My two cents: learn VoiceOver for iPhone yourself, turn on screen curtain for further realism, and spend tons of time with your relative practicing simple things. I am blind and a couple of years ago I was trying to help a friend to learn VoiceOver - the friend wasn't that tech savvy, and it turns out that even simple concepts like swipe left or two fingers double tap present some difficulty to them. So have a lot of patience, but in the end if they can learn to use apps like Mail or Audible independently - that would be a very rewarding experience.
Blind developer here. I could never recommend VoiceOver on MacOS to anyone. 10 years ago before I lost my eyesight I was a huge fan of Apple - everything was just working so much smoother than in Windows world. And much more visually appealing. However, after losing eyesight, I had to switch to Windows. I learned VoiceOver on Mac at first, but working with it was so unbearably frustrating,, even back in 2016 when I was trying. Here are some of my complaints that I still remember:
* Many actions work every other time. I remember that interacting with text area of terminal app was especially painful since the sequence of commands was non-deterministic.
* Hierarchical navigation model is more cumbersome than flat navigation on Windows. In XCode to access some project settings you need to interact with some panel, which has two horizontal subpanels, so you need to interact with the right one, which in turn has two more vertical subpanels, you interact with the bottom one, which has three more subpanels... The recursion depth was 9 levels, I kid you not; and making a single mistake will lead you to wrong place.
* Searching webpage in a foreign language doesn't work. Because Command+F needs to be presssed in English layout and this would open VoiceOver search window, where switching to another layout doesn't work.
* No easy way to open a link in another tab in browser - as opposed to Control+Enter on Windows.
* Too difficult keystrokes - I remember one of keystrokes involved 5 keys: Fn+Ctrl+Option+Command+Up/Down. By now I forgot what it means, but I remember that it gave me plumber's disease - pain in my left wrist from having to press too many keys for extended periods of time.
I probably forgot a bunch more. Not sure if any of these have been fixed since then. But my general impression was that Apple is not very interested in fixing bugs, but instead, they appear to care a lot about presenting shiny keynote slides every year on WWDC claiming how much they care about accessibility.
In Windows world things are considerably better. Jaws is much more convenient to use, even though I've heard many reports of them not willing to fix bugs. NVDA is open source and it is my favorite, since if something doesn't work for me - I just go and fix it myself, but in general things are rarely broken to that extent in NVDA.
Also if I remember correctly Jaws and NVDA share about 45% of marketshare in the screenreader world, while VoiceOver is about 10%. So judging from this point alone anyone would be much better learning a Windows screenreader.
> I remember one of keystrokes involved 5 keys: Fn+Ctrl+Option+Command+Up/Down.
What the actual fuck. This is ridiculous if you are blind and otherwise abled. Now imagine what it’s like if you have incomplete control over your fingers, or tremors, etc. At that point it’s simply impossible. Apple, with all those billions in the bank, maybe you could spend a few million getting these problems right.
If someone came to me with that, I'd recommend either sticky keys, where you can just press a key and the system holds it down, or VoiceOver's "trackpad commander" which basically gives VO control of the trackpad, so the user can swipe left for the previous item, swipe right for the next, that kind of thing. Of course, you then need to turn the trackpad commander off when you type cause any little tap will be sent to VoiceOver and your focus is moved from the text field you were in, to the submit button right as you press Enter for a new line...
There's also the "numpad commander" for external keyboards with a number pad. I like this; you navigate with the 4 and 6 keys, 4 moves back and item, 6 moves forward, and there are keys to skip to the next heading and such. Of course, for hand tremors, I'd really hope one day Apple's voice control and VoiceOver work well together. Right now, it's kinda harder to do if you don't know the name of controls to click on before you get to them with VoiceOver, or if you don't have headphones, the voice output will interfere with the voice input.
I haven’t seen that key combo before, but I wonder if part of the thinking is that they are all next to each other. I’m not sure fine motor control is needed for fn+ctrl+option+cmd; the side of the hand would be enough.
> But my general impression was that Apple is not very interested in fixing bugs, but instead, they appear to care a lot about presenting shiny keynote slides every year on WWDC claiming how much they care about accessibility.
yes, you could say the same about their sustainability /environment/ (and arguably /privacy/). it's more about marketing and owning the narrative than it is about actual substance imo.
iOS VoiceOver is better than Google TalkBack on Android. Although I've heard recently that Android is catching up fast.
I mean it's amazing that blind people can use such a portable device; but I don't quite like that there are only so few gestures that can be made using touch screen. That's the reason they had to invent rotor, I personally find it inconenient compared to using a full size keyboard; but given touch screen rotor is probably the best you can get out of it.
But also I need to mention again my complaints about bugs that never get fixed. Just in case someone from Apple is reading this:
* In some apps the focus jumps about 1 second after opening a new screen. This is especially bad in YouTube app, but also can be rreproduced in other apps albeit with lower delay.
* Back in the days when iPhones had a physical home button, tripple press was supposed to toggle VoiceOver. But the problem is that in more than half iPhones (mine and friends') it stops working after a few weeks of usage. Yeah it can be argued that it's hard to reproduce, but this bug was so well-known and infamous in blind community that shame on Apple for not fixing this.
In general I'd think that a smart decision would be to make both iOS and MacOS VoiceOvers open-source, so that blind people themselves can fix all the bugs. Until then we're left with the situation that a bunch of disinterested sighted devs work on VoiceOvers, and as I already mentioned they are more interested in implementing some shiny new features instead of fixing decade old bugs. And as far as I know being an accessibility engineer is kind of considered one of the worst in the pecking order of engineers, so only those people who couldn't find a better career become accessiblity engs. engs.
