Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week
blog.silktide.com
blog.silktide.com
I literally waited a whole week and thats waaaay to long and saw the curtain close (literally, that's what it looks like: a curtain closing). Finally (and only thanks to my experience with inplant-contactlenses that made the doctor confident I would be able to hold still like a statue when they insert 3 or 4 metal tubes in your freaking eye with only local anesthetics). My eye was fully drained and I was operated at midnight. The nice thing about local anestetics is you'll get to see everything.
After 4 weeks I was able to see again. Another 4 weeks and my brain had made the new 'connections' linking my left and right eye. When I started seeing little black spots with my other eye (half a year later) I took immediate action and dropped everything. The doctors were able to use a laser to burn/isolate the distortion and prefented my retina from ripping up.
TLDR: DO - NOT - WAIT. Drop everything when you see black spots that remain constant. Regular doctors can't help you, even specialists have difficulty finding the little holes in your eye.
Both of my father's retina detached and the only reason he can see today is because he got to the specialist in time for them to fix it. A matter of days can make the difference of vision for the rest of your life. Persistent black spots that "float" around your field of vision need to get checked out ASAP.
I think it's like many symptoms; the first time you should certainly seek a medical check ASAP to ensure it's not a symptom of a more serious underlying cause; but it should be cause for serious worry. I don't think you can walk around with retinal detachment for a year.
I've also heard of visual snow, which seems to be related to migraines.
TLDR; they're pretty common (I've had them for years), but you should go get them checked out if you see a rapid increase in the number of them.
I think the same thing happened to the author Oliver Sacks, who wrote about it. He noticed it right before Christmas and lost some sight because no doctors were available during the holidays IIRC.
Tinnitus is frequently a result of hearing loss, I couldn't tell you if it is ever a precursor.
I have moderate tinnitus in my left ear and also some hearing loss. Tinnitus can be pretty obnoxious, it's one of those weird things that if you concentrate on it, it gets worse.
I'm hopeful for some sort of procedure or drug to someday alleviate it, but for now I just live with it.
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“No, just spots.”
How does one program without sight? I have done something similar to OP on my latest project (I tried to use my product blindfolded + screenreader), and I found that it was a terrible experience. My site was absolute shite. It was only through my own familiarity with it that I was able to navigate it.
I would imagine trying to develop sightless itself would be a feat, so my question is: how? were you sighted before you lost your vision? Tactile feedback from the keyboard or voice commands?
For example, I was thinking I would have an easier time hearing Python vs hearing Clojure. I think that even if it were brail, something like Clojure would be more difficult to track.
Although giving it some more thought, I suppose the indentation of python might be the more difficult thing to deal with.
The laptop being used in one of the Youtube links on the page looks to be at least 14 inches.
Does screen size affect your productivity? Do you care about resolution? Do you get the smallest screen size phones and laptops?
I was hoping it might be about somebody who was 'blind' for a week in everyday life, and the potential shifts in their subjective perception of reality this might have caused.. it's something I've wanted to do for a while – anyone know of anything like that, actually?
http://invisibleexhibition.com/
I've been there, and it's been one of the most deeply touching experiences I've ever had. Highly recommended.
It consists of a tour with several rooms modelling a variety of features of everyday life, including a boat trip. There is also a bar at the end, where you buy a drink (paying for it was rather humbling for me) and sit down around the guide for a final chat. You never get to see the guide.
You are given a walking stick but for me it was pretty useless, I was stumbling on everything and everyone the same.
They also offer dinners in the dark.
The best part of the experience for me was realising that you are in the blind person's (admittedly fake) world, some form of opposite of when the blind person is in your world when walking down the street and bumping against a car parked in the middle of the street crossing.
No, but Eddie Murphy famously pretended to be white for a while and the results were frankly shocking (got free newspapers, easier time getting loans, etc.)
Funny, but not real undercover.
There was a famous book called Black Like Me about a white guy who pretended to be black in the south in the late 50s/early 60s.
