Hacker News Reader

Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

Blind person here, happy to answer any questions. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone born blind, so whatever ends up working well for me might not work as well for someone just losing their sight, though I tried to take that fact into account.

The most immediate suggestions that come to mind are:

1. Learn to use a screen reader. You don't need an expensive one. NVDA on Windows, Voice Over on the Mac and Orca on Linux are the way to go. NVDA is probably the least quirky and easiest to find resources for. I'd recommend against Orca, while it can be used, we all know how tricky Linux on the desktop can get, and throwing a screen reader into the mix doesn't help.

2. Forget about the mouse. Screen reader users use the keyboard exclusively. Try disabling the screen too, many sighted users who practice with a screen reader end up relying on what they can see, which makes things more difficult.

3. Accept that inaccessibility is a fact of life, and it has to be worked around. Not all tools are accessible, and some are more accessible than others. If you're looking for an accessible IDE, Vs Code is great and constantly improving. Emacspeak exists, but I don't actually know anyone who uses it, and I know quite a few blind people in tech. Some things that you're now doing through a GUI are best done via the command line, Git is a good example. Programming tools usually aren't the problem, it's everything else that causes issues. Slack and Zoom work great, for example, but many smaller collaboration tools don't.

4. Not all areas of programming are equally accessible. I can't imagine a blind dev working exclusively on the front end, where there's a lot of CSS involved, and where you have to look at Figma designs and debug issues solely based on screenshots. Backend stuff is much more accessible, same with lower-level systems programming. Dev Ops is very much a mixed bag.

I'm happy to answer any further questions either here or via email, my HN username at gmail dot com.

View on HN

I'd like to say, as someone who has not been exposed at any degree to those who are blind and use computers/internet; I am very taken aback with the composition and vocabulary you're able to convey in written form having not been sighted. It's truly impressive.

I agree that blind people are impressive in their ability to navigate a sighted world, but it seems strange to find the written word part to be the impressive part... the language part of their brain is fine. I don't see anything they wrote that seems like only a sighted person would be able to understand...

The written word is (kind of) the impressive part. The spelling rules of English are not easy to master, and blind people have much fewer reading opportunities than the sighted. You don't see labels on the products you buy, you don't see the billboards from a passing car, you often don't even read books or articles, as listening to synthesized speech is much faster, cheaper and more comfortable than reading Braille.

The only reason my spelling is as good as it is is the fact that I used to listen to English text with a Polish speech synthesizer for most of my life, as I was too lazy to switch languages. Polish is (almost) phonetically perfect, so I was hearing things almost exactly as they were written. This made my spelling much better than that of most blind Americans. Words like cystom (system), keybored or even polotission (politician) can sometimes be seen in the blind community.

That is super interesting! Thanks for sharing

Absolutely incredible. Thank you for sharing this.

Off topic and feel free to ignore but here goes: do you know of any low hanging fruit stuff I can do on web/front-end UIs that will help me get my sites/apps more accessible, that many developers miss? And secondly, do you know of a way to quickly simulate the experience a visually impaired person has without learning/using a screen reader? (As a solo developer, I don't have the time to dive too deep)

Take with a grain of alt b/c I'm not blind and my accessibility training is not formal, just learned from a job.

The built in mobile screen readers are not hard to setup. Enable in the settings and you can play around with it to grok how it works and how to navigate the UI tree with it.

Lowest hanging fruit always seemed to be making sure all the controls you wanted on your page were reachable with accessibility navigation (ie tabindex/focusable) and that the spoken labels were sufficient without sighted context.

If you're on a mac of course the easiest screenreader to use is voiceover, if on windows NVDA - problem there is not wide consensus among screenreaders about functionality, so you will read about a way to do something and think that is the way to do this but when you actually start doing it you find it isn't going to work the way you thought, if at all.

This means if you do anything good you will need to test on different screenreaders, I like https://assistivlabs.com/ for a service to allow you to do screenreader testing also because the developer who runs it is really helpful.

It also means the best ways of doing things tend to be the ones that have been around longest because every screenreader / browser combo has implemented different parts of newer specifications - that is to say it will feel like your chosen screenreader is Chrome, but all the other ones are IE11.

