I love this. Nothing really groundbreaking here, but it's still true from my experience.
A few weeks ago, I went to a hackathon for domestic violence. It was.. interesting. Lots of cool designs and products came out of it, but none of them actually had any interest in designing a problem that had a broad and proper enough solution. The biggest problem? Everyone created a smartphone app except for mine and two others'.
One of the lawyers who hosted the event and I had a conversation about this and agreed - this is the class of problem that prevents so many people from getting the help they need. They're simply aren't represented because they don't have the luxury of having a smart phone or constant internet access.
(mildly shameful plug) - My submission [0] was a map of all DV centers, as nothing like that exists or even close. It was made by scraping domesticshelters.com's center names and plugging it into a geocode service. domesticshelters' owner refuses to use it because of the privacy issues of an abuser being able to find a shelter just as easily as the abused - which is easily solved by mapping to a city center as my code does with an attached phone number. I received last place, with 'honorable mention'.
Point is, very few in tech really ever want to take on these hard issues since they're not fun, or they're not easy, or they involve social interaction with those they're helping. It's sad.
To be fair, couldn't that just be because generic mobile apps are seen as a way to get rich quick?
Okay, maybe you'd expect a bit more from someone attending a hackathon, but from my experiences, every time I mention the word 'startup', someone immediately suggests or asks about a mobile app.
For them, the only use of tech is mobile app that somehow blows up like Uber. It might be less about whether it's fun or easy or involve social interaction and more about whether the founder can see the dollar signs in his/her eyes.
I think your expectations are too high. What else are you expecting other than a website or mobile app? This is the hackathon format: the end product is software, so people are going to gravitate to mobile apps, which many believe to be more ubiquitously accessible.
Nobody believes the true solution (or biggest thing that needs to be done) to domestic violence is a pure technology solution, so all you're going to see in a domestic violence hackathon are small software products that chip away at the problem.
It's not sad. Maybe (shocker) there isn't a lot that tech can do to solve domestic violence.
For what it's worth, smartphones can be had for like $40, and eg Freedompop now has GSM sims with 700MB of month of free data. The time/effort required for phone-less solutions to be developed and adopted might be less than the time/effort to get basic computation and connectivity to people who need them.
(Disclaimers: I do agree with the ultimate point of the article, and your take as well. And I don't even like "smart phones" or assumptions of Internet connectivity for that matter. But those constants, they are a-changin')
On the topic of physical disabilities in particular (social and intellectual challenges are more tricky) - I think we need better ways of simulating disability for able-bodied folks, and more willingness to have people use those tools.
This can be as simple as a tool on your desktop that limits the color output of your machine (in various types of color blindness), or blurs the screen to particular partially sighted simulations. Not in-app, but general. And we need to enforce their use as part of development.
Physically, there are companies that will train staff by putting them in wheelchairs and asking them to navigate their space. How welcoming is it for a wheelchair user? Can they get through the pull to open door? Can they get into the bathroom to get as far as the accessible stall? As a wheelchair user myself, I often get the feedback that people just didn't realise how difficult things were in their ADA compliant buildings, because nobody had tested it out.
We test things on multiple devices, with multiple sets of capabilities, but we don't do a good job of testing as users with multiple sets of capabilities.
It's really hard to empathise with some of the issues until you can experience. I never realised the issues aging eyesight causes - until I aged! I'm long sighted. I can mostly still see fine, except my life long trick of moving things to arm's length no longer works - my arms aren't long enough any more. Or the distance is now such that the tiny text of the instructions or ingredients is now too small.
Aging sucks :)
I imagine the day-to-day frustrations are very different for someone with short sight, macular degeneration or the multitude of other eyesight disorders.
Android is terrible at being accessible - I can change font sizes, or zoom the website, but crucial elements don't. Plenty of apps "know best". Or there is some limit of zooming the website or its font. Or you zoom and it completely screws up the columns. In ten or fifteen years, perhaps less, Android will be useless to me. I would need a magnifying glass to use a phone! It's not an issue now, but I can clearly see where it will be, in my forseeable future.
It's pretty easy to approximate the experience of a totally blind user if you use a Mac. Just turn off your monitor or put on a blindfold, then press Command+F5 to enable VoiceOver. On iOS, you can find VoiceOver in Settings -> General -> Accessibility. For Android, there's TalkBack. Windows has a built-in screen reader called Narrator, but it's still limited enough that practically nobody uses it as their primary screen reader, so instead I'd recommend NVDA (http://www.nvaccess.org/). For desktop Linux, there's Orca.