Blind developer here; I often write tools for myself to perform some task that is not well supported by my screenreader. For example:
* I wrote an add-on that allows me to read HN comments in a structured way. A typical screenreader would present page in a linear manner, so you'd have to read all replies in order, which is quite tedious in popular posts. My add-on parses the page and identifies the level of each comment, and then I can navigate to previous/next comment at any level. So I can quickly check top-level comments and then read replies only if I'm interested.
* Another add-on makes Jupyter edit boxes to work with my screenreader. Jupyter was requiered at my company , so I either had to write that add-on or else. The way it works is that it sends Control+C Control+V keystrokes to the browser to retrieve contents and then presents them to me in an accessible window for editing. When I'm done it would Control+A Control+V new content back to edit box.
* BlindCompass - iOS app that I wrote for myself to navigate on the streets. One of the problems of blind people is that it is easy to lose the sense of heading, e.g. where is north vs South. So BlindCompass would read my heading and present it as a two-pitch sound, that allows me to deduce rough direction. It's also easy to figure out the right direction and just maintain it, so with BlindCompass I can cross large open spaces easily.
BlindCompass sounds (pun not intended) brilliant! Did you have inspiration for this or was it an original idea? Not any less impressive either way, just curious as someone who’s not at all family with this space.
I got the idea when I was learning to cross a wide street with a white cane. three lanes in each direction - and it proved to be a challenge because I would veer left or right and frequently get confused and lost. Then I thought a compass would be helpful, but a quick survey of compass apps on iOS showed that they are either visual, or show your heading as a number that can be read by VoiceOver, but it is still not very practical. So I thought that I need to encode heading as something that my brain can easily decipher during crossing the street. I have prior musical training, so that's why I decided to encode heading as a musical interval. This allows my app to communicate with about 10 degrees precision and in practice this is well enough to go on a straight line for long enough to cross the street.
I see someones cane get hit by a car one time causing him to lose orientation and make an almost 90 degree turn in the middle of the road. If the cane is pointed towards or away from traffic people don't even stop anymore.
This was actually long ago but it stuck with me. Just now I realized what perfect analogy for life it is. You move towards something, something interrupts the journey and then you just continue, thinking you are moving in the same direction.
Reminds me of season 5 of person of interest where the super intelligent AI known as "the machine" is giving relative directions to a character using ascending tones for right and descending for left, or something like that. The other character preferred directions in positions on an analog clock.
That was actually season 2! The final episode, I just watched it last week on a rewatch of the show. A lot of it feels pretty prescient right now, although not quite as intense as when the Snowden leaks happened and confirmed all of the government illegality of the show but none of the AI lol.
I'm not blind but I wrote an EPUB to Text-To-Speech reader using Coqui (a really good AI TTS project). There are books I wanted to listen to while doing other things, and I couldn't find audio-book versions of them, so this worked out perfectly. It could be that I did not do enough searching, but I was surprised I didn't see anything out there that already worked this way.
BlindCompass is neat! My child told me that she had learned about the existence of compass implants and wants to get one. Would that be useful from your perspective?
Very interesting idea. I think it depends on precision with which that implant can communicate heading. If precision is 10 degrees or less, this can actually be extremely useful to visually impaired people.
Implants? Sounds too hardcore. But I remember some people talking about compass anklets; you put one on your leg and it gives a signal (vibration?) on the north side. They said it can greatly improve your orientation on a hike, even if you do not pay conscious attention to the anklet.
(This happened years ago, I do not remember more details.)
This is one of the coolest things I've ever read. If you don't mind me asking, I'm really interested in how you read, write and edit code. What tools do you use? What's your typical workflow like?
I am blind and I developed this auditory compass for blind people that communicates your heading as two tones - musical interval between them encodes your heading. It helps white cane users not to get confused in space or walk straight across large open space by locking heading. It also makes me look like a lunatic, because I put iPhone into phone holder that I sawn to my hat to provide most accurate heading information.
The app is free, but I have to pay for Apple Developer subscription to keep the app in the app store.
This is brilliant! It reminds me of the North Paw anklet, which I think dates from back when phones didn't include magnetometers.
If I keep my phone in a hip holster but get the audio over a Bluetooth earbud, is that likely to be useful? Do you wear it on your hat so you can swivel your neck and "probe" the compass response, or because you get better results up there in some other way?
I do use it with bluetooth headphones - bone conductance headphones, so that I can also hear the street. I tried to put my phone in the pocket, but then heading fluctuates with every step. I assume this might be enough for someone, but I prefer to hear accurate heading, wich allows me to walk straight comfortably.
> I tried to put my phone in the pocket, but then heading fluctuates with every step.
As you're the developer (and a blind user eating your own dog food) I might suggest (for those that want to put their phone in their pocket) looking at using a running filter to smooth the headings and remove the swing of every step.
Savitzky–Golay filters are particularly good for this and (pages of complicated math aside) are really as simple to implement as a straight running average (as you multiply a string of heading values with normalised weights and sum to get the "better heading" .. add a new heading to front of string, drop off the oldest heading from the back, repeat).
It gets into a lot more code, but integrating the accelerometer readings to figure out where in the step you are, and correct the magnetometer readings, could work. It would have to relearn any time the phone shifted in your pocket, but that could become a continuous process while walking.
Probably easier to just put the phone in a hat, though.
So surprised to see so many negative comments here. Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed. Accessibility of websites is a real problem for blind people. And the thing is it is relatively easy to make your website accessible:
* Use simple HTML controls: all of them work great in all screenreaders. Only when custom behavior is implemented in javascript this might cause problems.
* Test accessibility with keyboard. That fancy combobox that you wrote that expands with beautiful navigation cannot be opened from keyboard.