I personally find that what helps you most about understanding when a site is not accessible enough is, after you have read a bit about problems people with screenreaders have, imagine using your site if you were blind.

Because you are blind things happen atomically, you do not have an context clues that you can see about what something is, so actions you can do on stuff should probably say not just what they are doing - like a button that says Delete - but what they are doing it to - like a button that says Delete and has an aria-label that says Delete user account. Really - being willing to sit still for 20 minutes looking at your site and thinking but what if I couldn't see will probably help you find a bunch of obvious problems.

Also when you have a sort of good fundament to your sites assistive usage, it means that things will be a lot easier when you do start testing on different screen readers.

on edit: obviously when I say because you are blind things happen atomically, I mean that in the context of using a screen reader on a webpage

> Really - being willing to sit still for 20 minutes looking at your site and thinking but what if I couldn't see will probably help you find a bunch of obvious problems.

Yes, I'm hoping to acquire this mindset. What I'm building is quite simple, almost crud like in terms of the UI. The issue is I don't feel I get the mindset just yet. I understand speech is linear, and I assume the order mainly comes from how it's laid out in html (as opposed to position). But how do visually impaired navigate the items in this big list, intuitively and quickly? I assume focusable elements are critical, but how about the the rest of the content hierarchy? A row in a table doesn't tell me anything if I can't see the header simultaneously - for instance.

if your table should be a table and is correctly coded as a table pretty much every screen reader will make it usable, in this example

https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/examples/table/tabl...

using voiceover you read the table it tells you the column names, probably in reading a table you would probably first read all the headers so you know what the table is dealing with - here these are first name, last name, company, address.

If you know what value in the table you are looking for you would go to that column, for example last name the second column, then navigate down with the voiceover key combination and the down arrow to get to the row you are interested in - row 2 James I'm looking for sara james so let's go to the first name column, then you could use voice over key combination and left arrow to go to the first name column and see it is Sara, then you read all the contents of that row to find out Sara James, Acme, Inc., 123 Broad St.

Obviously you need to remember the headers in this way of working, so if your tables are really complicated and have a lot of data in each column it might be nice to put a hidden screenreader only message in there that says Contents for First Name Column or something like that. But in this simple case I think it is reasonable to assume people will remember the column headers.

on edit: this is from a developer who is not blind however, so a blind user may have more efficient ways of working than me. Also note, many screen reader users are not completely blind or have some other disability, like dyslexia, which makes using a screen reader useful for them. A dyslexic user may be able to figure out the headers of the table, but if the individual cells have a lot of content the screen reader will be useful for them.

> Off topic and feel free to ignore but here goes: do you know of any low hanging fruit stuff I can do on web/front-end UIs that will help me get my sites/apps more accessible, that many developers miss?

Not sure if many developers miss this:

Look at your UI in black/white. Plenty of folks are colour-blind of one kind or another. If your UI works in black/white, it'll probably work for any kind of colour-blindness.

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IhQl1CBj9U for something focused on games, but with broader applicability.

Add Pa11y to your CI: https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y

Another good resource is the GDS accessibility standards: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/guidance-and-tools-for-digital-a...

It's tailored towards creating services within the GDS portfolio of services but there is good advice in there too

Absolutely. One is dead easy, quick, and free.

Step 1: Use a desktop PC. Step 2: Unplug your mouse.

Now learn to use your computer and then your site.

Windows is basically 100% usable by keyboard alone, and that basically is how all blind users use it. They can't see a pointer so pointing devices are useless.

I am Very Old™ and I learned Windows in the 1980s in a company that sold Macs as well as PCs, so it didn't have any PC mice. So I learned to use Windows with keyboard only.

I still can, although it's harder now. But I now run mostly MacOS and Linux.

Windows works very well with the keyboard and I sometimes amaze people by how fast I can move around and do stuff, because I don't take my hands off the keyboard or point and click much. I use the keyboard to run programs, move and rearrange windows, close windows, select and copy and paste, navigate forms etc.

All standards-compliant Windows programs use the same keystrokes to do this and they work everywhere. Learn them and you'll become faster anyway, _as well_ as improving the accessibility of your sites by becoming familiar with how blind users must access them.

this reply articulates what I was trying to say.

>sometimes be seen in the blind community.

