Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week (2013)

http://blog.silktide.com/2013/01/things-learned-pretending-to-be-blind-for-a-week

by ColinWright • 12 years ago

120 61 12 years ago

blog.silktide.com

jblok• 12 years ago

It's interesting that Facebook and Amazon have a terrible experience for blind users, considering their wealth of resources. I imagine it is common knowledge among blind users to expect the mobile site to perform better, if the desktop site is sucky.

ljf• 12 years ago

All the more amazing since accessibility is supposedly one of the things that Amazon does well: https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z12ld3fwhlnexv5b004...

jareds4• 12 years ago

I have no issue using the main amazon site with Jaws as a screen reader. I'm sure part of that is that I've been using Jaws for close to 20 years but it doesn't appear this guy used navigation by headers which makes amazon quite usable.

digitalengineer• 12 years ago

Would it be possible to build 'An app for that?' (E.g. Blind people). Browser sites and stuff through the app.

icebraining• 12 years ago

That's what screen readers do; a popular one is JAWS: http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-pa...

huskyr• 12 years ago

Very interesting article. I would love a followup about actual things you can do as a developer to make life easier for users with screen readers.

NAFV_P• 12 years ago

The article mentioned "w3m", never come across it before, although I do have "lynx" and "elinks". Really impressive.

kroger• 12 years ago

w3m was (is?) the most popular way read html pages in emacs http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org

yaddayadda• 12 years ago

First, I applaud David Ball for doing this and sharing his results!

Second, one of the first web application projects that I was a part of I was assigned as the "accessibility expert". At some point during that project I was told that the reason it is termed "accessibility" is because it makes the resource (e.g., website, print page, whatever the resource) more accessible for everyone, not just for people with physical limitations. The development version of that application lived on an unmanaged, but live server for more than a decade before it disappeared; up until its disappearance the application was still functioning, and could even be used on a mobile phone. Most of the recommendations I made, all those years ago, went uncontested by my teammates, but every now and then I had to fight for some aspect and I would make the "accessibility benefits everyone" speech. The last teammember to visit our application before it disappeared admitted that it wouldn't have been able to run on the latest technology if I hadn't been so adamant about accessibility all those years ago.

ewiethoff• 12 years ago

Thank you. I would love an article about accessibility for people who must use voice commands or those who cannot use a pointing device. Dragon is fine with spoken keyboard commands, but much of the JavaScript out there borks site navigation by keyboard and control of normal browser functionality by keyboard.

RodrigoGil• 12 years ago

Like the article. It reminds me the book from Saramago that inspired the movie: Blindness (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/). But it's important to note that it's completely different the case where a born blind person and a person that becomes blind. So it might be useful to speak with a born blind person and how they manage these web browsing tasks.

kendalk• 12 years ago

I dated a woman who was born blind. She could listen to JAWS speak text faster than I can read.

If you really want to know how your website "looks" to a blind person, ask one. Every state has an association for the blind. I am sure they would be happy to arrange a time to sit down with you. Expect some honest feedback.

jpswade• 12 years ago

The most useful information I found on accessibility was this video, which really showed me how the blind use the web:

"Victor Tsaran: An Introduction to Screen Readers"[1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izrC4R7SsH4

octo_t• 12 years ago

This reminds me of this wired article[1] when Steve Jobs died, whilst not directly related to blindness - it is touched upon - in my experience few firms have gotten it as right on accessibility as Apple, and definitely nowhere close several years ago, I haven't checked much in the last few years on android.

The top comment on Jobs personally intervening when a bluetooth stack had a bug in an iMac is pretty touching too.

[1] http://www.wired.com/business/2011/10/steve-jobs-disability/

jareds4• 12 years ago

From my experience android accessibility is about where iOS was in iOS 3.1. Usable but iOS is better.

PhantomGremlin4• 12 years ago

WARNING: strong opinions, e.g. flames, follow. Don't bother reading if you're easily offended.

