How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps
iinteractive.com
iinteractive.com
seems to be the only bit of text that actually details anything that was done. I would liked to have read about the actual changes and steps taken to improve accessibility instead of some kind of low key rant about MS
Screen readers almost entirely ignore the visual layer of any UI, and are entirely dependent on the layer that most developers ignore because it's not the visual layer. It's a perfect storm.
It stands to reason that someone who's actually used to using a screen reader should be brought in to verify what you've built actually works well for that target audience.
I'm a fully blind accessibility auditor, remediator and trainer myself, but I wouldn't dare to assume to know how a mobility-impaired user using eyegaze tech fares on a website I've audited.
My eyes don't gaze, so I don't have the context to make those calls.
On that note: I'm looking for work, anyone need me to tell them how their UI is bad for accessibility and fix it for them so they don't get sued later? :P
It honestly is not worth it. Huge costs, and you sell...maybe an additional license or two. So no one does it.
However, there are many companies with products/services that are just as much for the blind as the sighted (government, insurance, legal, medical, etc.) and many of them don't even make an attempt. The blind are still people and they should have equal access.
There's a large benefit for society when society is more accommodating. It's easier to notice the accommodations for limited mobility; but if you have a new limit to your mobility, you'll notice everywhere they aren't. Accommodations for limited vision are often less noticable if you don't have experience with limited vision, but many of them are not very expensive if done at the right time in the project.
If you decide on a GUI framework which doesn't communicate semantics to the underlying APIs properly, you have no good options. Either you rewrite your entire project in a different framework just to deliver one feature, dive deep into framework guts to fix the issue (which may be written in an entirely different language and outside your area of expertise), or do some ugly hack on top to sort-of make it work.
A lot of accessibility issues, especially historically, essentially boiled down to "developer chose the wrong approach and didn't know how to get themselves out of the situation later."
It's better now because we went from desktop frameworks drawing their own pixels on screen to web frameworks creating div soup, and div soup is much easier to fix than having pixels instead of native OS controls, but it still happens occasionally. The most recent one I personally ran into was WindScribe, who made a desktop GUI framework of their own for no good reason, and now they can't fix accessibility without a whole lot of work.
I had this exact issue with the Elgato StreamDeck user interface, which renders the macro buttons as one big canvas only drag-and-drop interacts with.
It's rare that I outright cannot figure out a way to make a UI accessible, but that one managed to break everything I tossed at it. I eventually switched my effforts to an open-source third party client which had a web UI, which is now accessible to screen reader users.
As for repairing HTML, my last few engagements have clearly shown me that while HTML CAN be repaired, many devs these days wouldn't know where to even begin to do that. The amount of hand-holding I've had to do has made me suggest, several times, to just give me git access as it'd be faster if I just fix it myself.
If you know you're going to add accessibility, which ... we have had WCAG since 2005, not knowing that at this point is negligence imho, just make sure you work with frameworks and libraries that won't require overhauling all the things when the PO or management finally get sued into letting devs actually implement it properly. If that kind of functionality takes a backseat to "stunning" and "beaituful" designs that a bunch of people can't use, we take the user out of user interface.
Interesting that the language of sight is so prevalent that it appears in this very title twice.
Echoing other comments, this would be a stronger article if it went into more specifics, but the AI voice precludes that meaningfully.
Well, it appears once in "invisible", and once in "blind"... but I don't see why "blind" is a surprise when talking about someone blind.
There is no reference to sight in "reveal".
This is the point I am making.
I've been at this long enough that yes I know that just getting something out the door so we can make money is important.
But this just creates another kind of technical debt that comes back to bite you.
Equally revealing is the audio quality of most CPU screen-readers (regardless of platform). Usually, not far from the crappy first attempts of 30 years ago.
But then, hey, it's a small market, right?
I speedread and can read text faster than his computer's voice -- but not by much. It is very impressive, and very hard to use.