HAH! Love it. Side note: I constantly make fun of the English phrase "I see what you're saying", meaning "I understand", often swapping it out with "I hear what you're seeing", sometimes swapping it multiple times in one sentence. People almost never notice unless I follow it up with "I smell what you're feeling" or "taste what you're smelling", because this creeps them out.

Interestingly in the Netherlands they do express things via taste words. Lekker (meaning tasty) can describe an experience, doing something well and more.

Heerlijk (meaning delicious) can also be used. I found a gravestone with the translation: “we thank you God for your great deliciousness”.

Not quite - "heerlijk" used to mean "lordly", so "heerlijk voedsel" means "food eaten by lords". This also explains the gravestone reference (de Heer == the Lord).

Thanks for clarification! Good to know. I often find it hard to learn and retain the multiple meanings / history of words in a second language. I do know de Heer, and Herengracht etc. I just hadn’t put that together that it’s same origin.

These words have shifted similarly but subtly differently in Norwegian too. Lekker = lekker, heerlijk = herlig.

That last example is wrong as translated.

In that context 'heerlijkheid' has nothing to do with taste words, it simply means 'glory'.

This is also common in other languages. Indonesians use enak (tasty) for almost any positive quality. Even in English people refer to attractive members of the opposite sex as "tasty"

But "heer" in Dutch is either a (human) lord or God, so "heerlijk" means lordly or godly, and over time this became more general.

Much the same word exists in German, "herrlich", but it means "beautiful" or "splendid". Same idea though.

I've mostly referred to members of the same sex as tasty, myself.

Funny anecdote : A software engineer teammate and I were discussing a change IRL in office standing next to my desk, when there was a churning sound from his stomach (the things we miss WFH). It was not too loud, but loud enough to derail my speech - Instead of saying "<my lengthy explanation..> <stomach_sound> Do you see that?" as a substitute for "Do you see what I am saying?", I accidentally said ".. Do you hear that?". SO awkward and funny

So, you are not even a native English speaker then? Oof. You have my respect.

It's really common for educated non-native speakers to spell better than native speakers. Because non-natives learn the language already with a written support, so they have worse pronunciation but better spelling compared to people who learn the language exclusively orally as kids.

My partner is a native speaker and I'm not, yet he often asks me how to spell.

In programming, it's important to structure correctly, format correctly, and spell consistently. This might explain why.

Makes me wonder if for blind people forms of phonetic typing would be more useful.

Like chord keyboards.

Or maybe some other less wide spread but also less complex to use phonetic input methods?

This is a weird compliment. He is blind, not mentally challenged.

I thought so at first, too. Read mikis reply and you'll see why it was a good compliment.

Ah OK!

I got what he meant. It was a complex reply with many parts and it seems like it would be harder to dictate or type without having that feedback loop of being able to see what you're doing.

Why though, can't you keep a paragraph of text in short-term memmory?

I can imagine it would be more difficult, although would presumably improve with practice.

I already would find it taxing to write a well structured and complex answer like the original comment. I would need to go back and forth, edit, change the order of sentences and the like.

And I am perfectly capable of doing this with my eyes.

But: I would never assume anything about the experience, challenges and abilities of the OP. I was fascinated by the depth of the recommendations and was reminded that I very much need to work on making my sites more accessible.

But I would personally probably refrain from asking if they couldn't just keep a paragraph of text in memory. But that is just me.

Close your eyes and try to produce a complex sentence in your head. It's not that hard, it's easy to imagine being able to do it with a little practice. Especially if you have a screen reader, or play it back with text-to-speech. I'm sure the poster is clever and impressive in lots of ways, but a blind person writing well does not surprise me.

A sibling comment mentioned this comment being weird. It strikes me as "weird" too. That doesn't mean it is not relatable. But if you are also struck by what is weird about this comment, you might enjoy taking a look at: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/inspiration-porn-c08b419... (which links to Stella Young's TEDx presentation).

I worked with a totally blind developer at a top tier tech company. He used a braille terminal. It was really interesting to watch him work.

There’s no denying blind persons face unique challenges, but I’ve been seriously impressed with the fortitude and adaptability I’ve seen them display.

