Here is a tip from someone who lost his sight last year: If you suddenly see little black spots, don't f&##^ing wait and get your eye(s) checked out by a specialist at once! Have a deadline? A demanding client? Or perhaps it's just a really bad headache? Don't wait.
I literally waited a whole week and thats waaaay to long and saw the curtain close (literally, that's what it looks like: a curtain closing). Finally (and only thanks to my experience with inplant-contactlenses that made the doctor confident I would be able to hold still like a statue when they insert 3 or 4 metal tubes in your freaking eye with only local anesthetics). My eye was fully drained and I was operated at midnight. The nice thing about local anestetics is you'll get to see everything.
After 4 weeks I was able to see again. Another 4 weeks and my brain had made the new 'connections' linking my left and right eye. When I started seeing little black spots with my other eye (half a year later) I took immediate action and dropped everything. The doctors were able to use a laser to burn/isolate the distortion and prefented my retina from ripping up.
TLDR: DO - NOT - WAIT. Drop everything when you see black spots that remain constant. Regular doctors can't help you, even specialists have difficulty finding the little holes in your eye.
Both of my father's retina detached and the only reason he can see today is because he got to the specialist in time for them to fix it. A matter of days can make the difference of vision for the rest of your life. Persistent black spots that "float" around your field of vision need to get checked out ASAP.
We aren't talking about those black floaters here, are we? With constant you mean "fixed in position" I suppose.
I think the same thing happened to the author Oliver Sacks, who wrote about it. He noticed it right before Christmas and lost some sight because no doctors were available during the holidays IIRC.
Yikes... I wonder if there's an equivalent alarming-but-seemingly-innocuous situation for hearing. I'd imagine the analog for this would be something like tinnitus... anybody know?
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 need to go it’s easy to bring up a list of links and start typing to use first letter navigation to jump to the link you need out of the 150 that may be on the page. An example of this is typing “pri” to bring up the print link in order to view stories on a single page. Second is the ability to use a find feature of a screen reader to search for specific text on the page. Once again this is not useful for general browsing but if you visit a site on a regular basis and need to repeatedly access a section of the page that isn’t easily findable by links or headings searching for a text string you know will be there is a god send.
I don't mean to be insensitive, but I am morbidly curious about your condition (mainly because 23andme said I am prone to macular degeneration, a thought that terrifies me).
How does one program without sight? I have done something similar to OP on my latest project (I tried to use my product blindfolded + screenreader), and I found that it was a terrible experience. My site was absolute shite. It was only through my own familiarity with it that I was able to navigate it.
I would imagine trying to develop sightless itself would be a feat, so my question is: how? were you sighted before you lost your vision? Tactile feedback from the keyboard or voice commands?
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 size phones and laptops?
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?
No, but Eddie Murphy famously pretended to be white for a while and the results were frankly shocking (got free newspapers, easier time getting loans, etc.)
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!
I agree with some earlier comments about watching out for black spots. I lost my sight in a grizzly bear mauling and learning to use adaptive technology was a critical part of my recovery which lead me back into the work place. The technology available is very helpful, but definitely has its limits and can indeed be quite frustrating at times. Agree with the article that Facebook is really not accessible in a meaningful way at all. While the mobile site is slightly better, it has no structure and is essentially made up of approximately 99 links on my mobile homepage. Like all skills though, you do get better at using a screen reader with practice. I believe the brain's neural pathways actually adapt to accommodate the way a blind user interfaces with the screen reader much in the same way it does for other tasks such as orientation and mobility (travelling blind). So, blind users actually do get used to the super fast speech that may be unintelligible to most people. With that said, I appreciate the article because there are very simple ways to make websites user friendly to the blind. Headings that are not over used and well labeled and having all controls on a site well labeled alone can make a huge difference. The other key is really simplicity. Less is more for the blind user for sure. I've tried to do that with my website (danbigley.com), but it can be difficult to test and ensure accessibility.