At the rate we're going, most websites will never be easily navigated by blind people. How do I know? Easy ...

My eyesight isn't as great as it was when I was younger. So I like to set my "Minimum font size" in Firefox to 18 pt. (Yes I know they're not technically considered "points" any more). That single simple change fucks up a lot of the web! Just that, nothing more. And it's something that any web designer could trivially test for.

And yet they don't bother! Why? Probably because they're mostly self-centered 20-something hipster douchebags, who can't even imagine there's someone with worse eyesight than they have. Or maybe their sense of "aesthetics" trumps any consideration of "accessibility". In other words: "Fuck off if you're too old to comfortably read 10 pt type. We don't need your kind on our website".

Worse, there are a few sites, such as Bloomberg, that somehow manage to trick Firefox into not rendering their fonts at a minimum 18 pt, but instead render substantially smaller. That's right, some hipster web designer at Bloomberg went out of his way to make sure the text displayed is small. He's probably quite proud of this.

Firefox does works OK on 99% of the web in terms of font size. Unfortunately, stuff breaks in other ways. E.g. when a large minimum font is selected, text often simply disappears off to the right of a page. So then a search box is just not displayed at all, because it's off to the right of the page. Or text just disappears off the bottom of a block. Probably something to do with fixed widths, I don't know I'm not an HTML guy.

Chrome apparently has a large contingent of hipster douchebags working on it. Apparently the concept of "18 pt" is too technical for their genius IQ brains. So they just have simpler font size selections such as Small, Medium, and Large. Unfortunately not granular enough when compared to Safari or Firefox. And Chrome is also far worse than Firefox in displaying pages in tiny type, even when Font size is set to Large.

Still, lots of sites do it right. E.g. Hacker News is no problem. A very simple layout and very readable. (Now if they would only fix that expired link problem).

I repeat, I'm bitching about something that is trivial, a mere inconvenience, compared to what the blind encounter. And yet I run into many web sites and browsers that can't even get that little bit right. So what hope is there for the blind? No nope, none at all!

jareds4• 12 years ago

As a totally blind developer I have to disagree. Maybe it's a bit easier for me since I don't need to worry about font sizes but I'd say 95% or more of the web is accessible if you are good with screen reading software.

bramd2• 12 years ago

I'd say 95% or more of the web is accessible if you are good with screen reading software.

True, however 80% or more of the blind users I've seen are not good with there screenreading software at all. Many people don't even know how to use navigation by heading for example... sad but true.

WalterBright• 12 years ago

I welcome suggestions for improving accessibility for impaired users: http://www.dlang.org

ctoth• 12 years ago

As another totally blind developer I'm going to have to either assume that you are not experiencing much of the web, or that you are simply lying. 95% of the web is accessible if you know how to use a screen reader? How about ... Google Docs, Google Analytics, Adwords, Github Gists, anything with SVG in it, all the unlabeled flash, all the unicode icons which don't speak, all the unlabeled links, all the unfilled alt text tags... Every single infographic, all the popup menus or modal dialogs or popovers which pop up at the top or bottom of the screen reader's virtual buffers instead of gaining focus when you invoke them, ... And then you have the stupid stuff. The JS library Github uses for tool tips renames the title attribute of links to original-title, which completely blows away the semantic meaning and means no screen reader is going to read it... But the clever author of the library got the right visuals so that certainly doesn't matter... Google Instant invites me to turn off Google Instant, to work better with screen readers... Instead of simply making Google Instant work better with screen readers. This is an oft-repeated strategy -- can't spend an hour to make your content accessible for the blind? Give the blind a lesser version of your product and call it a day.

I'm quite frankly terrified when I hear people on this and other forums go on about how the web is eating the desktop, because the web as it currently stands is a dreadfully inaccessible place.

This article has been on HN before, and I think my comment from last time might be worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023447

zero-error• 12 years ago

Have you tried using zoom, instead of changing the minimum font size? It would be reset for every different site you visit (at least on FF, not sure about other browsers) but from my experience scaling the whole site up instead of just the text doesn't break websites as much.