This ADA guidance actually doesn't even mention this. Sure, providing alt descriptions can be useful but it's almost never preventing me from using a website. But a combobox or a button that won't click is a real problem. But I hope this is just the first step in making Internet more blind-friendly.
About four months ago, I used to cycle every week to the store, but an auto-immune disorder has me now disabled and I use a wheelchair. A lot of this annoying attitude honestly is people really feel like accessibility is for "other people" and many just lack empathy in general. But really, no one lives forever, no one is 25 forever hitting the bars every night, even abled bodied people grow old and their bodies change or like me, an illness or injury can strike without warning. At the very least if you cannot be empathetic to other people who are disabled just know that one day it could be you and you'll be thankful someone somewhere thought of accessibility. Today, the ramps I used to walk my bike up to the walkway under my apartment are now a godsend for the wheelchair and the stairs that I used to haul my bike up begrudgingly are now a curse.
This is a cringe analogy but may be, just may be this will help since this is hacker news: think of the "Master Foo and the Programming Prodigy" and how writing comments is for your "future self." Well, making things accessible is for your future elderly or injured self if you're able bodied today. If you can't do it for others out of mere empathy, at the very least do it for a potential version of yourself in the future!
There is a category of non disabled people who benefit from wheelchair accesses : parents of newborns who have to push a buggy wherever they go. I find it interesting that this positive side effect is rarely mentioned in the discussions about this topic.
Edit : this is actually mentionned in other comments.
Same with the web. Fully abled users benefit from keyboard accessibility when e.g. their mouse runs out of batteries, or they’re dominant hand is occupied (e.g. carrying baby).
They still are if you talk to small business owners. Vast majority of people want to completely ignore accommodation and absolutely hate being told to do the bare minimum for other people, especially when it costs them money or time. Many of them rail against how the "government" or some other boogeyman lawyer is after them and how they're the victim when they ignore the needs, and are then cajoled into meeting legal minimum requirements.
This site especially has a vocal block of libertarian leaning self centered priviliged tech workers who see an affront in doing anything for anyone other than themselves, even if it is in their own best interest.
I have progressive mobility loss. one time I went down the stairs to a bar, assuming there'd be an elevator back up - it was a big building. Bartender just told me to fuck off. I had to crawl up the stairs on my hands and knees with a friend behind me, holding my walker and ready to catch me if I fell.
if the bartender had been apologetic I wouldn't have felt so furious, but his utter disdain had my blood boiling.
Is there a reason he should be apologizing? He's a bartender, the only thing he's responsible for is serving you drinks, he has absolutely no say in the accessibility accommodations the building chooses to put in. I don't really blame him for telling you to fuck off if you kept pestering/berating him after he told you there's no an elevator. What exactly did you expect him to do?
I didn't pester or berate him. I asked him once. He didn't literally tell me to fuck off, he just said no and went back to cleaning up, clearly uninterested in helping me. It was a big, two-story building, like a complex, so I'm sure there was an elevator at least for employee use (nobody's dragging kegs down all those stairs.) He just made it very clear with his body language he wasn't interested in helping me, and that my question annoyed him.
But no, I didn't pester him, I just went to seethe in a corner and ask my friends for help.
Okay, so maybe don't lie on the internet and go around telling people a bartender told you to fuck off when all he said was "No" and we won't have to make assumptions about what you had to have done to get a service worker to tell you "Fuck off".
Also -- if the bar is on the first floor why would they be taking kegs upstairs in the first place?
If he let you into the employee-restricted part of the building to use the elevator he would probably get in trouble with management and lose his job. How is that a fair expectation?
I've been escorted through restricted areas before for accessibility reasons. it's pretty normal. assuming more than one person is working in the bar, all he needed to do is get someone to accompany me. he could also have checked with his boss to make sure it's okay. also, complying with the ADA isn't optional. I could have sued them, and I bet management would have liked that even less.
also, how is it a reasonable expectation for me to crawl on my hands and knees up a flight of grimy stairs in public? why don't you try it sometime? it'd give you a taste of what it's like for me to live.
Good manners? The business he represents is unable to accommodate a customer's needs. He should be nice about that. We have no indication that the bartender got berated.
An apology from someone who has absolutely no ability to influence those decisions or policies isn't a sincere one, and is basically coerced under threat of getting in trouble when someone complains to their boss that they weren't "understanding enough".
Are you American by chance? I find that lots of Americans seem to want and even feel they're owed that kind of false sincerity/kindness from "low skill" workers they interact with.
Also I doubt it got to the point of someone telling OP to fuck off just for asking if there's an elevator, there has to be more to that story.
Also also there's no indication that the same business that owns the bar is the same business that owns the building, maybe they just rent a space on the bottom floor. So again, not the bartenders responsibility to apologize for something they have no control over, and possibly they're not even a representative of the same business that owns the building that chose not to include the accommodations.
In regards to accessibility accommodations, the only responsibility I can see to the bartender is telling people that there's not an elevator when they ask and he seems to have fulfilled that.
'not the bartenders responsibility to apologize for something they have no control over, and possibly they're not even a representative of the same business that owns the building that chose not to include the accommodations.'
So if you have a serious situatuon, like a disabled person stuck in the basement, and the responce is just, leave them there? Like what has to happen for the barment to get off his ass and get the manager?
- 'Mate, you have a dead body at the bar!'
- 'Sorry pal, calling the police is not part of my job description'
To the customer, you represent the business. I see no reason why an able bodied man can't help, but if so, he should get someone who can. Whatever is the highest level manager or owner present has figure out the problem
Nobody can give a disabled person a helping hand anymore because there have been too many instances of disabled people suing good samaritans into oblivion when they fall and hurt themselves. At the very least an employee could be written up by their employer for touching a patron and at the worst they could be sued civilaly and have their lives ruined.