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 proficient computer user--the same gap between supertechnical and nontechnical users exists in the blind community, perhaps even magnified by other aspects such as secondary disabilities in a good chunk of the blind population. That aside, I've been doing this for around 13 years, using a variety of screen access solutions on Windows, OSX, and even the hellscape that is modern desktop Linux a11y.
All of these solutions suffer from the same basic problem namely they are trying to squeeze a dynamic, multidimensional viewport into a linear text string for rapid communication. This don't work so hot, but like most things, you can adapt to it over time.
So why does the web suck?
First, a history lesson:
Back in the halcyon days of the 1990's, when I was just getting started with this silly computer stuff, the problem that was desktop accessibility had already nearly been solved. Microsoft gave us MSAA, and several screen reader vendors implemented their own heuristics on top of it to give pretty good access to standard controls. Highlight detection worked ... reasonably-well to know when text changed on a form, screen readers would perform nasty little hacks including API hooking and other black magic to give a pretty good picture of what was going on at any one time.
Then, along came the web.
At first this wasn't too terrible. Several screen reader vendors made a stab at solving web accessibility, and thus the virtual buffer was born.
The virtual buffer is where the story really gets interesting. You can follow along should you like -- I'm currently using the NVDA screen reader to compose this comment, and you can get it at http://nvda-project.org (for those who do, no I don't listen to that dreadful voice all day, there are alternatives.)
Okay: So, you have a tree, the DOM, and you need to render it linearly, and not only that, but it needs to make some kind of sense. Enter the virtual buffer.
Each screen reader gets a hold of the DOM through whatever ugly hacks, then renders your beautiful website with lovely topography into a flat, basically plaintext representation. Links get prefixed with "link", headings with "heading 3", so on and so forth.
The software developers in the audience probably already see the problem coming, when I learned how this worked I was rather offended.
So, for the screen reader, there are two single points of truth: the DOM, and the virtual buffer representation. As we all know, when a complex system includes information in more than one place, the two have a tendency to get out of sync.
Consider what happens when you update your DOM with some javascript magic. The screen reader needs to, hopefully without making me lose my current place on the page, diff your changes against its current buffer, update its buffer, and somehow indicate to me that the content has changed, without interrupting my current task.
Complex DOM manipulations aside, let's just talk about how poorly-marked-up your content is:
For those of you who got NVDA, I invite you to explore around HN a little. Note the unlabeled links for voting, for instance. Is there any indication that the first edit field on a submission's page is where one enters a comment? And HN is hardly a dynamic website. How can one tell nonvisually (or visually for that matter) who replied to whom in comment threads? That's something that's puzzled me for a while, I just have to heuristically separate conversation threads.
Now, it's not all bad. Slowly, aria is being deployed to a variety of websites. Even more importantly, I've recently been looking into adding access at the UI toolkit level for some popular projects, especially Bootstrap.js (if a proficient web person would be interested in helping me with this it would be awesome, I'm primarily a desktop software guy (yes, the blind are one of the few subpopulations who haven't gone hole-hog for the web, and I'd argue a good reason for that is the web's lack of accessibility.))
Simple fixes -- adding aria-haspopup="true" to dropdown toggles, adding aria roles to various things can help, and I'm hopeful that work at the bootstrap and similar level will take the onus off of individual web developers.
I'm typically pretty difficult to offend, but I must say it's just a tad bit jarring to find the top comment thread on this submission be about how terrible it is to lose one's vision and how one should do absolutely anything to avoid it. Isn't this Hacker News? Where hackers talk about technical things? Mreh.
As for the article itself, a couple rather important things:
Yes, I'm certain that it is extremely difficult to navigate the web as a newly-blinded person, and this is partially because of many of the issues that I outlined above.
That said, if you people want to know how a blind person sees the web, don't ask a sighted person to wear a blindfold for a week and expect it to be at all representative of how someone who's been doing it their entire life does. Why not just ask a blind person?
Just a few examples:
Where as the author of the submission refers to headings as the primary navigation mechanism, modern screen reader users are quite lucky in that most screen reader developers have mapped hotkeys to nearly every type of HTML element. For instance, I hit f to navigate to the next form field on a page, shift+f to navigate to the previous. Similar keystrokes are available for all the levels of headings, for links both visited and unvisited, for landmarks, for tables, so on and so forth.