3pt141593• 12 years ago

Hahahahaha, zoom. Since I installed the 13.04 version of ubuntu on my MBP retina, I get the pleasure of cruising the web at 200%. Half the sites out there break.

awor• 12 years ago

Yea, I agree with this.

I find if I'm tired, I need to increase the zoom to read text, so a quick mouse wheel while holding Ctrl and then a Ctrl-0 when finished and it's like it never happened

PhantomGremlin4• 12 years ago

Yes, zoom is great in OS X. I admit I haven't tried it in Firefox, I will now.

Whenever I encounter a site that doesn't render properly with large fonts, I simply turn off the minimum font size in Firefox and use the OS X Accessibility keyboard shortcuts to zoom in. This works well, but it's annoying to have to keep switching around like that. E.g. it would be nice to have faster access to the Firefox submenu that controls minimum font size.

ihuman• 12 years ago

So correct me if I'm misunderstanding you, but if a website misrenders when using alternative font sizes, the developers are "hipster douchebags"?

PhantomGremlin4• 12 years ago

This lack of consideration by many websites for my slight visual impairment is a pet peeve of mine, so I was deliberately stereotyping the developers. I'm sure the reality is much more nuanced. E.g.

a) the web layout software they're using doesn't work well with larger fonts. Nobody can realistically design today's websites by manually writing all the HTML, so when the tools have limitations, then the website has limitations.

or b) the designer has a lot on his plate. He needs to do ten things, and nine of them should have been finished last week. He's only got enough time to get things 95% right, not enough time to worry about every single border case.

or c) as mentioned in other comments, the designer is being rigidly constrained by management expectations of minute details of site appearance. Those constraints at default font size are incompatible with perfect rendering at larger font sizes.

I'm sorry if you were offended by my colorful choice of words. One of the nice things about Hacker News is it's generally a high-content low-noise place where people don't flame or troll.

lmm• 12 years ago

IME it's not the "20-something hipster douchebags" (nice stereotype you've got going there) who make websites like this. It's the experienced print designers, who are too set in their ways to work any other way than "I want the site to look exactly like this picture". I doubt it was some proud hipster web designer who made the text at Bloomberg stay small; more likely it was a frustrated developer who has no choice but to follow the orders of their Senior Designer who doesn't understand this newfangled web business (but thinks they do).

jes5199• 12 years ago

while we're on a rant about tiny fonts: iphone browser. Almost every day I'm trying to work around a site that only is navigable when the text is zoomed way way out so that everything is like 4pt. So frustrating.

dopamean• 12 years ago

This is probably the funniest post I've read on HN. Also, I'm sorry about the 20-something hipster douchebags messing up your web browsing experience.

ovulator• 12 years ago

In my experience it isn't the web developer / designer who makes this decision. It is either a) their boss, who grew up in a world of print or b) the client.

I have had both happen to me, more often than not the client. I have had a client phone me up before saying "this doesn't look like it did before" and eventually I find out they have their font size enlarged so that boxes don't line up the same way they did before, or scroll bars are present that weren't before, but still completely usable. I explain this to them, and their answer is simply "fix it". Even though they themselves are using an increased font size to help them read, they want to force their dream aesthetic on everyone who visits their site, usability be damned.

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

Stop thinking of web sites as hypertext documents, and think of them as apps. The solution is to have OS-level scaling that works, or at worst, futz with the video drivers or buy larger hardware. Most desktop apps (at least in Windows) break when you change font sizes, too.

autodidakto• 12 years ago

As someone who browses the web on Firefox, with Open Dyslexic font, NoSquint for text AND page zoom, "Allow Websites to chose their own background colors" disabled[1], and vimperator, thank you. Most webpages are at least semi-broken (including wikipedia, which doesn't zoom the article correctly, making the sidebars gigantic), and some are entirely unusable (requiring a secondary browser).

