How people with disabilities use the web | Hacker News Reader

How people with disabilities use the web

w3.org

124 pointsfagnerbrack36 comments

One story of incaccessibility:

An online bank does video verification. Being deaf, I couldn't complete the verification because I didn't understand the instructions. I asked someone for help, but the bank said, I need to do the verification alone.

What went wrong: The application didn't offer the possibility to send written instructions. The fallback of having support by someone else was declined. I offered to call a professional interpreter but that was declined, too.

i hope you sued them.

I think accessibility should be the basic of all website and search engines should promote SEO based on and ON TOP OF accessibility.

Currently, if anything, it's more like websites first and foremost try to be "semantic web", that matters to no one other than Google. Accessibility comes as separate mark-up enhancements, an after thought.

The web should be for humans before it conforms to some standard that only benefits some big corp.

I agree and everyone making or owning a website asked publicly will probably agree too. But it helps to have a resource like this clarifying what we agree on and upcoming laws like the https://bfsg-gesetz.de that enable any visitor to sue indifferent businesses will help to educate web developers and push them to create sites that can be used by all other fellow humans. (i am german hence the long sentence)

In this topic, there is a wonderful summary of concrete examples of dos and don'ts:

https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-o...

Is anyone else surprised by the physically-disabled people in their user stories using a regular MacBook keyboard as their primary input device? Ok, the man with quadriplegia also uses a joystick. It amazes me how inaccessible better hardware is.

The woman who is deaf blind uses a refreshable braille keyboard. I looked up the cost and it's ~$3000USD. Even if some nonprofit organization pays for this, you still need parents and caregivers that know to take advantage of this.

I have no hardware experience, but I think I may take on the task of making life easier for some people with disabilities.

Quick ideas that popped to mind while watching the user stories: 1. Using AI to transcribe videos for people to have a standalone captions source other than their video player. 2. Several of the users use the tab key to fill out forms. Hell, Google search is nigh-impossible to use as keyboard only; Good luck with smaller sites. Some sort of open source project for handling tabbing logically would be awesome. Maybe a chrome extension that lets devs interface with it a la sponsorblock. 3. I'm fascinated by refreshable braille now. It's expensive because the technology seems pretty niche. I'm very uneducated on this topic but it feels like a cruder technology would also work, at the cost of size or throughput. There also don't seem to be any phones/portables with this capability.

I'd love to get into something like this, but don't know how. If you are in this sort of space, I'd love to talk.

> 3. I'm fascinated by refreshable braille now. It's expensive because the technology seems pretty niche. I'm very uneducated on this topic but it feels like a cruder technology would also work, at the cost of size or throughput. There also don't seem to be any phones/portables with this capability.

This [1] was posted a few months ago and was an interesting read.

https://jacquesmattheij.com/refreshablebraille/BrailleDispla...

Wow, thanks for this link. This is so in depth, I'm definitely going to read it later more than my quick skim. Looks like a good idea to use rotating wheels, too

- see hable one. A few FOSS variants have been tried but failed - look up “switch boxes” - look up “eyegaze” hardware

Truth is hardware is actually hard to get absolutely right. Software - now there’s tons of space on this. The problem is identifying the big pinch points. If anyone there wants to help us look at these priorities

- ows. An open wireless switch box https://github.com/AceCentre/OWS/tree/main (largely hardware) - echo. SwiftUI app. Aiming to provide speech to blind and physically impaired and with no voice. https://github.com/AceCentre/Echo - facecommander. A fork of googles gameface that was appallingly bug ridden. Use your face gestures to act as keyboard inputs https://github.com/AceCentre/FaceCommander - dasher. This needs a lot of c++ https://github.com/dasher-project/dasher-MIT/ its the fastest text entry system for head mouse , eyegaze users etc but woefully old

See also openassistive.org makers making change, openaac for other communities

$3000 is a not so great one as well. They can go up to $16k for some 80 cell models. 20 cell ones have gotten pretty cheap, though. (Relatively speaking.) Being blind is expensive.

HN really needs to turn off that regex that removes the word “how” from the beginning of article titles.

Strongly advocate for this!

Another word that automatically got removed from the title is why and this happened to me a lot. The system should, at least, notify you that the title has been edited. Fortunately, you can re-edit the title and bring back what was removed.