But I am the only sighted person he's met who can use his PC. I navigate Windows mostly by keyboard, and he has no mouse. It slows me down slightly but I can still use it.
(He does have a screen on his family computer, so sighted family and friends can watch films with him. His work one has no screen.)
The inability to identify food when you take away visual clues was much much worse than expected. Even just beef vs chicken which I would have laughed at if you suggested that to me beforehand. But nope…one slightly exotic sauce on chicken and everyone was confused.
Talking about AI (sorry!), perhaps an AI assisted screen reader could remove repetitive elements (it appends "(read only)" to every. single. field.) in a smart fashion? Does this already exist?
We're seeing AI being used to improve a11y in quite a few places: (Live) transcripts for video conferences, image to text (VQA, visual question answering) etc.
But if you did want to run a full size model deepseek v4 flash is so cheap that I doubt even many hours of web browsing would have a noticeable cost.
And they do and will. Blind users are a tiny tiny part of users. But hurting usability for the disabled is bad PR. So of course they do it “accidentally”.
So a couple of days plus a few hours. Seems reasonable.
Cyclists know I can not hear them (I am wearing big noise cancelling headphones). Yet they still insist on their imaginary priority on sidewalks. I was forced to remove my noise cancelling headphones, just to hear their slurs!
Cyclists on bike have no priority, they are not allowed to cycle on sidewalks! They should be using roads! I am allowed to wear my noise cancelling headphones on sidewalk! I looked it up!
Accomodations are for people who need them not a shield for hyper-selfishness.
I cycle and I either don't wear any headphones or I use the open ones where I can still hear my surroundings. I assume every driver is eitehr an oblivious idiot or is out to kill me. I assume it's every pedestrian's first day on Earth because that's how it seems. The level of entitlement I see on a daily basis is insane. Runners who refuse to get out of dedicated bike lanes, people who park in dedicated bike lanes, people who get annoyed that I go onto the road when I'm allowed to, people that get annoyed that I go onto the sidewalk or road because I have to (often because the bike path is blocked), people who walk 5 abreast on a shared pedestrian bike path, etc etc etc.
But what really gets me is people who have elevated their own hyper-selfishness into some kind of virtue. "I'm going to block out all noise in a public space because that's what deaf people have to deal with" is a new one for me.
Oh and as an aside, people who are deaf often aren't completely deaf. Deafness (and blindness) is a spectrum.
Listening to music on a walk is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. It’s very slightly less safe for them, but they aren’t risking other people so that’s fine.
You have an affirmative responsibility to act in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risks for yourself and others.
[1]: https://naqvilaw.com/las-vegas-impaired-driving-attorney/lou...
Cyclists do stupid and dangerous things too. Believe me I am aware. I have to anticipate those too.
But, in my experience, nobody acts with more carelessness and selfishness than pedestrians. And I say that as one of them too.
There is no requirement to mitigate all potential harms caused to unexpected hostile sources by the direct actions of unexpected hostile sources.
Well yes, they are indeed entitled to what they are doing. It is you who is acting entitled here - cyclists are not entitled to having pedestrians dodge them.
Your earlier vehicle example is wholly misplaced. Divers have a legal responsibility to maintain awareness of their surroundings at all times. Pedestrians do not have that. Notice that many disabilities can legally disqualify you from driving.
You're not to blame at all when a cyclist runs you down on the pavement (that they shouldn't be on). Yes, you might have heard the bell without the headphones, but they're the one acting recklessly, and they're the one responsible for ensuring that they don't harm people acting normally.
There are all sorts of situations that it's possible to anticipate, but there's no moral fault ascribed for not acting defensively against every possible form of attack.
GP simply pointed out cyclists are apparently super unfriendly to deaf people, inferred from the experience where GP made himself temporarily deaf.
It doesn't matter whether GP takes responsibility or not. The issue is the social phenomenon where cyclists create danger for themselves and deaf pedestrians.
> I cycle
I know it's bad to stereotype people but you're not helping it.