As an aside I wish more developers would think about accessibility. It helps everyone. I highly recommend participating in dining in the dark or a similar program to learn real sympathy for the challenges blind persons face and to see how capable they are of overcoming them.

Braille hardware seems pretty expensive for what you get. Last time I looked most of the devices costed $800+ USD for a single row of 24 letters.

Many (most?) states offer grants to help pay for adaptive hardware. And I’m completely certain any company worth working for will spring for it too.

I’m a sighted person and I’m not going to pretend I know what the right technology for any particular blind person is, but computer braille really is fascinating.

Edit: I’m not a hardware guy, but it feels like an 80x24 or larger computer braille display is well within the capabilities of today’s hardware hackers. Imagine a reverse mechanical keyswitch with 8 dots that can be put on a PCB of arbitrary size in whatever configuration to understand what I have in mind. There’s probably not much money to be made, but someone with a passion and existing financial success could really make a difference.

The issue is that to move 80x24 dots independently you need 80*24 physical actuators (or an enormous mechanical multiplexer), which is very expensive. Industrial looms and knitting machines have that but nothing much else does. However, the technology to solve computer braille without needing width*height mechanical actuators actually exists - the fluidistor, or liquid transistor - but is only just now getting serious development, and it's mostly in haptic feedback labs.

If you want 8024 characters, you actually need at least 8024*6 dots, each Braille character, also called a cell when Braille displays are concerned, can consist of up to six dots, eight in computer Braille.

Speaking as someone who was born blind Braille may not be worth using if you went blind later in life. I was forced to use it heavily until about 10 or 11 in spite of the fact that I wanted to use text to speech since it's quicker. It was totally worth it since it gave me a basic literacy foundation that enables me to type out sentences like these and be able to spell well enough that less then 1/5 of everything I type has to be corrected with Spellcheck. I have an 18-year-old braille display I got in school when I started programming more. It still works but I only use it once a month if that. I do everything with text to speech. The only time it was really useful was when I was doing assembly programming and had to look at hex values in a debugger. If you go blind later in life it may be pretty easy to avoid learning anything but enough braille to read signs for room numbers and bathrooms and do just fine.

Wouldn't a large braille display be very useful for getting an overview of something? When consuming a big chunk of material, audio is very convenient, but being "linear" seems to make it quite impractical when you need to jump back and forth, or get an overview.

I'm particularly bad at piecing together a larger context from smaller pieces, so maybe it's easier for others, especially if they are forced to?

Large Braille displays basically don't exist, they'd be too expensive.

Navigation with a screen reader isn't just next item / previous item, though. There are hotkeys to jump between headings, links and so on. That's why good markup is so important for accessibility.

No sure, I didn't mean that navigation itself was hard, more that it's hard to know where to navigate to. If you can see, you can quickly scan a page and get some sort of understanding of what is where, but at least with audio that's very hard.

It seems that it should be possible to make cheap full screen braille displays, I suppose it's just that the volumes are not big enough to drive down prices.

In my experience, anyone with any kind of physics background thinks that Braille displays could be radically cheaper.

Anyone who spends a couple hours on researching the problem thinks that the price could be improved, maybe by half, but that the problem isn't as easy as it seems.

Anyone who tries building one eventually arrives at the conclusion that making it cheaper requires a bunch of tradeoffs which they're not willing to make.

As far as I know, the central problem off Braille Display engineering isn't making the dots, but putting them so close to each other. If the gap between dots would be half an inch, let's say, a braille display would probably be a hundred-dollar affair. It would be completely unusable for any kind of reading, though.

Orbit Research managed to find a way to make Braille displays somewhat cheaper, which is now incorporated into the Orbit Reader 20 and 40, but that technology has a much slower refresh rate than traditional Braille displays and causes them to be much louder.

I've tried using a screen reader and the best way I can describe it is that it is like using a computer through a telephone menu. You hear things described to you at a pretty quick pace and you need to mentally build a model of what you are doing. I would routinely lose mental focus of where I "was" and would be completely lost.

I'm sure this isn't as difficult for people who use these tools day-in and day-out. But it was an eye opening experience for sure.

One of my computer science professors was old enough to remember his undergraduate on punchcards, running stacks on shared mainframes at night.

In his words, "You got really good at checking your code, because if you made a mistake, you had to wait until the next evening for another time slot."

