Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week (2013)
blog.silktide.com
blog.silktide.com
An excellent example is NVDA[0], an open source screenreader for the Windows platform, mainly build by two blind guys. With Firefox, I think it is the best combination for browsing the web these days, even outperforming commercial screenreaders.
Oh, and if you want to know why semantics are important, grab a screenreader and read a HN discussion. The lack of nested lists and/or headings to indicate the relationship between comments makes it just a stream of comments without any structure. If proper semantics was being used, I could for example skip an entire subtree of the discussion if the starting comment didn't interest me.
I have little to add here beyond the fact that this is one of the coolest comments I've seen in a long time. :) Whilst I've long known theoretically about the use of screenreaders and such technology, I've never had the chance to see someone using it in action.
It's good to see that it works and is at least somewhat practical.
Second, one of the first web application projects that I was a part of I was assigned as the "accessibility expert". At some point during that project I was told that the reason it is termed "accessibility" is because it makes the resource (e.g., website, print page, whatever the resource) more accessible for everyone, not just for people with physical limitations. The development version of that application lived on an unmanaged, but live server for more than a decade before it disappeared; up until its disappearance the application was still functioning, and could even be used on a mobile phone. Most of the recommendations I made, all those years ago, went uncontested by my teammates, but every now and then I had to fight for some aspect and I would make the "accessibility benefits everyone" speech. The last teammember to visit our application before it disappeared admitted that it wouldn't have been able to run on the latest technology if I hadn't been so adamant about accessibility all those years ago.
At the rate we're going, most websites will never be easily navigated by blind people. How do I know? Easy ...
My eyesight isn't as great as it was when I was younger. So I like to set my "Minimum font size" in Firefox to 18 pt. (Yes I know they're not technically considered "points" any more). That single simple change fucks up a lot of the web! Just that, nothing more. And it's something that any web designer could trivially test for.
And yet they don't bother! Why? Probably because they're mostly self-centered 20-something hipster douchebags, who can't even imagine there's someone with worse eyesight than they have. Or maybe their sense of "aesthetics" trumps any consideration of "accessibility". In other words: "Fuck off if you're too old to comfortably read 10 pt type. We don't need your kind on our website".
Worse, there are a few sites, such as Bloomberg, that somehow manage to trick Firefox into not rendering their fonts at a minimum 18 pt, but instead render substantially smaller. That's right, some hipster web designer at Bloomberg went out of his way to make sure the text displayed is small. He's probably quite proud of this.
Firefox does works OK on 99% of the web in terms of font size. Unfortunately, stuff breaks in other ways. E.g. when a large minimum font is selected, text often simply disappears off to the right of a page. So then a search box is just not displayed at all, because it's off to the right of the page. Or text just disappears off the bottom of a block. Probably something to do with fixed widths, I don't know I'm not an HTML guy.
Chrome apparently has a large contingent of hipster douchebags working on it. Apparently the concept of "18 pt" is too technical for their genius IQ brains. So they just have simpler font size selections such as Small, Medium, and Large. Unfortunately not granular enough when compared to Safari or Firefox. And Chrome is also far worse than Firefox in displaying pages in tiny type, even when Font size is set to Large.
Still, lots of sites do it right. E.g. Hacker News is no problem. A very simple layout and very readable. (Now if they would only fix that expired link problem).
I repeat, I'm bitching about something that is trivial, a mere inconvenience, compared to what the blind encounter. And yet I run into many web sites and browsers that can't even get that little bit right. So what hope is there for the blind? No nope, none at all!
True, however 80% or more of the blind users I've seen are not good with there screenreading software at all. Many people don't even know how to use navigation by heading for example... sad but true.
I'm quite frankly terrified when I hear people on this and other forums go on about how the web is eating the desktop, because the web as it currently stands is a dreadfully inaccessible place.
This article has been on HN before, and I think my comment from last time might be worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023447
Like I said, not for the beginner. Then again, what else am I supposed to use? Mac has by far the best hardware and OSX is a giant piece of crap for power users.
I would try mint linux, but I'm too afraid of being stuck without support.
I've thought of making a small side company that only sells rMBPs with dual boot ubuntu at a 200 dollar markup. I'd pay that, but maybe I'm not your normal computer user.
I find if I'm tired, I need to increase the zoom to read text, so a quick mouse wheel while holding Ctrl and then a Ctrl-0 when finished and it's like it never happened
Whenever I encounter a site that doesn't render properly with large fonts, I simply turn off the minimum font size in Firefox and use the OS X Accessibility keyboard shortcuts to zoom in. This works well, but it's annoying to have to keep switching around like that. E.g. it would be nice to have faster access to the Firefox submenu that controls minimum font size.
a) the web layout software they're using doesn't work well with larger fonts. Nobody can realistically design today's websites by manually writing all the HTML, so when the tools have limitations, then the website has limitations.
or b) the designer has a lot on his plate. He needs to do ten things, and nine of them should have been finished last week. He's only got enough time to get things 95% right, not enough time to worry about every single border case.
or c) as mentioned in other comments, the designer is being rigidly constrained by management expectations of minute details of site appearance. Those constraints at default font size are incompatible with perfect rendering at larger font sizes.
