jscholes

> Does that mean Zoom does in fact perform the necessary legwork on the accessibility front?

Pretty much. They're not perfect, but they have put a ton of effort into it. It may be because they do business with governments, so require things like Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs)[1]. But it is the only platform I can actively consider using for work, as someone who relies on a screen reader.

[1] https://zoom.us/accessibility

Anecdote: much of the software competing with Zoom has really bad accessibility for disabled users, incl. those using a screen reader, screen magnifier, keyboard-only/switch control, speech recognition, etc. This is despite the fact that some of it has been around for 10+ years, or is backed by large companies like Google.

I bring this up because that can also cause privacy issues. There are the direct concerns, like not being able to access the text of their policies or accessibly manage your preferences. But the less obvious factor is inaccessible controls to:

- verify whether or not you're streaming video;

- determine whether your microphone is muted or not;

- ... etc.

If I don't know what I'm streaming and exposing to meeting participants, I'm losing on the privacy front. So Zoom it will have to be for now, I'm afraid. If you think it has too many issues for you to be a viable product, and have the option of making an alternative more inclusive, I'm open to chat.

> Regarding Jobs' quote, here's another way to look at it: the most beautiful hotel in the world wouldn't feel like such if all the toilets overflowed when flushed.

But this would be a functional problem, irritating at best and a potential health hazard at worst. Using plywood for the back of a chest of drawers is no such thing.

... unless you would struggle to address a printed letter due to a disability, Have anxiety, a full-time job or anything else that prevents you from physically attending a surgery appointment, or can't speak. Or all of the above.

Amen to this article. Concise and right on point. My parents have a Roku streaming stick hooked up to their (relatively dumb) TV, but are not tech-savvy. A bunch of times, they've asked if I know how they can watch X, and I do. I have an HTTP URL to an HLS playlist or similar ready to go. But good luck getting it to play it if no fancy app wrapper exists.

In the end, I set them up a Plex server, which I can securely remotely drop things into. But that comes with its own fair share of ridiculous concerns.

I think the most difficult aspect of learning English depends on (A) the learner and (B) the goal. If your aim is to learn the language to a sufficient degree that you can handle business customers at an upscale hotel in a non-English speaking country, you're going to have different concerns to somebody trying to emigrate to and fit in with a community in the north of England.

> light house cleaning.

I'm blind, and my screen reading software's speech synthesizer amusingly pronounced this as "lighthouse cleaning". Which is a very different thing and made you sound fairly unreasonable...

You can join a Yahoo group by sending a blank email to "<groupname>-subscribe@yahoogroups.com". There is no CAPTCHA, only an automated email confirmation which you reply to. Is there a reason why that wouldn't work for this project?

> I’m so glad I don’t live in the UK anymore.

Well, me too. But I'm curious where you live now, and if you think that things are truly better there?

Okay, I have a question for the author:

Why didn't you just use a website layout which was easy to navigate and understand for people using screen readers? Is it because it's not a topic you've ever considered, or did you do research into it and just find the documentation and available resources lacking? There is only a single heading on the entire page, for instance. Happy to hear thoughts by email (in bio).

> Is there any way to be certain these are done in hardware and can’t be caught in a low level system once the device is rooted?

If you suspect your device has been tampered with and need a guaranteed reboot, just let the battery run down and don't use it until it has.

> the hottest urban neighborhood

This could describe a number of neighbourhoods in Mexico City. But I'm quite interested - could you direct me to any resources? E.g. how did you find the condo?

> I am so curious as to what a fully blind person would find most enjoyable about legos.

I'm not sure this directly answers your question. But I'm totally blind and my first ~7 years of education were spent at a school for blind and visually impaired kids. A whole lot of work goes into mobility training for children with disabilities, so for me it was how to hold and use a white cane effectively, how to navigate around unfamiliar environments, plan routes from A to B, etc.

I credit my first mobility teacher with giving me a life-long confidence in this area, primarily because he made super detailed lego models of the school buildings and used them to teach. I would have to carry out tasks such as moving my finger from a classroom in one building to the library in another via a valid, eficient route, and placing scraps of material in the right sections of the model based on my knowledge of the flooring materials used throughout the school.

It was so effective because it separated the learning of criticle skills from the pressure to perform. Getting up, walking around and demonstrating what you're learning was important, but it came with other responsibilities such as lookking after your safety. That could easily distract you from learning about acknowledging markers, developing a sense of direction and so on.

Love this idea. I'm currently looking for a way to be sent money from Mexico (to the UK), and was disappointed that the site currently had no suggestions. On that note, it's probably better to show an error message instead of an empty table when that happens.

I also have some accessibility suggestions; if you're looking to improve things on that front hit me up.

> Unless you’re referring to the screen reader

I am. I would never claim MacOS couldn't be used by professionals in a more general sense.