> Americans seem to want and even feel they're owed that kind of false sincerity/kindness from "low skill" workers they interact with
This is true to a sometimes weird degree, but...
> there's no indication that the same business that owns the bar is the same business that owns the building
A business is going to get judged on its physical space regardless of ownership or fairness.
There's a bar in Amsterdam with a rather unique tap collection and a remarkably annoying location, but every time I mentioned it to one of my friends there neither of those things would come up - it was always some variation of "oh isn't that the one where you have to walk up a sketchy spiral staircase to use the toilet?"
> A business is going to get judged on its physical space regardless of ownership or fairness
The portion you quoted from my post doesn't necessarily represent my actual opinion, I was just pointing out his statement doesn't always hold true.
But I don't disagree with you, you can definitely judge a business for it's physical aspects, however I don't think your friends go up to the bartender demanding they fix the sketchy stairs, and then get upset to the point your "blood boils" when they don't personally apologize to you for them. There's a difference between judging and complaining with your friends privately, and hassling someone that happens to work there over stuff they have no control over.
Parent post that I replied to was replying to grandparent which stated: "Good manners? The business he represents is unable to accommodate a customer's needs. He should be nice about that."
I think the disconnect may be if we're talking about an American bartender, they're likely getting paid below minimum wage (welcome to USA tipped wages) by the establishment. They have no power over the setup of the establishment and likely dislike both their boss and the customers. Source: I know a bunch of bartenders here in NYC.
The value calculus of something always seems to be heavily dependent on who gets the bill.
> even if it is in their own best interest.
I'm one of those people blessed with knowing what's best for other people, but I restrict my efforts to giving them unwanted advice. I don't care to force it on them.
A guy my Dad knew had a business, and the parking lot could hold about 4 cars (his, and 3 customers), all right in front of the door. He couldn't blacktop the lot, because if he did he'd have to paint a designated accessible-only parking spot, which actually would take up two spots. So he had to leave it as a gravel lot, which made it harder for wheelchair access.
It isn't that he was against accommodations, it just didn't make sense for that location where each spot was right by the door.
Accessibility and building regs ironically combined to prevent a bookstore where I used to work from replacing a set of skinny, awkward, inward-opening doors which made the entire store a fire trap.
Why? Because state law required that any part of the building being modified be brought into compliance with modern building code. In this case:
- Replacing the doors with outward-opening doors would mean bringing the doorframe into compliance by widening it
- Widening the doorframe would mean widening the alcove into which it opens, and in a 19th-century masonry mid-rise every wall is structural
- Widening the door also means widening the short (3-4 steps) staircase leading up to it and bringing them into code by making them less steep
- Making the stairs less steep means they are now longer than the alcove and protrude beyond the property line onto the sidewalk
I read years ago that there was a minor industry of lawyers looking at satellite photos to find motels with a swimming pool, and then suing them for the pool not being ADA compliant.
The usual result was the pool got filled in, as it was too expensive to upgrade it.
"Actually helping people is bad" is an extremely attractive narrative that sticks very effectively. It is regularly used to resist all manner of useful systems from welfare to charitable giving to accessibility.
"I read years ago that _nonspecific_thing_" should be a red flag for making broad judgements about the merits of accessibility. One story about "welfare queens" poisoned millions of people against anti-poverty measures for generations.
I'm sorry I don't have a photographic memory. But hey, a simple google search comes up with:
"In California, serial plaintiffs and their lawyers have found these cookie-cutter lawsuits to be lucrative as plaintiffs can claim statutory damages, compensatory damages, treble damages and attorneys’ fees."
Think of how much easier this process will be with websites. Just crawl and email legal threats. Lawyers will get paid again. Some tech people might even go along for the ride.
I do not live in the USA so I'm woefully ignorant of US legal matters but how does a lawyer, having identified a breach of a federal law, then get a payment from the miscreant ? I mean the only way that comes to mind is to write to the offender saying "You're breaking the law but if you send me a cheque I won't tell anyone". For a lawyer in particular that doesn't strike me as a sustainable business activity !
So there's obviously something I'm missing here ... would you care to explain ?
The lawyer needs to find a person that has suffered as a result in order for the suit to be valid. So they team up with someone who is unable to use the facility as a result of it not being compliant. They sue, and split the money. Often, all that is needed is for the lawyer to demand compensation since it is far easier and cheaper to just offer them a few thousand dollars to settle than it is to hire a lawyer and figure it out in court.
The ADA is interesting because, to my understanding, the law asks for ‘reasonable’ accommodation without defining what that is. So it leaves it to the courts to decide. It is reasonable that new building should be completely wheelchair accessible. But is it reasonable for architecturally or historically significant sites to be modified for wheelchair accessibility? That’s where the lawyers come in.
The space being wider and the spaces being close to the door are two separate accommodations. Leaving it gravel leaves one solved (distance) and simply avoids the other (width) completely while ignoring that caused a 3rd (gravel if you do manage to get out). The guaranteed width is so there is a standard amount of space to exit the vehicle, see the drawing at https://www.ada.gov/restriping_parking/restriping2015.html
But yes it gets increasingly hard to have a good solution for everyone when there are so few spaces.
What is best interest is debatable, but we know for a fact that some people show no interested in survival of people around them - like drunk drivers.
Or like management of Grenfell tower in UK was asked to address fire safety problems, they didn't want to spend the money and about 100 people burned alive. Also the building is gone.
Or like that apartment block in US that collapsed recently.
Or like management of Bhopals fertiliser plant, that failed due to lack of maintenance and produced positions gasses that killed thousands of people, ofcourse starting woth employees of the plant. The CEO ofcourse escaped to US and US is refusing to extradite him.