I'm sorry if you were offended by my colorful choice of words. One of the nice things about Hacker News is it's generally a high-content low-noise place where people don't flame or troll.
I have had both happen to me, more often than not the client. I have had a client phone me up before saying "this doesn't look like it did before" and eventually I find out they have their font size enlarged so that boxes don't line up the same way they did before, or scroll bars are present that weren't before, but still completely usable. I explain this to them, and their answer is simply "fix it". Even though they themselves are using an increased font size to help them read, they want to force their dream aesthetic on everyone who visits their site, usability be damned.
[1] lets me forceblack on grey text, but for some reason makes 50% of web images disappear (background url= on a div?) and most sprite icons/buttons disappear.
Website accessibility for visually impaired people might be considered to be on a "spectrum". E.g. if totally blind people are a "10" in terms of problems, and perfect vision is "0", then I'm perhaps a "1". And yet things are already annoying for me. So what about those people who develop age related macular degeneration? This is not an uncommon problem for older people, e.g. it's something my own mother had.
Eventually those people will move from "1" to "2" to "3" to "4" etc. in terms of impairment. But if websites already start to break at "1", then what hope do people with real problems have?
"I once realised when watching a DVD on my Playstation 3 that you can set the speed to 1.5x. Which means you can finish watching a 2 hour movie in only 1hour 30 mins and still understand what’s going on. “That gives me 30 minutes of life back!” I said excitedly."
Or you can read the Wikipedia summary in 90 seconds and get 1 hour 58.5 minutes back but that's not really the point.
How about just don't watch the movie? There's no obligation to watch any of them and there are so many that there's always going to be something you miss however much you try and cram in.
Watching a movie is something which is meant to be a pleasure, or thought provoking, or profound or any number of things which are going to be largely lost at high speed. At that point you're just reducing it to consumption so you've seen it and maybe it's just me but what's the point of that?
A pile of DVDs became something I had to get through, ditto books, games or albums. Talking to others I found it wasn't just me - that somehow the important thing had been completing things and enjoying them had become almost secondary.
Recently I found myself listening to a podcast at 1.5x speed regularly and after a while it occurred to me that it was because I was resenting the time it was taking up and that the problem wasn't really that it was taking too long, it was that I wasn't really enjoying it but was listening out of obligation (it had popped up in the unplayed list, it must be played!). At that point I said a silent sorry to Mark and Simon and unsubscribed. I've similarly quit watching a bunch of TV shows and I'm far happier abandoning books or games part way through.
Seeing someone talking about watching a movie at 1.5x speed made me think of that - consumption over enjoyment. Yes there are movies and shows that can be watched that fast and still enjoyed but given the sheer volume of stuff out there is that really the best use of an hour and a half even? Surely there was something good enough that it warranted real time viewing?
Maybe it's not the case here but that's what came to mind.
I watch basically all youtube videos at 2x as well (with the html5 player) to the point where I'll actually shut a video off if the only thing offered is the old flash player (and ditto applies to vimeo vids).
However, I've never had enjoyed scripted tv shows at 2x speed, I'll usually dial it back to 1.5x to watch. It's not in an effort to save time, it's that I genuinely find aural mediums better when sped up.
Obviously your (and his) mileage may vary.
If you really want to know how your website "looks" to a blind person, ask one. Every state has an association for the blind. I am sure they would be happy to arrange a time to sit down with you. Expect some honest feedback.
I work 10+ hours a day with large (40"+) screens. White background was very aggressive towards my eyes and cause of many headaches. After adopting Solarized it went away.
In case someone is interested here are screenshots of my desktop and some webpages:
I use KDE and IDEA with Solarized color theme:
http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
In Chrome you can use this page to filter colors. It has white/black list so you can set colors per domain:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/change-colors/jbmk...
The top comment on Jobs personally intervening when a bluetooth stack had a bug in an iMac is pretty touching too.
[1] - http://www.wired.com/business/2011/10/steve-jobs-disability/
For example, headers are just more text. Tables and figures that "float" to the top of a page, or in any other way interrupt the text, get read in the visual, not the logical, order. Images get "read" as a stream of binary data. Equations get mangled horribly. Etc. etc.
The PdfLaTeX typesetting engine can embed some semantic information into the PDF. However, it doesn't do everything. For example, I believe it does not handle the issue with "floats" that I mentioned [1].
I don't know whether there are TeX-aware tools for "reading" a LaTeX input file out loud (which is what I think you're asking about). But if there was such a tool, it might well be easier to understand, than listening to a dumb reading of the resulting typeset PDF.
It is possible to go into an existing PDF file and mark up a lot of these things, specifically in order to help the reader along. The webmaster where I work often has to mark up PDF files (usually generated from MS Word documents, rather than from LaTeX). I've never done it, though, so I don't know what's involved. My impression is that it's pretty painful.
[1] To make the issue with floats more explicit. You can tell LaTeX to add a figure, and to "float" it to the top of a page. The typesetting engine will do so. However, suppose the resulting PDF file ends page 4 with "The figure clearly shows..." and then starts page 5 with the figure, followed by "... two trends in the data." Then when the document gets read out loud, the reader will say "The figure clearly shows", then it will go into a spastic literal reading of the figure's contents, then it will finish up with "two trends in the data."
"Victor Tsaran: An Introduction to Screen Readers"[1].