There's a danger, though, that a sighted person using a screen reader for a short time will come away with misguided ideas about what is practical for a blind person that uses these tools day in and day out. For example, see this thread:
My experience has been that the thought process involved in creating accessible designs results in systems that are easier to use for people without disabilities. For example, curb cuts were designed to benefit people in wheelchairs, but they make life easier for delivery people with hand trucks, people with strollers, etc.
It's the same for UX design. Features designed to increase accessibility, such as better contrast, reasonably large fonts, etc. seem to make software more usable period.
Sometimes, but not always. While I'm a fan of larger fonts and click targets, a lot of people like to have these thugs be a lot smaller so they can have more information-dense screens.
…which itself is an accessibility issue; if you have good eyes but rotten limbs, you'll want to increase the information density of your screens so you have to scroll as little as possible. Most voice recognition systems accept one or more of:
- space
- page down
- scroll down one page
Now imagine needing to say that every time you want to page down; you'd turn the font size down as low as possible, sit closer to your monitor, and turn it 90° so it's taller than it is wider.
It's nice when accessible designs provide benefits to people who don't _need_ them, but sometimes a design that's better for people with one class of disabilities will end up being a worse design for normal people or differently disabled people.
I'm a big fan of Rawls' Veil and use it in my own thinking about what is just.
I do want to add, though: "No one complains that typefaces set at 20px are too big to read." - I do, very often, when reading on my phone. If the font is so big that only three or four words fit on a line, I cannot read the paragraph - the vertical scrolling & concentration required is too fatiguing. I'd say it happens on 10-20% of mobile sites today, and it's an increasing proportion. I strongly prefer tiny text with very little scrolling to the opposite. Browser text size preference don't help much; the setting often doesn't have any effect.
This site is fine on mobile (for me), though. And I fully agree with the message, with my caveat.
The abstract of this paper offers a data point that is consistent with the claim. For the purposes of this discussion, it is safe to say that the claim is not too far off.
Yeah, I'm only a couple years off from forty and I'm pretty sure my vision is not nearly fifty percent dimmer than twenty years ago. Certainly my glasses prescription has changed slightly, but that is more about redirecting the light.
I think this isn't fair to Rawls. If you had to design the internet today, you would probably design the internet just as it is today. Not because you want to exclude 'people that are 80 and have really bad vision', but because even if you made every page have high contrast and an 60pt font, there are almost no 80 year olds on the internet compared to 20 year olds, and you have to cater to your actual audience, not your 'in some universe where old people were on the internet what would be the best way to make it easy for them' universe.
This isn't really so crazy, and it's not some kind of ableist ageist blind spot that content creators have. There is no demand for 60pt fonts, the people that need them, who are extremely few, are more able to adapt the world to their needs than the world is able to adapt itself. Or maybe their needs are totally missed, but you can say that about literally any tiny group.
[+] [-] bpchaps|10 years ago|reply
A few weeks ago, I went to a hackathon for domestic violence. It was.. interesting. Lots of cool designs and products came out of it, but none of them actually had any interest in designing a problem that had a broad and proper enough solution. The biggest problem? Everyone created a smartphone app except for mine and two others'.
One of the lawyers who hosted the event and I had a conversation about this and agreed - this is the class of problem that prevents so many people from getting the help they need. They're simply aren't represented because they don't have the luxury of having a smart phone or constant internet access.
(mildly shameful plug) - My submission [0] was a map of all DV centers, as nothing like that exists or even close. It was made by scraping domesticshelters.com's center names and plugging it into a geocode service. domesticshelters' owner refuses to use it because of the privacy issues of an abuser being able to find a shelter just as easily as the abused - which is easily solved by mapping to a city center as my code does with an attached phone number. I received last place, with 'honorable mention'.
Point is, very few in tech really ever want to take on these hard issues since they're not fun, or they're not easy, or they involve social interaction with those they're helping. It's sad.
red-bin.github.io [0]
[+] [-] CM30|10 years ago|reply
Okay, maybe you'd expect a bit more from someone attending a hackathon, but from my experiences, every time I mention the word 'startup', someone immediately suggests or asks about a mobile app.
For them, the only use of tech is mobile app that somehow blows up like Uber. It might be less about whether it's fun or easy or involve social interaction and more about whether the founder can see the dollar signs in his/her eyes.
[+] [-] argonaut|10 years ago|reply
Nobody believes the true solution (or biggest thing that needs to be done) to domestic violence is a pure technology solution, so all you're going to see in a domestic violence hackathon are small software products that chip away at the problem.