Somewhat ironically one of the best examples of absurdly awful UI/UX because someone decided they know best.

Far from the worst accessibility thing just on HN.

I will now beat the “grey in slightly darker grey” is not an acceptable color scheme drum again.

You know perfectly well Hacker news is the apex of efficiency and minimalism, and that "good hackers" don't care about trivial nonsense like "accessibility" or "readability" or "user experience," only the purity of signal over noise.

Now go to the blackboard and reverse binary trees until you've learned your lesson.

Considering the site uses a bunch of CSS classes that end up always using the same visual style (e.g. black text), i'd say that "good hackers" can use Stylus or some other similar addon and customize the site's look.

You can do a lot of customization with it, while overall my HN looks 90% the same as the default style (since i don't dislike it), i have done some customizations like making every other comment have a slightly darker background (to easily distinguish them when scrolling) and added some color to distinguish different parts of each post.

You don't even need to be a "good hacker". Just go into browser settings, set your preferred colors, and set it to disallow sites from setting their own colors (mobile browsers seem to have removed this functionality for some reason, but desktop ones still have it).

If you happen to have a CSS manager such as Stylus installed:

<https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd>

(That's what I'm driving now.)

Just closing the page would be the usual approach. As no one uses such poor contrast it does reflect poorly on yc. If someone forces a tiny font on me (i cant read it) I try zoom like the way you read pdf on mobile but it dramatically/needlessly raises the bar for how interesting the text needs to be.

I agree with most of that.

I find HN ... mostly ... more worthwhile than not. The styling / UI/UX is abysmal.

That said, if you've the option to install a CSS style manager on your platform(s) of choice (Firefox desktop or Android, Chrome and Safari desktop), you have agency to change the situation and I've provided the styling to fix most of your major gripes (which are also mine).

And that said, I've said that which I care to.

Idk, "people with disabilities use the web" still matches up with the content of the article to me

The "how" is the thing that adds interest in this case. We are hopefully all cognizant of the fact that disabled people exist and (need to) use the web.

We might be aware, but companies don't seem to care, so it's still a fitting title.

Given my experience, I don't think we all are. I've basically resigned myself to not being paid for accessibility work. Nowadays I refuse to work in toolchains that don't easily support accessibility (i.e. if Kivy is the frontend) because that tells me a) accessibility wasn't considered in tool choice, and b) I'm going to have to do a lot more unpaid work to follow my own conscience.

For HNers who don’t already know this, you can edit immediately after submission to fix meaning-changing auto-edits.

And as I've suggested previously to dang: ALERTING SUBMITTERS THAT CHANGES HAVE BEEN APPLIED, and requesting confirmation, would be A VERY GOOD THING.

"Yes, they do," was my first thought upon seeing the article title.

I mean, possibly, but I feel like a lot of HN needs to hear the message that people with disabilities use the web. :)

@dang Can we fix this title so we might get some topical discussion on it going?

"@dang" is a no-op: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526450>

Well I don't have any other way of trying to get his attention :)

That's not what the link provided advises.

Fair enough. Keeping in line with this thread, I didn't click the link and just reacted to the 'title' ;)

Email requests to the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. I've done so in this case.

Re: downstream comments, "@dang" is a no-op:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526450>

I think it does more good than harm. The trouble is that the good cases pass without notice whereas the bad cases attract attention. By that standard, literally any feature is a bad thing.

>The trouble is that the good cases pass without notice whereas the bad cases attract attention.

No, the trouble is the bad cases attract attention.

>By that standard, literally any feature is a bad thing.

That's specious reasoning, because that isn't the standard. The standard is signal over noise.

The script cut one word out of the title, which changed the context of the title enough that it spawned confusion and what is now the biggest subthread here. The bulk of conversation under TPA is about this issue, not the subject at hand.

When it works correctly, does it add to the quality of conversation more so than its failures detract? I don't think so. When it works it doesn't matter, and when it fails everything goes off the rails.

If you have to have this feature, just add a confirmation step. And maybe at least check that the canonical URL is different than the posted URL and confirm that, too. Yes it means added complexity, but so did the features themselves. Minimalism doesn't mean you have to cut your nose off to spite your face.

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