Only motorbikes is tough because people dont like them going past them in traffic jams :/ the last bastion of decency in our traffic xD... (lets forget about people who own racing bikes they dont count)
People act as people do regardless of their method of conveyance. A polite way of encountering a group walking where they should (and another should not ride) is to dismount the bicycle, say "excuse me" and walk through, then to remount and continue on the bike. In the case you mentioned, calling out in advance "excuse me, coming through" should just do it. If not, step up to bell ringing.
You should see what cyclists from Austin do on the Texas backroads, with their stopping in the middle of the lane at the top of a hill, doing the same on a tight curve, riding abreast... But again, people are people; they don't seem to realize road signs have a setback for a very good reason.
(Not all cyclists do this. But the rude ones are common enough that "cyclists" have gotten this reputation.)
There are people on bikes that ride like an asshole. There are people on cars that drive like an asshole. Both cause (different levels of) risk for pedestrians. There's only so much we can do about assholes, social ostracism works only so far and social change is much harder to accomplish than modifying our built environment to reduce or eliminate conflict points.
As an aside, I've noticed people get startled when I'm on my bike stopped but balancing on my bike while I wait for then to cross. I think some people intuitively model bikes on the same category as cars, so being anywhere close causes them to react as if a car hard crept close.
In my experience as a pedestrian, bikes are worse than cars. Less predictable, less observant of laws, and more willing to take risks that depend on others jumping out of their way.
On the plus side, they don’t weigh 3000lbs.
Bicycles belong on the streets. (I bike to work most days, I take the streets)
FWIW, I live in Seattle, a famously bike-friendly city. Stop signs, red lights, pedestrians and even one-way street signs don’t seem to exist in the visual field of many cyclists here.
Obviously there are reasonable law-abiding bicyclists out there. Certainly all the cyclists online say they obey all the laws. But apparently I’m seeing an entirely different group of people in the real world, zooming around lawlessly.
Motorists exceed the speed limit, roll through stop signs, and are looking at their phones while driving.
Cyclists blow through stop signs, and take advantage of shortcuts.
Pedestrians "jaywalk." There's not much else they can do.
No. It signals cyclists not giving a fuck about the law. In at least some EU countries, it is illegal to cycle on sidewalks, except with children.
Realistically though I think it leads to the same state of play as everywhere else where pedestrians don't much fancy being hit by a faster moving and taller (if not larger) object so dodge out of the way even if they aren't necessarily obligated to.
On the one hand, not everyone wants to be required to have their 4yo ride on the road with no bike lane, but on the other hand, I hate having preteens on extra.heavy looking bikes below out of the way at me why they drive at nearly car speeds on the sidewalk.
Of course we wouldn't really have to ban bikes on sidewalks to deal with those preteens as preteens aren't allowed on electric bikes or electric scooters anyway in this state. And electric scooters aren't allowed on the sidewalk or road here.
It is legal in some places, illegal in as many others, and has caveats almost everywhere (children are almost always allowed, in other places it is based on speed, etc.).
My town is one of the few places where cyclists are allowed on the sidewalks, but I don't do it except for very good reasons such as along dangerous roads. Those places also tend to have no pedestrians. And I give wide berth to people on foot, typically slowing down to walking pace or even getting off my bike and walking.
Also, the bell is for "announcing" not "enforcing." It's gentler than startling someone as you pass them, or making their dog freak out. And it doesn't preclude slowing down.
Read an "accessibility" spec or a requirement or a UX "good practice" is not a substitute for see how people use it!
One of my anecdotes from back in the day: The secretary of a school that use the app I help develop call about problems reading data, that comes in CD. We can't do much by phone so I travel to the town to try to debug on site (bring dev tools in the day where that means diskettes and cds, we were transitioning from FoxPro 2.6 DOS to Visual Fox Windows 95).
Eventually after some time the secretary put the coffee cup in the CD tray.
Go figure!