In fact I don't know how to apply your advise to anything safety related, there are literally millions of examples of people saving a bit of money on safety and dying as a result and killing people around them.
or you know there really could be... There is entire sub-group of lawyers that are ADA Trolls, just like there are Patent Trolls, and Copyright Trolls. They exist not to make business more accessible, but to line their pockets and make business hard for everyone, these lawyers give the ADA regulations a bad name and it a real and actual problem.
>>Vast majority of people want to completely ignore accommodation and absolutely hate being told to do the bare minimum for other people
Ummm no. That is not actually true. the problem is often times the regulations are inflexible, and unaccommodating themselves businesses are often put in position where they simply can not comply for some reason or another to every letter of very regulation (of which are vast, vague, and complex)
Business owners also do not like to be continually threatened with heavy fines, and government violence in order to operate their business.
>This site especially has a vocal block of libertarian leaning self centered privileged tech workers
it is very sad that we have come to the point where only authoritarian control via threat of violence are to be seen as the "acceptable" solution to a social problem. At one point the liberal solution was anti-violence now it seems the only acceptable solution for vocal block of ill-liberal self centered privileged tech workers is to use the power of government violence to force their will upon others believing in their own moral certitude that their world view is the "correct" one, and anyone that disagrees has to be selfish immoral bigot or uncaring capitalist scum, or other such thing......
Liberal solutions instead would be using other incentives to persuade people to voluntary solutions
I just want to point out the juxapostion of this comment and the sibling comment where the commenter described their mobility issue and crawling up the stairs, in the context of the parent comment.
We do not know the full story of that comment. Remember all stories have 2 sides we only have one. Even taking the story at face value all we really know is the one employee of the bar was an asshole. Asshole exist in the world and no amount of regulations is going to change that, in fact the inverse is generally true in that more regulations simply create more assholes (i.e malicious compliance)
You don't have to restrict yourself to that comment, ask any physically disabled person they'll have a story of having to crawl or being trapped in an inaccessible space. The bartender is not the issue, the issue is the systemic lack of basic human dignity and access afforded to the disabled.
Yep, if you look at their comment history, you can see it case in point. Rants about how fiat currency are the biggest fraud in history, etc. Every talk of government is using the phrase threats of violence.
Another one talking about the virtues of Trump government. Its kind of surreal in its divergence from reality.
And what is your point? The practical effect of these ADA trolls is the complete shuttering of useful things that could not be made accessible in a reasonable fashion. E.g. universities have removed websites because they don't have the funding available to make the resources accessible. It's not trivial amounts of money, the case I was remembering was a court ordering the subtitling of years of video courses, ... or their removal.
I really feel for people with disabilities, but there's a heavy profit motive to abuse the ADA, and that's what causes people to hate it. There's other issues as well like rising costs of construction and doing anything productive due to red tape that are no doubt related, but what people see are the ADA trolls.
If all that people see are the ADA trolls they need to spend more time looking at their disabled brothers and sisters.
At the end of the day the question is, are we content to let them crawl? Are we content for the public space to be segregated? Would we allow this for our family or ourselves?
If we consider these things unacceptable then we need regulations. Regulations come with drawbacks and avenues for abuse, all of them, but it shouldn't be the primary and prevalent focus when they're put into place to protect marginalized sections of society. In a healthy society, I would expect of a tech forum to mainly be discussing tech tips and methods to comply with these norms. The truth is people don't want to do the minimum work to help these people, western societies are incredibly individualist and every effort or capital spent on helping others is seen as personal injury. It's this mindset that makes it so even in new products and constructions, the simplest norms aren't applied. I think there needs to be a change of mindset, because the first thing that should come to people's minds when reading this article is the social good that will come of it, not the reactionary examples of abuse.
The trolls are very visible and could eventually erode support for the ADA in the general public. This is true for any vulnerable population, actually. Asking people to ignore them never works well, there needs to be legislation work that specifically targets them so that the ADA doesn’t lose popularity.
I'm not asking people to ignore them, I'm asking for a hierarchy of concerns with regards to the ADA. The first concern being the acknowledgement of the good it does and its necessity.
It's arguable, but in my opinion you've got the chain of causality backwards. People here focus on the trolls because the ADAs popularity is low, they don't like the effort it entails, and they don't like government regulations in general, and they'd just as much not have to apply norms at all.
I can tell you the vast majority of businesses are not ADA compliant and do just fine.
The trolls are what make the ADA less popular, I’ve seen it happen in LA (a place where compliance and awareness is high)…some grifter was actively trying to figure out how to lodge an ADA complaint against the bagel shop I was in. It was utterly obvious, and this place, being in LA, had done everything right in terms of accessibility (the doors don’t have to be mechanical, just easy to open and wide enough to get a wheelchair through). You get a few bad actors in an otherwise good thing and they give the entire program a bad reputation.
Now…I don’t quite remember much when the ADA has done good, but I do remember that one troll shopping for a settlement check. This is the popularity problem the ADA faces.
>>because the first thing that should come to people's minds when reading this article is the social good that will come of it
Wishing does not make it so, and human psychology does not work that way and never will. if you continue to base your responses of this flawed view of reality you will continue to be disappointed.
One must plan for how humans actually are, you know reality, not how we wish things were. This is often the problem with regulations, economic policies, etc. People crafting them are crafting them for a population of people that does not actual exist, so they always fail
Humans are tribal, that tribe is generally viewed to max out at about 100 people or so, any group that is larger than that is going to be an abstract concept not something that can be held deeply personal. For a pure altruist motive that is the target, that is why local community groups are far more effective at charity than national programs, the people are more personally connected.
>>western societies are incredibly individualist
Through out history collectivist societies always fail because they are incompatible with human psychology. A collectivist society must stay small, it could never be the size of a city let alone a nation state. Individualist pursuits are the best way to organized large groups.