It's not sad. Maybe (shocker) there isn't a lot that tech can do to solve domestic violence.
[+] [-] mindslight|10 years ago|reply
(Disclaimers: I do agree with the ultimate point of the article, and your take as well. And I don't even like "smart phones" or assumptions of Internet connectivity for that matter. But those constants, they are a-changin')
[+] [-] sago|10 years ago|reply
This can be as simple as a tool on your desktop that limits the color output of your machine (in various types of color blindness), or blurs the screen to particular partially sighted simulations. Not in-app, but general. And we need to enforce their use as part of development.
Physically, there are companies that will train staff by putting them in wheelchairs and asking them to navigate their space. How welcoming is it for a wheelchair user? Can they get through the pull to open door? Can they get into the bathroom to get as far as the accessible stall? As a wheelchair user myself, I often get the feedback that people just didn't realise how difficult things were in their ADA compliant buildings, because nobody had tested it out.
We test things on multiple devices, with multiple sets of capabilities, but we don't do a good job of testing as users with multiple sets of capabilities.
[+] [-] anexprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
It's really hard to empathise with some of the issues until you can experience. I never realised the issues aging eyesight causes - until I aged! I'm long sighted. I can mostly still see fine, except my life long trick of moving things to arm's length no longer works - my arms aren't long enough any more. Or the distance is now such that the tiny text of the instructions or ingredients is now too small.
Aging sucks :)
I imagine the day-to-day frustrations are very different for someone with short sight, macular degeneration or the multitude of other eyesight disorders.
Android is terrible at being accessible - I can change font sizes, or zoom the website, but crucial elements don't. Plenty of apps "know best". Or there is some limit of zooming the website or its font. Or you zoom and it completely screws up the columns. In ten or fifteen years, perhaps less, Android will be useless to me. I would need a magnifying glass to use a phone! It's not an issue now, but I can clearly see where it will be, in my forseeable future.
There's quite a few colour blindess simulators out there (http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simula... http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/) but none of them that I ever found let you plug in a URL.
I'm not aware of scientifically sound vision simulators - we need some. Same goes for other senses and disorders.
Given how the web, and technology, work it should be easy to do much better.
[+] [-] mwcampbell|10 years ago|reply
There's a danger, though, that a sighted person using a screen reader for a short time will come away with misguided ideas about what is practical for a blind person that uses these tools day in and day out. For example, see this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284567
[+] [-] GabrielF00|10 years ago|reply
It's the same for UX design. Features designed to increase accessibility, such as better contrast, reasonably large fonts, etc. seem to make software more usable period.
[+] [-] adiabatty|10 years ago|reply
…which itself is an accessibility issue; if you have good eyes but rotten limbs, you'll want to increase the information density of your screens so you have to scroll as little as possible. Most voice recognition systems accept one or more of:
- space
- page down
- scroll down one page
Now imagine needing to say that every time you want to page down; you'd turn the font size down as low as possible, sit closer to your monitor, and turn it 90° so it's taller than it is wider.
It's nice when accessible designs provide benefits to people who don't _need_ them, but sometimes a design that's better for people with one class of disabilities will end up being a worse design for normal people or differently disabled people.
[+] [-] barrkel|10 years ago|reply
I do want to add, though: "No one complains that typefaces set at 20px are too big to read." - I do, very often, when reading on my phone. If the font is so big that only three or four words fit on a line, I cannot read the paragraph - the vertical scrolling & concentration required is too fatiguing. I'd say it happens on 10-20% of mobile sites today, and it's an increasing proportion. I strongly prefer tiny text with very little scrolling to the opposite. Browser text size preference don't help much; the setting often doesn't have any effect.
This site is fine on mobile (for me), though. And I fully agree with the message, with my caveat.
[+] [-] aetherson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] good_gnu|10 years ago|reply
The abstract of this paper offers a data point that is consistent with the claim. For the purposes of this discussion, it is safe to say that the claim is not too far off.
[+] [-] coldtea|10 years ago|reply
It might sound too much of a difference, but it's not that apparent (you can try changing an f-stop on a camera for comparison).
(Probably there's some logarithmic sensing involved).
[+] [-] trurl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justin_vanw|10 years ago|reply
This isn't really so crazy, and it's not some kind of ableist ageist blind spot that content creators have. There is no demand for 60pt fonts, the people that need them, who are extremely few, are more able to adapt the world to their needs than the world is able to adapt itself. Or maybe their needs are totally missed, but you can say that about literally any tiny group.
[+] [-] sheharyarn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mibrah|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jacalata|10 years ago|reply