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I worked at a company making devices for blind and visually impaired users - screen magnifiers and OCR devices that scan whatever you put there and read it out to you. There are some very low hanging fruits in that domain. It was a very small family company, we had like 20 people total and just 2 developers, and none of us was blind, so we made some UI decisions that were very stupid in hindsight. Fortunately the company also has a distribution network for blind/visually impaired people stuff and we got feedback pretty quickly.

But I think that's one place where a blind developer would be more productive than average.

What I found surprising is the realization that computer hardware gets less accessible for blind people over time - touch screens are much worse than knobs and buttons, and graphical interfaces are much worse than text interfaces.

Web clients could help, but they also evolved from simple semantic DOM + some styling to dynamic js+virtual dom hybrid and "div-34gs34grtt" says nothing to the blind user.

The div-34gs34grtt isn't supposed to be read literally. The name isn't even exposed unless you're poking at the console or something.

All of the visual and hierarchical information abstracted away for visual users in a website that conveys information.

Abstracted visual semantic clues:

  * the type of data in said div

  * the indentation

  * the typography

  * the animations

the layout on the page

  * the interactivity
 with touch and mouse and keyboard events

These clues arw completely lost to blind users. Semantic attributes can help build up that hierarchical information for non-visual users. And yes, the name of a division is semantic information. It serves the purpose of defining an identifier for a section of a document, much like the title of the list above.

Unfortunately true. My biggest gripe with cars is the move to touchscreens. I remember being able to train myself to use a normal car radio with buttons. Now, the only way for me to do that would be to use my iPhone with my screen reader, and I usually need the driver to put the car stereo into Bluetooth mode for me

> We absolutely could do a better job of helping people with various impairments make their lives work. Up to 60 percent of people have some degree of impairment but only about 15 or 20 percent self-identify as disabled. The people who are less impaired and are able to make their lives work without much accommodation tend to hide it or at least downplay it and don't call it a disability.

Doesn't the article, ie. the bit you quoted, suggest that this is good for them? How would identifying as disabled improve their life?

I'm not suggesting they should identify as disabled. I'm suggesting that there is no clear, bright line between able-bodied and disabled, some degree of impairment is actually the norm rather than the exception and life could be better for a lot of people if this were more widely understood and accommodated for.

>self-identify as disabled

and herein lies the problem. to get any kind of support (money, housing, respect) it's ultimately a doctor that decides whether you are disabled or not

Depends heavily on your jurisdiction. In the UK if one has any condition lasting longer than 12 months which would affect the ability to do day to day tasks this would count as a disability automatically. The "test" here is applied without accommodations, so if one needs a cane to walk that would count too.

There's a lot of people in the UK who fall very clearly on the "disabled" side of that equation in the UK who would not self identify as disabled.