The title attribute of a link is read in a few cases: 1: when the link is explicitly tabbed to, and 2: when the link does not have text. A perfect example of where the title attribute should* be used is for the HN voting links.
Anyhow, I think that's enough rambling for now. Anyone who would like to discuss this, my e-mail is in my profile.
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.
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.
Even as a fully healthy user, I often find the "mobile" versions of sites are much easier to use. They tend to have a lot less junk on them and make the actual content much more prominent.
Am I the only one who thought this has startup potential? It sounds like a problem in search of a solution. I can picture for instance a service that would take a page, scan it, remove all the unnecesary clutter and make it as much screen reader friendly as possible.
> I can picture for instance a service that would take a page, scan it, remove all the unnecesary clutter and make it as much screen reader friendly as possible.
If this was technologically achievable, it would be in screen readers already ;)
Opera Mini requests web pages through Opera Software's servers, which process and compress them before sending them to the mobile phone [...]. The pre-processing increases compatibility with web pages not designed for mobile phones.[1]
On the other hand, I thought that publishing useful accessible HTML content with minimal and logical markup would benefit mobile users and screenreader users at the same time. But, instead, many people would rather have an app for their phone...
It's nothing close to that video, but I use VLC's "playback speed" settings to watch TV at around 160%. It is definitely something you adapt to...I used to have trouble at 130%, and now that seems slow.
(If you do this, you also learn to appreciate good enunciation. Stephen Colbert is completely listen-to-able at 200%. His guests, not so much.)
As a similar, but easier, experiment, try listening to Adobe Acrobat read a PDF file out loud-- especially if the PDF contains anything at all interesting, like mathematics, figures, tables, or any kind of "float" that pegs to the top of a page as the text flows around it.
While tools are available to let the PDF creator tag the document in order to facilitate reading, in practice they don't seem to be used much, and even then the experience is painful at best.
Shouldn't websites start having an accessible version, like they have mobile versions of their sites? These would be free of too much JavaScript fu and go directly to the meat of the matter. In fact it is possible people with no physical challenges would start preferring these simpler faster versions too. Maybe in near future, the latest trend in web will be less JS, less graphics, less animation and more matter.
This is an absolutely terrible idea that seems to refuse to die.
No, it is not reasonable to put the accessible content in some sort of blind-only ghetto. Amazon do this, for instance, with a text-based version of their website. It makes it more difficult to maintain unless you've architected from the absolute beginning for it, and over time the text-based version becomes useless.
Think of it from the perspective of someone adding new features to your webapp. Let's put it in HN terms -- you're building your MVP, launching in three days or something absurd... Are you really going to go build a text-based version of your website? Are you going to keep that updated?
No. The only solution is to make the actual web, the one we all use, accessible. This doesn't mean changing what individual developers do so much as making sure that it's harder to be inaccessible than to be accessible with technical fixes, I.E. fixing Bootstrap so all Bootstrap sites are more accessible.
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!
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.
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.
Very interesting experiment. Sighted people often take their vision for granted. I know I do and I try to think of what I would do if I lost my vision but we can all work on improving accessibility in general.
[+] [-] digitalengineer|13 years ago|reply
I literally waited a whole week and thats waaaay to long and saw the curtain close (literally, that's what it looks like: a curtain closing). Finally (and only thanks to my experience with inplant-contactlenses that made the doctor confident I would be able to hold still like a statue when they insert 3 or 4 metal tubes in your freaking eye with only local anesthetics). My eye was fully drained and I was operated at midnight. The nice thing about local anestetics is you'll get to see everything.
After 4 weeks I was able to see again. Another 4 weeks and my brain had made the new 'connections' linking my left and right eye. When I started seeing little black spots with my other eye (half a year later) I took immediate action and dropped everything. The doctors were able to use a laser to burn/isolate the distortion and prefented my retina from ripping up.
TLDR: DO - NOT - WAIT. Drop everything when you see black spots that remain constant. Regular doctors can't help you, even specialists have difficulty finding the little holes in your eye.