It stuck with me because it boggled my (privileged) mind how adaptable people and their brains are to just about any scenario you can dream up.

Even just thinking of how much sighted developers benefit from adding a second or third display to our setup— what is the benefit of added desktop area? Additional context, of course, being able to have lots of things on the go at once! And then you unplug from your dock and all those windows you had spread out are now crushed together on the single laptop screen.

It boggles my mind imagining the discipline that would be required to maintain all this state purely in one's mind.

The juxtaposition of phrases like "eye opening experience" to this subject matter make me realize how many sighted metaphors we use as a matter of course. I don't know whether or not that matters, but they certainly jump out at you in this context (another metaphor...)

Metaphors are not just prevalent in how we speak, they are central to how we think.

The book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By is a seminal work on this.

Almost every sentence you can produce will contain some kind of metaphor, or metaphorical use of an originally concrete word. And since vision is one of the most salient senses for almost everyone, it's not surprising.

As an aside, while I can’t speak for the community as a whole, all of the blind persons that I’m personally acquainted with don’t mind visual metaphors so in my case at least I don’t worry that I’m giving offense. I agree it is striking though how easily we use visual metaphors.

> I can't imagine a blind dev working exclusively on the front end

That’s unfortunate! Clearly blind people are the most qualified to work on one specific frontend job: accessibility.

The fact that it’s extremely hard to automate accessibility testing in a meaningful way would make it a full time job at most places that take accessibility seriously.

Yes and no. Screen reader testing is extremely important and that's something blind people do well. However, if there's a link on a website that the screen reader cannot see, a blind person won't report that as an accessibility issue because they won't even know it's there. Other things, such as testing with Zoom or high contrast mode, also require sight.

If your test is broken if the test script leaves out the button.

Sighted developers and QEs will miss testing elements if they aren't aware they should be there.

Most tooling and test sites are in practice at least slightly broken.

I'm talking about a level playing field between sighted and blind QA, they are both subject to missing problems if the test is poorly designed. The fact that "most" tests are broken is related but tangential to my observation.

> if there's a link on a website that the screen reader cannot see, a blind person won't report that as an accessibility issue because they won't even know it's there.

This is highly variable. As a screen reader user who works in accessibility with a software engineering focus, I don't consider a test to be complete if I've only evaluated what the page exposes to the accessibility API. Assessing the rendered DOM by hand, testing on different viewports where controls may be slightly or completely different, etc., are just as critical to the testing process as trying to simply use the page. But, I recognise that there are many accessibility testers out there without such a technical focus, and it is true to say that they may gloss over something if it is completely missing in the accessibility tree.

How do you deal with computer troubles? If your OS fails to boot, are you basically stuck getting help?

On the PC, yes, essentially yes. Using a mobile app to OCR what is on the screen (via the phone camera) sometimes helps. There are also some apps[1][2] where sighted people can connect to us via video call and help us with whatever we need at the moment.

On the Mac, this is not an issue. The whole recovery environment is 100% accessible, at least on M1. I think it was more problematic on Intel, but you could still figure it out.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm curious how changes in graphical user interfaces of programs and operating systems over the years have impacted your workflows. Do you develop on Windows or the command line?

I'm a Mac user these days, before that, it was Windows with WSL, Notepad++, Windows Explorer and remote VS Code for bigger projects. I use the command line a lot, but some things are best done with a GUI. I'm not a fan of command line editors, for example, as screen readers don't always deal well with TUIs. They can be used, but they bring their own set of headaches which I just don't want to deal with.

Updates definitely affect your workflow, you need to be careful about what updates you install. This is less of a problem with coding-related tools, but definitely a nightmare when mobile apps are concerned, for example. Web apps are even worse, as you can't avoid updates that completely break accessibility. I've heard stories of people getting in big trouble because a web app that was critical for their job suddenly had a UI overhaul and stopped being accessible. OS updates can cause trouble, in fact, Windows constantly breaking things with their forced updates was one of the major reasons why I switched to Mac OS. It wasn't even accessibility-related, most of it was basic stuff like sound.

Which OSes and devices have the best accessibility in your experience?

This is not an easy question to answer.

iOS and Mac OS definitely win in terms of what's built-in, the screen reader they come with is more than enough.