Collectivism works at a small, family or tribe level, not for a mass population
I don't know if you intend it that way, but it comes off very patronizing. You cannot ascribe the status quo to human nature, and paint people who seek to change it as naive idealists.
Society is changed by writing laws and changing minds. Cultures evolve, people acquire new perspectives on issues based on their peers and the discussions they partake in. Regulations are being written and discussions are being held as to their moral importance. No one is content with wishing on a star for a better world.
As for collectivism, you only need to look across the Atlantic for examples of functional western societies which strike a different balance than America between individualism and collectivism.
You can also look at the past, back when black people weren't allowed in white businesses and black schoolgirls had to be escorted by the state to be allowed to attend school. People didn't ascribe to a fatalist view back then, they believed things could change and they fought for it.
>You can also look at the past, back when black people weren't allowed in white businesses and black schoolgirls had to be escorted by the state to be allowed to attend school.
I always find this argument ironic given the Jim Crow laws you are referring to were government regulations that required said discrimination, they were collectivist policies being imposed upon individuals. Would discrimination still have occurred absolutely, but it would not have been as wide spread nor as abusive. Only government action can cause the kind of oppression seen, only government has that monopoly of violence to allow such perversion of morality, that is the hazard of putting your faith in government.
Just like the EU nations you admire so much you only seem to want to ever talk about the positives of this "balance" of regulation and never talk about the enumerable negatives that come from those policies
Do you believe the EU is rainbows and unicorns and none of the their policies have any downsides, that the American model is 100% evil, and the EU model is 100% good? are you that much of a "naive idealist".
I do not claim the American model is perfect, though I am pretty sure we will differ on where the root cause of most of the problems are (hint I blame federal overreach for most of America's problems)
>>Society is changed by writing laws and changing minds. Cultures evolve, people acquire new perspectives on issues based on their peers and the discussions they partake in
Culture evolves yes, and laws always follow culture, not the other way around. you can not regulate ethics or morality, and attempts and trying always fail.
That is my point. The regulations that work, that do not have massive corruption, or massive amounts of unintended consequences or regulations that only need to control a small portion of outliers in society. to prevent actions that are viewed by the vast vast majority (not just a plurality, or even a simply majority) as abuse.
When "democracy" passes laws and regulations based on plurality, or simple majority you run into all kinds of problems, these are compounded even further if the regulation are acted via fiat authority by an unelected administrative state.
The fact that discriminatory laws exist does not invalidate the usefulness of the rule of law. Jim Crow was very much in line with the cultural beliefs of the population. Culture does not absolutely precede law, law and culture feed each other. A recent example are the rates of acceptance of gay marriage before and after the laws passed.
>> Do you believe the EU is rainbows and unicorns and none of the their policies have any downsides, that the American model is 100% evil, and the EU model is 100% good? are you that much of a "naive idealist".
I see now you were not being patronizing by accident, but are willfully insulting. Painting a caricature of my argument does not strengthen yours.
Then go after ADA trolls, instead of advocating effectively that disabled people (26% of the population) should just accept dehumanization and utter humiliation through no fault of their own and that they cannot change simply because society considers it too expensive for them to have basic dignity.
The ADA is enforced by civil lawsuits. You can make a lot of money going around finding "violations" and suing over them. In the heyday of compliance for restaurants, a fair number of iconic restaurants in our area were put out of business by these lawsuits because they were in old buildings where it was just not possible to make accommodations. No rooms for ramps. No way to put in elevators. You get the idea.
This action may result in some benefits for those who need it, but the main beneficiaries will be law firms.
Is that true? I thought ADA compliance is like building code compliance. It is only enforced during changes. I would guess a lot the restaurants failed because lots of restaurants fail.
> First, the ADA requires all places of public accommodation, including retail businesses, to
remove barriers to access whenever it is readily achievable to do so..
> "Readily achievable" means easily accomplishable, and able to be done without much difficulty or expense. This is an ongoing obligation, and is required even if you are not performing any renovations.
> In addition, if you are altering or renovating an existing building, the ADA also requires you to make the altered areas readily accessible to and usable by people with disabilities. The ADA also requires you provide an accessible route from the building entrance to the altered areas, so long as doing so does not result in disproportionate costs.
> "Disproportionate costs" are defined as those costs exceeding 20% of the overall cost of the alterations. For example, if you are spending $50,000 on alterations, under the ADA you may have to spend up to an additional S10,000 providing an accessible route.
It is easy to make a basic web form, e-commerce site, or blog post accessible. But the web is largely becoming a space for arbitrarily-complex, fully-interactive applications. Today's web is full of products with:
- complex information architecture, with nuanced relationships between nodes communicated by position, spacing, boundaries and other visual cues
- real-time data updates that transform the document in arbitrarily complex ways
- screens where nearly every square inch is actionable, and these actions transform the document in arbitrarily complex ways
- controls that are not simply a button or text link, but regions full of structured content embedded within them.
- screens that respond to inputs in real-time in arbitrary complex ways
- rich graphics that eschew the traditional document model, with its established accessibility guidelines, altogether
To make such an application accessible requires:
1.) auditing all the visual cues, writing supplementary text if necessary, and adding the ARIA properties to communicate these cues
2.) communicating all document transformation to the user, either by navigating focus to the new content, or communicated to the user some other way. In the case of real-time updates, this also can't obstruct the normal usage of the site.
This is certainly possible at a small scale, but very hard to do consistently by an organization if engineers and designers on each product team don't have a solid understanding of how screen-readers work or the ARIA spec. It is also hard to have any quality control on this without having someone actually test every product on a screen reader.