[+] [-] kevinconroy|13 years ago|reply
Both of my father's retina detached and the only reason he can see today is because he got to the specialist in time for them to fix it. A matter of days can make the difference of vision for the rest of your life. Persistent black spots that "float" around your field of vision need to get checked out ASAP.
[+] [-] morsch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sethg|13 years ago|reply
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“No, just spots.”
[+] [-] VMG|13 years ago|reply
I think the same thing happened to the author Oliver Sacks, who wrote about it. He noticed it right before Christmas and lost some sight because no doctors were available during the holidays IIRC.
[+] [-] teeray|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jareds|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chewxy|13 years ago|reply
How does one program without sight? I have done something similar to OP on my latest project (I tried to use my product blindfolded + screenreader), and I found that it was a terrible experience. My site was absolute shite. It was only through my own familiarity with it that I was able to navigate it.
I would imagine trying to develop sightless itself would be a feat, so my question is: how? were you sighted before you lost your vision? Tactile feedback from the keyboard or voice commands?
[+] [-] rogerbinns|13 years ago|reply
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 size phones and laptops?
[+] [-] lesterbuck|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] josscrowcroft|13 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] nathell|13 years ago|reply
http://invisibleexhibition.com/
I've been there, and it's been one of the most deeply touching experiences I've ever had. Highly recommended.
[+] [-] bostonpete|13 years ago|reply
No, but Eddie Murphy famously pretended to be white for a while and the results were frankly shocking (got free newspapers, easier time getting loans, etc.)
[+] [-] jimmytucson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silktide|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoother|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel13|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctoth|13 years ago|reply
Now, a few points: First, and most importantly: your web sucks. I'm a very proficient computer user--the same gap between supertechnical and nontechnical users exists in the blind community, perhaps even magnified by other aspects such as secondary disabilities in a good chunk of the blind population. That aside, I've been doing this for around 13 years, using a variety of screen access solutions on Windows, OSX, and even the hellscape that is modern desktop Linux a11y. All of these solutions suffer from the same basic problem namely they are trying to squeeze a dynamic, multidimensional viewport into a linear text string for rapid communication. This don't work so hot, but like most things, you can adapt to it over time. So why does the web suck? First, a history lesson: Back in the halcyon days of the 1990's, when I was just getting started with this silly computer stuff, the problem that was desktop accessibility had already nearly been solved. Microsoft gave us MSAA, and several screen reader vendors implemented their own heuristics on top of it to give pretty good access to standard controls. Highlight detection worked ... reasonably-well to know when text changed on a form, screen readers would perform nasty little hacks including API hooking and other black magic to give a pretty good picture of what was going on at any one time. Then, along came the web. At first this wasn't too terrible. Several screen reader vendors made a stab at solving web accessibility, and thus the virtual buffer was born. The virtual buffer is where the story really gets interesting. You can follow along should you like -- I'm currently using the NVDA screen reader to compose this comment, and you can get it at http://nvda-project.org (for those who do, no I don't listen to that dreadful voice all day, there are alternatives.) Okay: So, you have a tree, the DOM, and you need to render it linearly, and not only that, but it needs to make some kind of sense. Enter the virtual buffer. Each screen reader gets a hold of the DOM through whatever ugly hacks, then renders your beautiful website with lovely topography into a flat, basically plaintext representation. Links get prefixed with "link", headings with "heading 3", so on and so forth. The software developers in the audience probably already see the problem coming, when I learned how this worked I was rather offended. So, for the screen reader, there are two single points of truth: the DOM, and the virtual buffer representation. As we all know, when a complex system includes information in more than one place, the two have a tendency to get out of sync. Consider what happens when you update your DOM with some javascript magic. The screen reader needs to, hopefully without making me lose my current place on the page, diff your changes against its current buffer, update its buffer, and somehow indicate to me that the content has changed, without interrupting my current task. Complex DOM manipulations aside, let's just talk about how poorly-marked-up your content is: For those of you who got NVDA, I invite you to explore around HN a little. Note the unlabeled links for voting, for instance. Is there any indication that the first edit field on a submission's page is where one enters a comment? And HN is hardly a dynamic website. How can one tell nonvisually (or visually for that matter) who replied to whom in comment threads? That's something that's puzzled me for a while, I just have to heuristically separate conversation threads.