Now, a few points: First, and most importantly: your web sucks. I'm a very proficient computer user--the same gap between supertechnical and nontechnical users exists in the blind community, perhaps even magnified by other aspects such as secondary disabilities in a good chunk of the blind population. That aside, I've been doing this for around 13 years, using a variety of screen access solutions on Windows, OSX, and even the hellscape that is modern desktop Linux a11y. All of these solutions suffer from the same basic problem namely they are trying to squeeze a dynamic, multidimensional viewport into a linear text string for rapid communication. This don't work so hot, but like most things, you can adapt to it over time. So why does the web suck? First, a history lesson: Back in the halcyon days of the 1990's, when I was just getting started with this silly computer stuff, the problem that was desktop accessibility had already nearly been solved. Microsoft gave us MSAA, and several screen reader vendors implemented their own heuristics on top of it to give pretty good access to standard controls. Highlight detection worked ... reasonably-well to know when text changed on a form, screen readers would perform nasty little hacks including API hooking and other black magic to give a pretty good picture of what was going on at any one time. Then, along came the web. At first this wasn't too terrible. Several screen reader vendors made a stab at solving web accessibility, and thus the virtual buffer was born. The virtual buffer is where the story really gets interesting. You can follow along should you like -- I'm currently using the NVDA screen reader to compose this comment, and you can get it at http://nvda-project.org (for those who do, no I don't listen to that dreadful voice all day, there are alternatives.) Okay: So, you have a tree, the DOM, and you need to render it linearly, and not only that, but it needs to make some kind of sense. Enter the virtual buffer. Each screen reader gets a hold of the DOM through whatever ugly hacks, then renders your beautiful website with lovely topography into a flat, basically plaintext representation. Links get prefixed with "link", headings with "heading 3", so on and so forth. The software developers in the audience probably already see the problem coming, when I learned how this worked I was rather offended. So, for the screen reader, there are two single points of truth: the DOM, and the virtual buffer representation. As we all know, when a complex system includes information in more than one place, the two have a tendency to get out of sync. Consider what happens when you update your DOM with some javascript magic. The screen reader needs to, hopefully without making me lose my current place on the page, diff your changes against its current buffer, update its buffer, and somehow indicate to me that the content has changed, without interrupting my current task. Complex DOM manipulations aside, let's just talk about how poorly-marked-up your content is: For those of you who got NVDA, I invite you to explore around HN a little. Note the unlabeled links for voting, for instance. Is there any indication that the first edit field on a submission's page is where one enters a comment? And HN is hardly a dynamic website. How can one tell nonvisually (or visually for that matter) who replied to whom in comment threads? That's something that's puzzled me for a while, I just have to heuristically separate conversation threads.
Now, it's not all bad. Slowly, aria is being deployed to a variety of websites. Even more importantly, I've recently been looking into adding access at the UI toolkit level for some popular projects, especially Bootstrap.js (if a proficient web person would be interested in helping me with this it would be awesome, I'm primarily a desktop software guy (yes, the blind are one of the few subpopulations who haven't gone hole-hog for the web, and I'd argue a good reason for that is the web's lack of accessibility.)) Simple fixes -- adding aria-haspopup="true" to dropdown toggles, adding aria roles to various things can help, and I'm hopeful that work at the bootstrap and similar level will take the onus off of individual web developers.
I'm typically pretty difficult to offend, but I must say it's just a tad bit jarring to find the top comment thread on this submission be about how terrible it is to lose one's vision and how one should do absolutely anything to avoid it. Isn't this Hacker News? Where hackers talk about technical things? Mreh.
As for the article itself, a couple rather important things: Yes, I'm certain that it is extremely difficult to navigate the web as a newly-blinded person, and this is partially because of many of the issues that I outlined above. That said, if you people want to know how a blind person sees the web, don't ask a sighted person to wear a blindfold for a week and expect it to be at all representative of how someone who's been doing it their entire life does. Why not just ask a blind person? Just a few examples: Where as the author of the submission refers to headings as the primary navigation mechanism, modern screen reader users are quite lucky in that most screen reader developers have mapped hotkeys to nearly every type of HTML element. For instance, I hit f to navigate to the next form field on a page, shift+f to navigate to the previous. Similar keystrokes are available for all the levels of headings, for links both visited and unvisited, for landmarks, for tables, so on and so forth. The title attribute of a link is read in a few cases: 1: when the link is explicitly tabbed to, and 2: when the link does not have text. A perfect example of where the title attribute should* be used is for the HN voting links.
Anyhow, I think that's enough rambling for now. Anyone who would like to discuss this, my e-mail is in my profile.
(It's probably because the layout is not optimized for very long texts; it's hard to find the beginning of the next line when there are so many of them and the distance between them is small like this.)
I figured I'd try using a high pitched tone generator to produce different buzzes depending on where I am on the screen.
EDIT: I am aware that using non-standard hardware will not help me develop accessible web pages. That's not the point of the exercise.
Visual impairment does not necessarily equal total blindness. Accounting for text size, contrast level, etc. is a lot to consider. AA conformance level (middle level, so to speak) is very hard to achieve.
A List Apart did a pretty good article on the issues with WCAG 2.0 in 2006: "To Hell with WCAG 2" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2
It doesn't matter what you call it - nothing is going to change the reality. You might as well use the first word that was coined for it and stop. Every new word you find will eventually have the same emotional significance, since the underlying reality isn't going to change.