JAWS, a paid screen reader for Windows, is perfect for enterprise environments, as it works well with Microsoft Office and Common productivity applications and lets IT administrators enforce security policies. At also has a vibrant market for scripts, both free and paid. Those scripts add accessibility to third-party apps. Companies can even hire script developers to implement accessibility for the internal apps employees need, which is often important in big corp / government, and it is in those environments where JAWS thrives.

NVDA, the free Windows screen reader, is more suited to software development work than JAWS in my opinion. It's written in Python, which makes it much more flexible, but also much harder to learn script development. There's a big collection of addons and plugins of all kinds, from speech synthesizers and braille display drivers to full on remote access suites (which no enterprise security policy can block), but all of those addons need to be released as GPL, which discourages any development on addons for internal and professional applications. In many countries, NVDA has replaced JAWS entirely, even in the enterprise.

Narrator, the built-in Windows screen reader, is getting better with each year, but it still isn't on par with other solutions that we have. It's great for installing another screen reader or figuring out why your existing one doesn't work, but that's about it.

Linux is a shitshow, free software zealots will claim it's perfectly accessible, while many problems still remain. It can be used, but it's probably the least accessible out of the big three, at least when the GUI is concerned.

Android works, people use it, but iOS works much better. IPhones are much more popular in the blind community, even in countries where they're extremely expensive, even considering the fact that blind people are often unemployed or have low-wage jobs. Android has quite a few rough edges and thinks might not work the same way on different phones. It's been getting better over the years, but even something as simple as accessibility on first setup isn't guaranteed, something that Apple has basically figured out more than 10 years ago. It's much more common for an Android phone or a Windows PC to fail in a way that requires sighted assistance than it is for a device running iOS or Mac OS.

Because you mention it a couple times, do enterprise security policies negatively interact with accessibility in an enterprise environment?

My experience with corporate IT has been that they're not great at, or under resourced for, any outside-the-box situation.

But since accessibility software is a legal requirement, at least in the US, I'm curious if that breaks the tendency to inaction.

IIRC, accessibility hooks in Windows are very, very low level. Thus they bypass most security policies. Also IIRC, there’s been multiple “wontfix” “0-days” abusing those hooks and fixing them would basically brick Windows for people using accessibility tools.

It depends. Where I live, this usually doesn't seem to be an issue for some reason. I guess IT administrators don't really know how powerful a screen reader is. Just to give you an idea, it would be trivial for anyone with basic Python experience to weaponize NVDA into a key logger and a screen scraping spyware, without admin rights, and no antivirus would complain.

In the US, this seems to be much more of a concern, so JAWS is often a requirement in big corp / government.

Do you have experience with Google docs? I’ve heard that it is more accessible than Dropbox Paper and am interested to know if that’s been your experience.

We have a heavy documentation culture at Stripe so as a developer these tools matter a lot.

No idea about Dropbox paper, but those tools are hard to make accessible, so I wouldn't be hopeful.

Google Docs works, there are two accessibility modes, none of which is enabled by default. The old, standard mode hides all content from screen readers and uses a built-in micro screen-reader that outputs whatever is needed to a live region, which your screen reader then reads. The newer one, called braille mode, actually shows you the content, only relying on ARIA when absolutely necessary. Both have their pros and cons, but I'd recommend using Braille Mode for most things, unless you run into use cases that the legacy mode handles better.

I've heard people say that some really advanced docs features have accessibility issues, but I haven't used it that extensively to confirm that.

As always, Etherpad, the open source / non-proprietary / privacy-friendly alternative boasts about being accessible but has so many a11y bugs that it's basically unusable. As always, markdown over git works better than any web-based solution ever could.

I have my gripes with Google, but from working there, I can definitely give them props for how much they cared about accessibility. It’s in their mission statement, and they take that seriously.

> I have my gripes with Google, but from working there, I can definitely give them props for how much they cared about accessibility.

Accessibility at Google suffers in the same way as most UX-related things suffer at Google. Namely, the fact that everything is constantly reinvented from scratch, rather than there being one unified way to do it. As a screen reader user, I can say that in some Google products, there can be instances of what, on the surface, should be exactly the same component, but was apparently developed in multiple different ways. This leads to the constant need to work out how accessible each instance is (and e.g. what keyboard support it has), even though I dealt with the same UI pattern minutes ago.