Now, it's not all bad. Slowly, aria is being deployed to a variety of websites. Even more importantly, I've recently been looking into adding access at the UI toolkit level for some popular projects, especially Bootstrap.js (if a proficient web person would be interested in helping me with this it would be awesome, I'm primarily a desktop software guy (yes, the blind are one of the few subpopulations who haven't gone hole-hog for the web, and I'd argue a good reason for that is the web's lack of accessibility.)) Simple fixes -- adding aria-haspopup="true" to dropdown toggles, adding aria roles to various things can help, and I'm hopeful that work at the bootstrap and similar level will take the onus off of individual web developers.
I'm typically pretty difficult to offend, but I must say it's just a tad bit jarring to find the top comment thread on this submission be about how terrible it is to lose one's vision and how one should do absolutely anything to avoid it. Isn't this Hacker News? Where hackers talk about technical things? Mreh.
As for the article itself, a couple rather important things: Yes, I'm certain that it is extremely difficult to navigate the web as a newly-blinded person, and this is partially because of many of the issues that I outlined above. That said, if you people want to know how a blind person sees the web, don't ask a sighted person to wear a blindfold for a week and expect it to be at all representative of how someone who's been doing it their entire life does. Why not just ask a blind person? Just a few examples: Where as the author of the submission refers to headings as the primary navigation mechanism, modern screen reader users are quite lucky in that most screen reader developers have mapped hotkeys to nearly every type of HTML element. For instance, I hit f to navigate to the next form field on a page, shift+f to navigate to the previous. Similar keystrokes are available for all the levels of headings, for links both visited and unvisited, for landmarks, for tables, so on and so forth. The title attribute of a link is read in a few cases: 1: when the link is explicitly tabbed to, and 2: when the link does not have text. A perfect example of where the title attribute should* be used is for the HN voting links.
Anyhow, I think that's enough rambling for now. Anyone who would like to discuss this, my e-mail is in my profile.
[+] [-] ctoth|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unimpressive|13 years ago|reply
I figured I'd try using a high pitched tone generator to produce different buzzes depending on where I am on the screen.
EDIT: I am aware that using non-standard hardware will not help me develop accessible web pages. That's not the point of the exercise.
[+] [-] embplat|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nness|13 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] lmm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanctgardner2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mahn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZoFreX|13 years ago|reply
If this was technologically achievable, it would be in screen readers already ;)
[+] [-] opminion|13 years ago|reply
Opera Mini requests web pages through Opera Software's servers, which process and compress them before sending them to the mobile phone [...]. The pre-processing increases compatibility with web pages not designed for mobile phones.[1]
On the other hand, I thought that publishing useful accessible HTML content with minimal and logical markup would benefit mobile users and screenreader users at the same time. But, instead, many people would rather have an app for their phone...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini
[+] [-] StavrosK|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user24|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vnorby|13 years ago|reply
I was stunned by how fast the blind can "speed listen" in the linked video. Is this something anyone can learn?
[+] [-] IvyMike|13 years ago|reply
(If you do this, you also learn to appreciate good enunciation. Stephen Colbert is completely listen-to-able at 200%. His guests, not so much.)
[+] [-] drstrangevibes|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dmlorenzetti|13 years ago|reply
While tools are available to let the PDF creator tag the document in order to facilitate reading, in practice they don't seem to be used much, and even then the experience is painful at best.
[+] [-] septerr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctoth|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zplesivcak|13 years ago|reply
Edit: Thank your for pointing that out leberwurstsaft!
[+] [-] leberwurstsaft|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hamidnazari|13 years ago|reply
Anyhow, I can't agree more, "being W3C valid means jack".
[+] [-] kjhughes|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baalexander|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silktide|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bauc|13 years ago|reply