Unfortunately, few engineers (and even fewer designers) have this expertise. Many years ago, I did a 12-week, 70-hour-a-week web development bootcamp, and, of those 800+ hours, exactly 0 hours and 0 minutes were spent on web accessibility. To be honest, I doubt the instructors even knew anything on the subject.
Sure, it would be easier to build an accessibility web by just simplifying product requirements. But I have had little-to-no success doing this as an IC engineer.
Turning an existing application into a accessible one is a huge issue, but only if it was built without accessibility in mind.
That is a bit like saying "todays applications do all sorts of potentially dangerous operations and need to be integrated with social media etc. Making all that secure is certainly possible at a small scale, but very hard to do consistently by an organization if engineers and designers on each product team don't have a solid understanding of IT security work or the OWASP top 10. It is also hard to have any quality control on this without having someone actually pen-testing every product."
Yes, accessibility is work. But not optional. If you build non-accessible websites you are just bad at your job.
I agree with you. But we’ve had decades to get better at accessibility, and yet it’s practically mostly worse today than with desktop apps in 1999.
A forcing function is needed. Those wheelchair ramps didn’t get built because architects and real estate developers thought it was fun and interesting.
I don't disagree, and I am not trying to argue that these laws aren't a good thing. But I'm also not sure the lawsuits are going to make a big difference.
My last company, despite facing an actual accessibility lawsuit, was willing to let all 3 of the engineers with the most accessibility expertise walk (including myself) rather than allow a long-term WFH policy.
One very simple step a dev can take is to just `tab` over their pages and check that important elements (links, buttons, etc) receive focus. Especially if they toggle something on the page via JS. If something doesn't, replace the div soup w/ a focusable element like `<a href="javascript:;"></a>`
For those saying accessibility is hard, doing just this one thing can make a big difference.
This is mostly true, but it's usually better/easier to use the semantic element for any particular use case. In this case, for example, to correctly mimic how the <a> tag works, you'll need to handle both click events and keyboard events (e.g. space for clicking), and even then you'll struggle to handle right-clicks, ctrl-clicks or middle clicks in a way that is truly cross-platform.
The <a> tag, on the other hand, just does all that for you.
> Wondering if wheelchair users were hated back in the days when the law about wheelchair ramps was passed.
Not as far as I know, nobody I knew was hating on any disabled people, but laziness, procrastination, and the cost of accomodations was enough to prevent quite a few businesses from accomodating the disabled ( with ramps and such ) until they were legally forced to do it under penalty of law... And even today only businesses considered "public accommodations" are required to comply... that's it really not hate, just laziness.
How much of the nation’s wealth has been invested in this, and where has it not been invested? Make sure you count lawsuits, paperwork, planning, construction, maintenance, and enforcement. And try not to respond without pointing out something more wasteful, rather than something productive. Let’s pretend you took that money and invested it in advanced education for young black women in Chicago instead. What did we forgo?
A system where we invest our money in only the maximally productive places is not a system that is just. Ensuring that people aren't left behind is a virtue and even if investing in people at the boundaries ends up leading to less society-wide productivity it is still valuable.
Your proposal falls prey to a sort of "investment-productivity monster." What if we identified the brightest kids in 2nd grade and spent all of our education resources on them, while shuffling the rest into the Amazon Fulfillment Centers? Maybe that'd increase overall productivity. But it'd be wrong.
Your reasoning in itself is faulty: It pitches perceived good for one group ("young black women in Chicago") against perceived good of another group ("wheelchair users").
Let's for a moment disregard that there are a lot more wheelchair users than young black women in Chicago, and that the wheelchair users obviously are a lot more disadvantaged - a government is not a business. Its goal is not necessarily to use money "ideally beneficial" in a utilitarian way - its goal is to keep a society working, which in our liberal democracy environment means protecting the weak and keeping things relatively fair (in the sense: to help those who cannot help themselves).
While every young black woman from Chicago can stay in school, attend night school, or spend time in a library, not even the most athletic wheelchair-user can consistently hop their wheelchair (plus body-weight) up the stairs. And even if every single black young Chicago-woman becomes a new entrepreneur, resulting in a larger net-good for society as a whole, the wheelchair-user still would have the same problem.
The reflexive, but non-engaged and and economically dishonest answer here is to avoid the question by comparing any investment to a write-off, this justifying anything. Nobody thinks like this looking forward, as it’s clearly nonsense. That’s why I proposed you not do this.
I've always wondered but never really investigated... do screen readers handle css-only drop downs well? We've always avoided it and instead used javascript to toggle aria attributes which seems very backwards.
I think it depends on the implantation. I think it is more important that your drop down is keyboard accessible. I usually expand my menus with ":focus-within" as well as ":hover" and make sure that one element which is always visible is also focusable. That way you can tab to it and the menu expands.
Indeed, you should probably just use "<details>" and "<summary>" for drop downs today (works perfectly without any javascript and have accessibility built in). CSS only dropdowns were a hack for an era before these elements were widely supported.
Blind developer here. Even though web technology might move fast, things move slowly in the world of accessibility.
You're saying it's too hard to catch up with the latest technology - I wouldn't agree with this in the context of accessibility. What happens in practice is that a frontend developer develops for example a fancy combobox that needs to be clicked on with a mouse without thinking twice. And that combo box stays on the website for years. Now suppose that's a website to book flights. I go there and I spend half an hour trying to click that damn combobox with a keyboard and still it wouldn't allow me to select anything. Well too bad, it turns out I cannot fly XXX airlines. Or I'd have to wait for my sighted assistant who comes once a week to deal with these websites.
And what if I told you that half of websites on the internet are like this - that is not accessible or extremely ahrd to use? I have to avoid certain online stores, certain airlines, certain hotels because of that. Finally I work in faang company and so many internal web tools here are not accessible. I found my way around, but I have seen blind people being fired for not being able to perform while every other tool that is required for you to use doesn't work with your screenreader and nobody cares to fix that?