> but my impression is Apple is generally regarded as the best in what comes to accessibility features, and they keep improving. They’re so proud of it they frequently brag about it in promotional videos

For screen reader users, they're the best in terms of what they ship with the OS. You get a fully accessible experience out of the box, which includes a tutorial for first-timers. You can even run with text to speech in the Recovery mode e.g. to format your disks.

Contrast that with Microsoft, with Windows 10 being the very first version to offer an accessible setup/installation process, no obvious way to use a screen reader in Safe Mode, and next to nobody using Narrator in their day-to-day computer use because it took so long to be developed to any usable degree. One of the most popular Windows screen readers (JAWS) also costs hundreds of dollars - thousands over a user's lifetime if they purchase upgrades along the way. Apple are definitely winning there. Everything is free and just works, and I'm quite happy for them to brag about it.

Where it starts to fall apart is when you want to actually get things done outside of a core set of Apple apps. For example, Office support is pretty lacking, with poor or no accessibility for advanced word processing and spreadsheet features. The terminal support is so bad that an enterprising blind user made his own terminal screen reader to combat it[1].

There are other problems, such as the screen reader's slow performance making the entire OS feel sluggish. Plus, if there are any bugs in it, you have to wait for an entire MacOS update before it gets fixed. That's annoying when it's a Window Manager bug, but can be completely disruptive when your only gateway to your computer won't read your email for a while without crashing.

There are also tons of more opinionated stuff that users can (and do) argue about, like the efficiency of the way you browse the web with VoiceOver on MacOS vs the way Windows screen readers do it. But once you've assessed that the core accessibility experience isn't going to work for you, debating the rest is pretty pointless. Plus (and this is entirely anecdotal) it can become exhausting trying to have a discussion about these problems, only to have hordes of users tell you that you're wrong even though they're unemployed (or employed in a different field) and don't have people relying on them to get anything advanced done in the first place. Sometimes I think there's a tendency to want to justify how much money they've spent on expensive Apple hardware which, realistically, they didn't really need, especially if the cost of a cheaper Windows laptop plus JAWS would've been less or the same anyway. And these days, there's a fantastic free, open source screen reader for Windows[2].

[1] https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr [2] https://www.nvaccess.org

> If you must run Windows 10

I must, because it's the only viable choice for a blind, screen reader user (me) who wants to get real work done.

I thought this article was going to be about GNU ed.

> We found these guys who live in Bradford, England who are setting up websites and companies so that they can process money for Accostings in the UK.

I'm from Bradford - this is not at all surprising.

> And you surely can understand that code is trying to read a port or use a default one.

In programming languages which use paradigms I'm more familiar with, yes. In Haskell, not so much, which is the entire point of this thread.

> we unsuccessfully tried to approach bars with a Netflix like subscription for drinks.

... wow. Glad you dodged a MoviePass-style bullet on this one.

> Though notice that you picked literally the most trivial example in the entire codebase that anyone can understand without explanation.

I needed the explanation to understand what the code snippet was doing. Careful with those generalisations.

The developers of JAWS may have added the code needed to detect it, but that still leaves several screen readers without such an implementation (thankfully because this is a terrible idea).

There are a number of people on this thread suggesting that the arguments in this article are fairly weak. That may be the case for some (or most) of them, but the accessibility concerns are right on point.

I work in digital accessibility and by using CSS background images as actual inline content, you're purposefully choosing a technique which does not have a well-understood accessible alternative. Which is fine, if you are one of the people who understand that alternatives do exist and how to use them. My experience suggests to me that the majority of web devs must not be in that category.

I thank the author of the article if including this concern helps just one developer or designer make more accessible images.

This approach was used for years by Spotify[1], to allow websites embedding their player to load content directly into a running instance of the desktop app.

[1] http://cgbystrom.com/articles/deconstructing-spotifys-builti...

> "People sleep in their apartments, but the rest of the building is part of their house too,"

This is the definition of renting a bedroom, not an apartment.

> Initially I thought my work had used my card to book a trip for me or something similar. I didn't even imagine someone could have gotten my card details somehow.

I must be missing something here. Is sharing your card details with your workplace, so they can spend your money on your behalf, a normal thing for you (or anybody) to do? Legitimately asking here because I don't understand this at all.

> If you enjoy reading on the web chances are you’ve been forced to login to Medium at some point in the last week.

I've never once logged into Medium. I see a "Pardon the Interruption" notice every time I want to read something, but I just hit Escape and move on with my day. If I had to pick a side, I'd probably say avoid Medium. But I don't know under what circumstances it forces you to log in just to read something.

Well, other than the fact that it only supports Linux and MacOS.

> a software package or a lifestyle upgrade.

I'm unclear what you mean by this. Could you clarify?

These are great resources, thanks so much.