This is all fantastic! Thank you so much!!

> Dev Ops is very much a mixed bag.

Have any examples of issues while doing DevOps? For that type of work, in my own perception, I deal 100% of the time with text (be it error messages, or automation code).

One issue is the inaccessibility of graphs. I wonder if miki123211 had anything else in mind.

That is one thing. Other issues might include having to use VNC or KVM, no sound by default on Windows server, captchas in the AWS cloud console etc. If you're doing normal Linux server administration via ssh or dealing with Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes or other command line tools, you should be fine though.

Has anybody tried to use mouse to 'echo-locate' parts of the screen? Bats, with far simpler brains, can see complex scenery and prey in real time, so I'm sure a small portion of the visual cortex could figure echo location. The idea is to generate sound based on close surroundings of the cursor, in real time. To an inexperienced user, this sound would be meaningless, but witj practice that sound would let the user see.

Why would that be better than using a keyboard to navigate between discrete units on the screen? There are a set number of clickable points on the screen, why make a game for the blind user to try to echo-locate those spots instead of just letting them cycle through them? The point of a screen for a sighted user is to make a concise way to transmit existing information... it is only a good way if you are sighted.

Well, how do you screen-read a geometric shape?

how do you echolocate a shape? It seems you are suggesting some mapping of a 2D visual scene to audio. If that is useful in practice, it is one of many possible interfaces that blind people could use. It wouldn't supplant screen readers.

Third hand report, but apparently academics have tried to simulate what an echo locating person would hear from a 3d world, but not yet managed to convey the experience to a blind person over audio. IE there is some effect that they haven't captured yet

So Doom for echo locators not yet possible.

Seems like to even be possible you'd have to have a really good model of each users ear to figure out how to use headphones to recreate the effects that has on how sound is localized.

That part is old news, it's called Head Related Transfer Functions and even using a general HRTF works quite well. I presume you've tried Spatial Audio with airpods, or some similar system?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function.

I've heard of HRTF but dig the name out of my memory to mention it. I'm not sure those are good enough for faking ecolocation though. Don't have an iPhone or EarPods to try spatial audio.

You can locate sounds within 20-30° or so, which is pretty good for navigation at least.

Maybe for slow narrative games but a game with any action like The Last of Us it sounds unusably imprecise and slow, and TLoU is a fairly slow game if you're playing it stealthily.

I’m mostly thinking about real life navigation, when I worked on this the idea was to help blind people get around. But I’m sure lots of interesting games could be made using the technology.

There have definitely been attempts for mapping the real world, but the ones I've seen have been quite primitive. I started my own project around this, but I never had the time to finish anything useful.

Do you play computer games? What are some good blind accessible ones?

I would get very heavily into Inform / Interactive Fiction / Old School Text Adventures, for sure

Go to audio games.net. That's a whole website dedicated to accessible gaming.

From the more mainstream ones, The Last of Us 2 has famously implemented accessibility. I haven't played it, as it's one of the only games for the PS4 that is accessible, but people are saying that it almost plays itself when accessibility is enabled, taking away part of the enjoyment.

Other mainstream games are getting accessibility mods, Hearthstone has a really great one. Audio Quake, an accessibility mod for Quake, was also quite popular back in its day.

Text based games, from Infocom's interactive fiction to MUDS and MOOs are also pretty accessible, a significant portion of people still playing them are blind.

Can confirm! I run a company that has five MUDs, and we have quite a few blind players as well as at least a couple of blind employees. I'm not visually-impaired, but I like knowing that our players who are are "seeing" the same game world in their heads as fully sighted players, or at least seeing the world from an equal perspective.

> but people are saying that it almost plays itself when accessibility is enabled, taking away part of the enjoyment.

I don't envy anyone trying to solve this problem, seems next to impossible to do a live action game above a certain level of accessibility. Just the time you have to communicate what's on the screen (much less being able to quickly communicate what's on screen) is so tight on a shooter for example. Found a neat video [0] of TLoU2's accessibility features.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHN5v3NJ9ko

> Just the time you have to communicate what's on the screen (much less being able to quickly communicate what's on screen) is so tight on a shooter for example.