[1] lets me forceblack on grey text, but for some reason makes 50% of web images disappear (background url= on a div?) and most sprite icons/buttons disappear.

csomar2• 12 years ago

I'm in my early twenties and I have the same problem. But I don't see how this relates to blind people.

PhantomGremlin4• 12 years ago

I thought I answered this in my original post.

Website accessibility for visually impaired people might be considered to be on a "spectrum". E.g. if totally blind people are a "10" in terms of problems, and perfect vision is "0", then I'm perhaps a "1". And yet things are already annoying for me. So what about those people who develop age related macular degeneration? This is not an uncommon problem for older people, e.g. it's something my own mother had.

Eventually those people will move from "1" to "2" to "3" to "4" etc. in terms of impairment. But if websites already start to break at "1", then what hope do people with real problems have?

dmlorenzetti2• 12 years ago

PDF files have similar issues. Acrobat can attempt to read them out loud, but unless the PDF author adds extensive annotations, Acrobat has no idea about the "structure" of the document.

For example, headers are just more text. Tables and figures that "float" to the top of a page, or in any other way interrupt the text, get read in the visual, not the logical, order. Images get "read" as a stream of binary data. Equations get mangled horribly. Etc. etc.

mjmahone17• 12 years ago

Is the .tex file typically easier to read/understand? Or is there a way to compile .tex into something that's easy to read and understand?

dmlorenzetti2• 12 years ago

LaTeX, much like HTML, allows you to use either stylistic markup ("put this bit in a bigger font") or semantic markup ("mark this bit as a headline").

The PdfLaTeX typesetting engine can embed some semantic information into the PDF. However, it doesn't do everything. For example, I believe it does not handle the issue with "floats" that I mentioned [1].

I don't know whether there are TeX-aware tools for "reading" a LaTeX input file out loud (which is what I think you're asking about). But if there was such a tool, it might well be easier to understand, than listening to a dumb reading of the resulting typeset PDF.

It is possible to go into an existing PDF file and mark up a lot of these things, specifically in order to help the reader along. The webmaster where I work often has to mark up PDF files (usually generated from MS Word documents, rather than from LaTeX). I've never done it, though, so I don't know what's involved. My impression is that it's pretty painful.

[1] To make the issue with floats more explicit. You can tell LaTeX to add a figure, and to "float" it to the top of a page. The typesetting engine will do so. However, suppose the resulting PDF file ends page 4 with "The figure clearly shows..." and then starts page 5 with the figure, followed by "... two trends in the data." Then when the document gets read out loud, the reader will say "The figure clearly shows", then it will go into a spastic literal reading of the figure's contents, then it will finish up with "two trends in the data."

bramd2• 12 years ago

Interesting that some commenters here seem to have an attitude of "let's build an app for the blind", "there is no hope for the blind" etc. I'm born blind and build software and do some accessibility consulting for a living. Fortunately we've reached times where the blind community can build software themselves.

An excellent example is NVDA[0], an open source screenreader for the Windows platform, mainly build by two blind guys. With Firefox, I think it is the best combination for browsing the web these days, even outperforming commercial screenreaders.

Oh, and if you want to know why semantics are important, grab a screenreader and read a HN discussion. The lack of nested lists and/or headings to indicate the relationship between comments makes it just a stream of comments without any structure. If proper semantics was being used, I could for example skip an entire subtree of the discussion if the starting comment didn't interest me.

[0] http://www.nvaccess.org/

tekacs• 12 years ago

I'm born blind and build software and do some accessibility consulting for a living.

I have little to add here beyond the fact that this is one of the coolest comments I've seen in a long time. :) Whilst I've long known theoretically about the use of screenreaders and such technology, I've never had the chance to see someone using it in action.

It's good to see that it works and is at least somewhat practical.

ghostfacedbat• 12 years ago

For a good 30 seconds I thought that the author had linked to a blank page, and that it was very elegant epitome of the experience of being blink (the article initially took unusually long to load on my phone).

