Bitlab: Tactile tablet for blind and visually impaired people | Hacker News Reader

Bitlab: Tactile tablet for blind and visually impaired people

blitab.com

22 pointsfgeorgy9 comments

As a member of this product's target market (blind myself) I wish they'd put a bit more effort into making their site accessible. There appear to be various images with no useful alt text, for instance. I also wish the front page actually tried to market to me. Would be nice to know what OS this is running, whether it's a full-featured Android device or just something I can send files to, whether I can run it as a peripheral with my desktop, etc. I'm a bit worn out on all the fluffy "making blind people more independent and employable" messaging I see from these types of projects which seems to ignore the fact that I'm already quite independent and employable, and maybe at the end of the day I think about things other than my "independence and employability metric."

Interesting tech, and if the price isn't prohibitive I'd be down to buy one. But I wish more folks in this space designed traditional landing pages and actually made them accessible. Too many access tech companies don't focus on their message or don't convey it in a way that lets me know what any reasonable buyer would want to know.

Ugh, WTF, so I click on their preorder link, which is apparently a JavaScript anchor, and my screen reader gets no indication that a preorder page/box/whatever has come up. Maybe I could poke the page a bit longer and find one, but I think I'll pass. I hope the final product is built better than this landing page. Don't like being so critical but it doesn't look like any usability testing for the target market was done with this page and it kind of befuddles me.

I mostly agree with you. But I think the screen reader should be smart enough to automatically read whatever appears on the page after you activate a link. So the problem with the pre-order popup could be solved in the screen reader.

Sure, but you can't necessarily know that automatically reading any new piece of text is any better than not reading new text at all, and even if one screen reader can handle this particular case just fine, it seems like anyone targeting a whole community should just use ARIA and best practices for rendering modal content accessibly.

I agree that a website for a product like this should have exemplary accessibility.

The heuristic I'd use in a screen reader is as follows: if a user activates a link and a new element becomes visible but nothing else happens within half a second or so, read the contents of that element as if it were a newly loaded page.

FWIW for anyone else reading this thread, ndarilek and I have each developed a screen reader (on Android and Windows, respectively).

This product is vaporware. Every six months or so it gets spammed around sites like HN and r/blind to promote the latest award they won. Meanwhile, the images on the site continue to show either a non-functional static prototype or 3D renderings. Given that this group has provided no evidence of this device actually functioning, I find it highly offensive that they are now taking preorders. It's a shame, because bringing awareness to the lack of innovation in assistive tech/nonvisual computing should be commended. But the approach they have decided to take, especially considering the site isn't even usable by their target market, is manipulative and bordering on exploitative.

Their preorder button doesn't work for me either in Safari. It just scrolls down to a bunch of icons to be a tester/developer/distributor/supporter/investor/make a donation. All of those go to a generic contact form and only "donate" has a button that lets you give them money - and has no indication it's a preorder so it's presumably not.

Recently I started to experience some dark spots in my vision. On my way to the ophthalmologist I was reflecting on vision and how my life now seems to depend on it. I actually wondered if I would still read Hacker News if I were blind. I understand that my perspective may be very ignorant, but I would be glad to know more about your daily life such as: what device you use already to read Hacker News? What you do for work? What technology most interests you? Thanks for sharing your first comment, it's really helped me already.

It's hard to answer your questions definitively but I'll give them a shot:

What device do I use?: I don't use any one device. My main computer is a laptop running Linux and the Orca screen reader, but I've used Windows and NVDA before. I've had multiple Android phones/tablets and have used IOS. Last decade I used OS X heavily but transitioned away after a few years. Most devices have some level of accessibility built-in these days, so there isn't one single thing I'd use, just as a sighted person might use a laptop/desktop at their desk, a phone on the go, etc.

What do I do for work?: Again, probably the same as many here. I've done contract development on Android and the web, and am currently launching my own company. Nothing surprising or different.

What technology interests me?: I guess it depends on the day. :) I'm a web and mobile developer so tend to be more up on things like React, React Native, etc. I particularly enjoy working with mobile tech because there are lots of ways in which a mobile device with camera/GPS/lots of processing power/numerous connectivity options can tell me things about my world given the right apps and services. 8 years ago, running an errand meant I grabbed my phone, MP3 player, bluetooth GPS receiver and the PDA to which the receiver paired that ran accessible mapping software. Now I just grab my phone and it's much more capable on its own, handling GPS, OCR for reading documents, etc. I think there are a number of ways mobile tech can improve how we interact with our world, and I'm starting companies to explore those.

The title was mistyped. It's Blitab.

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