There's an episode of Person of Interest that provides at least a possibility here: "Let's try an ascending tone cue for right, descending for left.". The tone then switches to beeps when on target.

Feels odd sharing a youtube link in the context of this post, but if anyone wants to see/hear the scene I'm talking about it starts at 1:21 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70

(Just for a bit of context the character doing this isn't blind, but these cues are helping her shoot people through walls. The episode is the second season finale, titled "God Mode".)

At a certain point it sort of feels like you're creating a different, parallel game that hangs off of the "main" one. It's definitely worth trying, but I wonder when it makes sense to identify those elements that would make an action adventure/shooting game playable by a blind person and then use just those elements to make a new game that is natively playable by blind and sighted people alike.

I wouldn't presume to speak for others with a different experience from myself (and it does seem [1] like some blind users really like what TLOU2 had to offer), but as a fully-abled gamer with limited time, even I sometimes choose to watch a streamer or even a YouTube summary in cases where I'm interested in the story or whatever but don't feel up for playing a thing myself. I wonder how this option stacks up against what TLOU2 was able to deliver.

[1]: https://caniplaythat.com/2020/06/18/the-last-of-us-2-review-...

Card games like Hearthstone seem like they'd be great options, but the turn time limits sure would be challenging! It can be hard enough to keep up at times when you can take in game state at a glance and take actions in an instant with with mouse.

The roguelike genre (on its purist form, text interface with turn-based action) seems would be appropriate for blind people. Roguelike Radio did an episode about that:

http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2012/10/episode-48-designing-f...

When you say that small tools are lacking. I assume this is more than a simple lack of hotkeys, perhaps you can elaborate a bit?

It's usually unlabeled buttons, unlabelled icons, divs that change color on click instead of actual honest to god native HTML checkboxes, inaccessible drag-and-drop, no heading structure which makes navigation harder, weird date pickers that screen readers cannot handle and so on.

Amazing reply.

Is there a community for blind developers? I could see that being a helpful resource.

How do you deal with HN itself? The site is remarkably inaccessible.

HN's accessibility issues can be worked around. The only big one that's actually pretty annoying is the lack of hierarchy, it's hard to figure out who is replying to whom.

Do you have an example of a website with a comment hierarchy that works well for you? I'm pondering writing an alternative frontend for HN with accessibility in mind--I don't have experience with that, and am not affiliated with HN, but am willing to see if I could make this work.

Would you also appreciate an easier way to find replies to your own comments?

> Do you have an example of a website with a comment hierarchy that works well for you?

I'm not the original commenter, but I am a screen reader user who works in accessibility.

Unfortunately, I don't have too many good examples; the problem of hierarchical commenting systems being difficult to navigate is common across the web. There is a Reddit client for iOS, Dystopia[1], that does this extremely well for users of the built-in screen reader, VoiceOver[2], by allowing entire threads/subthreads to be collapsed and/or skipped over. On the web, you'd want to look into using hierarchical headings, nested lists and the like, to allow the structure to be conveyed semantically. HN is inexcusably bad at this, as there isn't a single heading anywhere on the site.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/ [2] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/turn-on-and-practice-...

Not a website, but Dystopia for Reddit, an iOS client, does this well. It just announces the level of each comment, where direct replies to a post are l1, replies to those are l2 and so on. This is probably the easiest way.

Is multiple monitors a thing for blind people? I’m wondering if there’s a difference between switching between windows and switching between monitors.

My one blind techie friend doesn't use a monitor at all. Why would he?

Is multiple screen readers a thing?

Define what you mean. As it stands the question is unanwerably vague.

Yes, there are multiple screen readers.

Screen readers do not need or particularly use a monitor; monitors are for sighted people.

Screen readers read what is displayed at and following their cursor. This means screenreader users need to learn to control a system with 2 cursors: one for entering text, and a different one for reading it.

People asking about multiple screens for blind users are basically asking which colour of monitor bezel blind people prefer. This is not a question. It's irrelevant.

Some OSes will not boot or will not display a GUI unless they detect a monitor, although there are HDMI dummies that can fix that. So, some blind users may have an old monitor connected, just so their OS will boot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com