19 days ago

Note the irony in the title.

miki123211• 19 days ago

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.

TimByte5• 19 days ago

The web has its own problems, but at least bad HTML is often still visible enough to repair. A custom canvas-like desktop UI can be basically a black box to assistive tech

zersiax7• 19 days ago

Very true :)

I had this exact issue with the Elgato StreamDeck user interface, which renders the macro buttons as one big canvas only drag-and-drop interacts with.

It's rare that I outright cannot figure out a way to make a UI accessible, but that one managed to break everything I tossed at it. I eventually switched my effforts to an open-source third party client which had a web UI, which is now accessible to screen reader users.

As for repairing HTML, my last few engagements have clearly shown me that while HTML CAN be repaired, many devs these days wouldn't know where to even begin to do that. The amount of hand-holding I've had to do has made me suggest, several times, to just give me git access as it'd be faster if I just fix it myself.

zersiax7• 19 days ago

The solution, that accessibility advocates have been clamoring for for decades now, is to s"shift left".

If you know you're going to add accessibility, which ... we have had WCAG since 2005, not knowing that at this point is negligence imho, just make sure you work with frameworks and libraries that won't require overhauling all the things when the PO or management finally get sued into letting devs actually implement it properly. If that kind of functionality takes a backseat to "stunning" and "beaituful" designs that a bunch of people can't use, we take the user out of user interface.

ryandrake2• 19 days ago

We should stop thinking about accessibility as if it's some kind of feature that you "add" into the product later in development. This "add it later" mentality doesn't work for security, and it definitely doesn't work for accessibility. Like security, accessibility should be baked into the product's design from the very beginning. It should be part of the product's basic requirements.

TimByte5• 19 days ago

The "read only" example is such a good illustration of how accessibility problems often aren't one big broken thing, but a bunch of tiny reasonable-seeming decisions stacked together

GarnetFloride• 19 days ago

So many things are like that. Trying to bolt on accessibility or security as an afterthought never work as well as making those things part of the initial design.

I've been at this long enough that yes I know that just getting something out the door so we can make money is important.

But this just creates another kind of technical debt that comes back to bite you.

mamcx• 19 days ago

In general you WANNA see any people using your app.

Read an "accessibility" spec or a requirement or a UX "good practice" is not a substitute for see how people use it!

One of my anecdotes from back in the day: The secretary of a school that use the app I help develop call about problems reading data, that comes in CD. We can't do much by phone so I travel to the town to try to debug on site (bring dev tools in the day where that means diskettes and cds, we were transitioning from FoxPro 2.6 DOS to Visual Fox Windows 95).

Eventually after some time the secretary put the coffee cup in the CD tray.

Go figure!

8bitsrule• 19 days ago

Revealing that, after 30 years of Internet, someone's actually confronting this situation for the first time. So's the word 'gaps' ... as if the English Channel is a 'gap' for swimmers.

Equally revealing is the audio quality of most CPU screen-readers (regardless of platform). Usually, not far from the crappy first attempts of 30 years ago.

But then, hey, it's a small market, right?

asadotzler• 19 days ago

Most people who depend on screen readers prefer the synthetic voices for their consistency which can allow them "read" at far faster speeds. I've been working for a couple of years to reach the speed one of my friend regularly works at, about 900 WPM. I topped out around 550 WPM with the human-sounding voices and then almost immediately got to 650 moving to a synthetic voices. Still a long way to go to hit 900, but I'm certain it's possible, and nearly certain it's impossible with text that's voiced to sound human-like.

lproven• 19 days ago

I've been occasionally helping a blind friend of mine with his PC since 2005. His screenreader talks at about 600wpm or more and after 20 years of practice I can't understand it.

I speedread and can read text faster than his computer's voice -- but not by much. It is very impressive, and very hard to use.

But I am the only sighted person he's met who can use his PC. I navigate Windows mostly by keyboard, and he has no mouse. It slows me down slightly but I can still use it.

(He does have a screen on his family computer, so sighted family and friends can watch films with him. His work one has no screen.)

zersiax7• 19 days ago

Honestly the fact that this article still needs to be written in 2026 is the designated real-big-sad imho.

Screen readers almost entirely ignore the visual layer of any UI, and are entirely dependent on the layer that most developers ignore because it's not the visual layer. It's a perfect storm.

It stands to reason that someone who's actually used to using a screen reader should be brought in to verify what you've built actually works well for that target audience.

I'm a fully blind accessibility auditor, remediator and trainer myself, but I wouldn't dare to assume to know how a mobility-impaired user using eyegaze tech fares on a website I've audited.

My eyes don't gaze, so I don't have the context to make those calls.

On that note: I'm looking for work, anyone need me to tell them how their UI is bad for accessibility and fix it for them so they don't get sued later? :P

neverartful2• 19 days ago

I'd like to connect with you offline for further conversation. I didn't see any contact information in your profile (and there's none currently in mine either).

zersiax7• 19 days ago

I'm not a hard person to find. My hackernews handle into a search engine gets you myriad ways to contact me (Mastodon, LinkedIn, etc.) but I'm at florianbeijers [at] google's mail service if email is your preferred mode of communication. I have a website at florianbeijers.xyz with a contact form, its just very much a placeholder and not really currently meant for public consumption until I revamp it

gaoshan• 19 days ago

My company has a team of accessibility impacted testers who will assess any web/device work we do. It is invaluable and they can always find things that were missed regardless of how many tools we use to help in development.

bradley132• 19 days ago

I'm a teacher and I've had blind students, so I am aware of the barriers. But: do an honest evaluation of the costs of full, correct accessibility vs. the number of people who benefit. A cold-blooded calculation for a company putting out a project.

It honestly is not worth it. Huge costs, and you sell...maybe an additional license or two. So no one does it.

neverartful2• 19 days ago

I understand your point, especially for company websites whose products/services aren't oriented to the blind.

However, there are many companies with products/services that are just as much for the blind as the sighted (government, insurance, legal, medical, etc.) and many of them don't even make an attempt. The blind are still people and they should have equal access.

toast0• 19 days ago

The carrot is clearly not enough for accessibility. That's why the ADA provides the stick.

There's a large benefit for society when society is more accommodating. It's easier to notice the accommodations for limited mobility; but if you have a new limit to your mobility, you'll notice everywhere they aren't. Accommodations for limited vision are often less noticable if you don't have experience with limited vision, but many of them are not very expensive if done at the right time in the project.

Havoc• 19 days ago

Recently went to a restaurant that is fully blacked out and has blind waiters. Pretty fascinating experience.

The inability to identify food when you take away visual clues was much much worse than expected. Even just beef vs chicken which I would have laughed at if you suggested that to me beforehand. But nope…one slightly exotic sauce on chicken and everyone was confused.

troglodytetrain• 19 days ago

So, at this point any company that doesn’t want ai agents navigating on their webpages have to kill the accessibility.

And they do and will. Blind users are a tiny tiny part of users. But hurting usability for the disabled is bad PR. So of course they do it “accidentally”.

How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

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