And calling something by how you're not going to have it is ridiculous - yes, please walk into my charred pieces of wood, while I search for my soon to be lost keys and give you a ride in the crushed metal.
Times change, words continuously change meaning. Use the words that your audience understands, not the ones that your audience understood last week or one hundred years ago.
Your original post used it as a reason not to coin a new word: >>>It doesn't matter what you call it - nothing is going to change the reality. You might as well use the first word that was coined for it and stop.
I am saying that the (ET) is precisely the reason to coin a new word. Otherwise, your audience will not understand what you are talking about.
If you speak a language your audience doesn't understand, your audience will not understand your language. This applies to all languages: french, english, perl, python, and the euphemism treadmill.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do, including speaking the languages they understand if you would like them to understand your speech.
I'll get specific with two mechanisms of failure that I've seen. Let's say that there is a euphemism treadmill that starts with the word A then proceeds alphabetically to K. A was created in 1852, and K is "the current euphemism du jour". Your favorite word is E, created in 1960 and popularized in the 70s, replaced with F in 1981.
Mechanism 1:your audience consists of people born after 1981 who are unaware that E is even on the treadmill at all, and they don't understand that E->F->G->H->I->J->K .
They have an opportunity to act in good faith and say "lmm, the word E is incredibly offensive to me. Did I misunderstand you?"
And then you could reply "Yes you misunderstood me because political correctness ruined the word E, I actually meant the current euphemism du jour which is K."
Another case is a person who is aware of the treadmill and does understand you, but decides that they are more interested in being offended than continuing the discussion. They will then decide to talk about their poor little feelings instead of whatever the discussion was actually about.
If you want to get a point across to that specific type of idiot, you need to use their language so they can't get distracted with their "feelings". Same thing goes for the rest of their irrational customs, and probably most of yours and mine as well. When in Rome.
One thing to note is that old words sometimes really are so offensive that their meanings should be either treadmilled or redefined. Homosexuality was the technical term for an illegal mental disorder that the computer hero Alan Turing(Turing machine, Turing test, WWII Enigma decoder) was chemically castrated for. Bill Hicks has a short bit about Jesus not wanting to see people wearing crosses when he comes back, I would think the same would apply to people who survived homosexual persecution:
For example, "retard" is overwhelmingly negative. Saying someone has a learning disability doesn't magically make them learn better, but it does:
A) treat them as a person. Imagine if we had a particular term for a person with cancer. They're not a person now, they're a "cancee", or whatever the term is. This is degrading, you're defining them in terms of their illness. The same is true of mental illnesses and physical disabilities.
B) affect reality by changing the social situation. Treating someone with a disability with respect and referring to them in the way they prefer doesn't fix all their problems, but it is a contribution you can make to helping them. This is really true of all people; you might not be able to fix everyone's problems, but you should still be nice to them.
I agree that the currently able label is a stretch, partially because it's about labeling yourself. If you don't want to be referred to as currently able, that's your choice, and I don't think it negatively impacts other people.
Edit: I meant to add that a good counter example for the treadmill is reclamation: see dyke marches, use of the word "nigger" in black culture. There aren't a lot of terms that have come full circle in modern culture, but there also aren't many iterations on the treadmill so far
If this was technologically achievable, it would be in screen readers already ;)
Wikipedia would not be possible without manual labor, as an example. We should not discount manual labor and the fact that humans are so versatile at dealing with ill-defined input.
Surely a "service" does not need to be a purely technological and automatic service.
I can imagine a portal, like google, that instead of storing vanilla cached pages, stores "vision impaired friendly" pages for viewing. I can further imagine that with the right tools developed, crowd sourcing could make this successful.
If one were to develop tools for slicing and cleansing or dynamically transforming pages such that these tools were friendly to blind and otherwise vision impaired users, you would have built in motivation among the crowd to participate.
Opera Mini requests web pages through Opera Software's servers, which process and compress them before sending them to the mobile phone [...]. The pre-processing increases compatibility with web pages not designed for mobile phones.[1]
On the other hand, I thought that publishing useful accessible HTML content with minimal and logical markup would benefit mobile users and screenreader users at the same time. But, instead, many people would rather have an app for their phone...
I was stunned by how fast the blind can "speed listen" in the linked video. Is this something anyone can learn?
(If you do this, you also learn to appreciate good enunciation. Stephen Colbert is completely listen-to-able at 200%. His guests, not so much.)
While tools are available to let the PDF creator tag the document in order to facilitate reading, in practice they don't seem to be used much, and even then the experience is painful at best.
Startups have a good chance to start their framework with accessibility in mind.
An MVP could ignore this aspect, because it is not the final product yet.
Edit: Thank your for pointing that out leberwurstsaft!
Anyhow, I can't agree more, "being W3C valid means jack".