And what's the price to fix it? Educate developers to use simple combobox instead of fancy one? Try to test it with keyboard? Are blind people really asking for too much?
And also regarding getting sued - I have no idea what kind of lawyers can sue for this, I have never heard of actual blind people being able to sue someone because the website was not accessible. If that was the case I would be able to sue half of Internet including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so many more. I suspect certain lawyers are taking advantage of the system - e.g. there was this american life episode years ago about a lawyer who is specializing on suing hotels that claim to provide acomodations for disabled people -wheel chair users - and they don't satisfy ADA requirements or something. I suspect this Domino pizza lawsuit was initiated by similar type of ADA troll lawyer. Don't compare blind people to troll lawyers!
I’m currently doing accessibility work with an in-house web framework of reasonable complexity. 90% of the accessibility issues are relatively straightforwards. Things like keyboard usability are easy to explain to devs and behave fairly consistently across browsers.
But the last 10%… things like “what should happen to focus when you open a modal?” get messier fast (the ARIA docs give several different behaviours for several different scenarios, which means every dev who wants to open a modal needs to understand enough to correctly select the behaviour for their circumstance), especially since different screen readers can behave in different ways when encountering the same content. The cost to investigate and properly solve these can be nontrivial.
That’s not to excuse people who don’t even try for that first 80-90% of the low hanging fruit… but please forgive the designers and devs who fall short of the last 10%!
There are lots of scenarios where a modal is the expected way to accomplish a task. Preventing irreversible errors (Are you absolutely sure you want to delete this user’s data irreversibly?), save/load dialogs, etc. Modal overuse is a real problem (and one we’re addressing in our product), but there are some situations where they solve a real problem.
OP's point is that most websites, in their experience, fail to get the easy 90%. If what you've got left is a few focus issues, it sounds to me like OP can at least accomplish their task.
HN users' tendency to opine about things they know nothing about is really aggravating here. You and a few other blind users come in and share your experience, only to be told by a bunch of people who have never used a screen reader in their lives that you're wrong. How weird.
Just know that a lot of us who don't comment are taking notes of what you say. :)
One more point to consider: CodeMirror is not accessible for blind users with screenreaders, as it just presents an empty text area. While Monaco is acdcessible, at least VSCode is. This used to cause a lot of pain for blind people using Jupyter, which uses CodeMirror (or at least used to).
I presume that is because it is a complicated feature, but not technically impossible? Although perhaps using contentEditable* makes an implementation more difficult?
* From article: “CodeMirror would achieve that by leaning on native browser text editing (via contentEditable) rather than implementing text editing entirely in the library/javascript.”.
Edit: from https://blog.replit.com/codemirror “CodeMirror 6 is a complete rewrite of the CodeMirror editor with a focus on accessibility, touchscreen support, and extensibility.”. I expect that marjin really cares about accessibility. However, in my limited experience, as a lone developer I couldn’t make our complex product properly accessible unless that was the focus of say six months effort, which we couldn’t afford at the time.
Ah, you're right, CodeMirror 6 appears to be more accessible. However it still only shows one line at a time. So that's still worse than Monaco. Monaco can show one or two hundred lines at a time. So with CodeMirror 6 I still would have to read text line by line without any way to skip a function for example, which is unnecesarily tedious.
Sure, I understand that people don't have infinite time to spend on perfect accessibility. I was careful not to have any blaming tone in my message.
The article says that the new version of CodeMirror uses a contenteditable and native selection, which I would expect to pretty much "just work" with screenreaders - is that not true?
This is mostly accurate for CodeMirror version 5. But this article is talking about version 6, which was intentionally built in a way that avoids the problem.
Could it be that Boeing engineers made this presentation vague and confusing on purpose? I mean the article presumes that the engineers had poor PowerPoint skills, but it seems to me that this could have been cover-your-ass type of situation (also perhaps similar to Challenger disaster story).
I mean obviously Boeing engineers need to communicate to NASA their assessment of the situation, but they don't want to be blamed for any technical difficulties (e.g. if second shuttle would have to be launched to save the crew). So they think Columbia will probably be fine, but let's communicate our worries to NASA, but let's do that in deliberately vague and conspicuous language, in hope that NASA managers won't see the fine print.
10 years ago I found even more outrageous bug in Windows 8.
I was working in MSFT back than and I was writing a tool that produced 10 GB of data in TSV format , that I wanted to stream into gzip so that later this file would be sent over the network. When the other side received the file they would gunzip it successfully, but inside there would be mostly correct TSV data with some chunks of random binary garbage. Turned out that pipe operator was somehow causing this.
As a responsible citizen I tried to report it to the right team and there I ran into problems. Apparently no one in Windows wants to deal with bugs. IIt was ridiculously hard to report this while being an employee, I can't imagine anyone being able to report similar bugs from outside. And even though I reported that bug I saw no activity in it when I was leaving the company.
However I just tried to quickly reproduce it on Windows 10 and it wouldn't reproduce. Maybe I forgot some details of that bug or maybe indeed they fixed this by now.
Worked there too at one point. It can be a struggle to find the right feature team. Once you do, if you can get it triaged, unless it’s high sev high priority it’s getting kicked to the next time period.
> Maybe I forgot some details of that bug or maybe indeed they fixed this by now.
There are lots of things which have been fixed in Windows 10, I'd go so far to say 1903 (19H1) is where things started to settle down, but even the latest versions are not perfect. When the Israeli/Palestinian conflict broke out in 2019, some of the US military computers started playing up for about a week, after the US vetoed something at the UN level regarding this conflict. So MS still has a long way to go to get things secure.