Tyrannosaurs4• 12 years ago

An aside but:

"I once realised when watching a DVD on my Playstation 3 that you can set the speed to 1.5x. Which means you can finish watching a 2 hour movie in only 1hour 30 mins and still understand what’s going on. “That gives me 30 minutes of life back!” I said excitedly."

Or you can read the Wikipedia summary in 90 seconds and get 1 hour 58.5 minutes back but that's not really the point.

How about just don't watch the movie? There's no obligation to watch any of them and there are so many that there's always going to be something you miss however much you try and cram in.

Watching a movie is something which is meant to be a pleasure, or thought provoking, or profound or any number of things which are going to be largely lost at high speed. At that point you're just reducing it to consumption so you've seen it and maybe it's just me but what's the point of that?

nitrogen• 12 years ago

Some shows are just paced too slowly, but still provide entertainment or enlightenment. Who are you to care whether a viewer watches such a show at 1.5x speed?

ryanpetrich• 12 years ago

For my tastes, most television can be watched comfortably at 1.5× and anything with a "laugh track" can be watched at 1.75× without losing meaning.

Tyrannosaurs4• 12 years ago

It's a comment on behavior I've noticed in myself.

A pile of DVDs became something I had to get through, ditto books, games or albums. Talking to others I found it wasn't just me - that somehow the important thing had been completing things and enjoying them had become almost secondary.

Recently I found myself listening to a podcast at 1.5x speed regularly and after a while it occurred to me that it was because I was resenting the time it was taking up and that the problem wasn't really that it was taking too long, it was that I wasn't really enjoying it but was listening out of obligation (it had popped up in the unplayed list, it must be played!). At that point I said a silent sorry to Mark and Simon and unsubscribed. I've similarly quit watching a bunch of TV shows and I'm far happier abandoning books or games part way through.

Seeing someone talking about watching a movie at 1.5x speed made me think of that - consumption over enjoyment. Yes there are movies and shows that can be watched that fast and still enjoyed but given the sheer volume of stuff out there is that really the best use of an hour and a half even? Surely there was something good enough that it warranted real time viewing?

Maybe it's not the case here but that's what came to mind.

csomar2• 12 years ago

I think you answer your own question. He has more pleasure watching at 1.5x.

Tyrannosaurs4• 12 years ago

I'm not saying he doesn't enjoy these things at that speed, I'm just commenting on the fact that I think it's an interesting thing to be doing and, having personally done a similar thing, when I looked at it I found that speeding things up actually wasn't addressing the real problem.

Obviously your (and his) mileage may vary.

Aloha• 12 years ago

This is one of the reasons I test all the sites I work on with links - I want to get a clue as to how it will work for someone blind. If were using a javascript menuing system we add a bottom nav that has discrete links for every page on the website.

Shwanton• 12 years ago

Some newer HTML5 elements (Shadow DOM) are supported and some still have a ways to go. A coworker of mine wrote a great writeup about the state of the accessibility of the Shadow DOM in modern browsers. http://substantial.com/blog/2014/02/05/accessibility-and-the...

Jean-Philipe• 12 years ago

Hasn't this article been on HN already last year? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5020421 just with a slash in the end, as far as I can tell

qwerta• 12 years ago

I have nearly perfect vision, but I also use accessibility tools. I have uniform inverse color theme in all programs, IDE, all webpages and even in PDF reader.

I work 10+ hours a day with large (40"+) screens. White background was very aggressive towards my eyes and cause of many headaches. After adopting Solarized it went away.

In case someone is interested here are screenshots of my desktop and some webpages:

http://imgbox.com/TiqtcFri

http://imgbox.com/1PEM5M7U

http://imgbox.com/Tpyl5hrq

http://imgbox.com/lxND4eoI

I use KDE and IDEA with Solarized color theme:

http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

In Chrome you can use this page to filter colors. It has white/black list so you can set colors per domain:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/change-colors/jbmk...

dreamdu5t• 12 years ago

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week (2013)

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