ndarilek

I have, and it's nice, but I like installing Bootstrap via NPM/some other package manager so I can track new versions and include its JS components, and I wish these shipped as a diff or something so I could install stock Bootstrap and pull in the changes. I'm unsure what would happen if I used NPM to install stock Bootstrap, then included the modified stylesheet after. If I could see, I'd just try it myself and see what happened. Thanks for reminding me of these themes!

No worries, I get that we're probably not a demographic you've considered, and like I said, I don't even know if in the end this tool will work for me.

To give you an idea of what I'm thinking of, I've looked into https://github.com/dennybritz/neal-react (unfortunately the hosted demo appears to no longer be up.) I'm sure this will bring out the "JavaScript shouldn't be abused like this!" haters, and I'm not the biggest React fan, but I like that I can position a few high-level components without having to think "I need 2 divs, one that's a panel, one that's X width and another 12-X, etc." Granted, I've never built anything with this React library and don't even know if it looks good, but it's closest to what I want in a page design system. Just give me a few high-level blocks that are responsive and look good, and I'll go from there.

This is interesting. I'm blind, and while I can think of ideas for products/side projects, designing a nice-looking website is such a huge momentum-killer. I mean, I know that I could just focus on features, keep the site design simple, and build a good design later. Then I visit <insert random Show HN here>, and half the comments are about how some UI element or other breaks on some combination of browser or other, and the last thing I want is to have my idea dismissed because it's ugly. I thought Bootstrap would help with this, but when my sighted GF takes one look at my attempts at site design, her first comments revolve around lack of color, and I don't even know where to begin with that. And yes, I know about themes, but sometimes that feels like I'd have to make my idea fit the theme, whereas this seems to let me pick and choose what elements I want.

Unfortunately, when asked to select a hero block, I'm greeted with a series of images. Would you consider adding alt attributes to these? If I knew roughly what they looked like, I could probably pick and choose something semi-appropriate for a given project. I don't know what other issues I'm likely to hit, but I'd be interested in providing additional feedback if this at all seems like a viable direction.

Also, just noticed I can't select a hero block via the keyboard. Items aren't tab-focusable and keyboard-selectable. Maybe this won't work at all for me, but I'd really like something between "Here's a fully-formed theme" and "Here's a completely inaccessible website builder that gives you a blank canvas and assumes you don't want to touch the final HTML." :) If anyone knows of anything like that, please do share.

I'm blind and prefer Fedora because it tracks GNOME more closely, and GNOME seems to reliably get accessibility right whereas Ubuntu/Unity doesn't.

So admittedly my development workflow isn't super high-tech. I do lots of JavaScript, some Rust, and a few others. All my languages have reliable command line tooling, which of course works well under Linux.

Some blind folks advised me to try Windows because it was supposed to make me more productive. I tried it for about a year and a half. I've used Linux since Slackware96, and whenever something failed under Windows I was stuck googling error codes and tracking down system logs. I can launch a Linux system upgrade from the command line. If it fails, it fails for an obvious/searchable reason, and prints its failure cause in the terminal. I don't have to track down logs in non-standard locations, google odd hex codes, etc.

Under Windows, the best I could find for accessible JS/Rust dev was Notepad++. That's just an enhanced text editor. At that rate I might as well use Gedit/Vim under Linux for development, which I do and it works well.

If you're developing heavily in Windows specific tech, then Linux wouldn't be a good fit. But as a technical user I'm quite happy with Linux generally, and Fedora specifically. About the only accessible Windows things I miss are audio games and Netflix, and my VM satisfies most of those. There are corner cases where Orca/Firefox act up, but under Windows there were lots of cases where I fought the OS, so there's just no perfect solution. I'd take a stronger foundation over slightly less accessibility any day.

I feel like you and I have had a vaguely related conversation before, but do any of the remote desktop access protocols support piping sound in addition to graphics? That might be a quick-and-dirty way to prototype something. I've been looking for a reason to play with Elixir/Phoenix, and if there's interest in this then I may try some sort of one-click Orca VM that pipes everything back to the browser. Interesting idea.

Also, I feel like there was an early version/prototype of NVDA Remote that ran in the browser. I remember going to a page, turning on forms mode or whatever NVDA calls it (I've been out of the NVDA loop for a while) and I could send keys/get audio from the remote machine. I think that was before the addon was available so I'm pretty sure it was web native, but I could be misremembering. I don't think there's anything preventing transmission of the Insert key, at least. Capslock or other esoteric modifiers may be trickier.

"Ethereum has always marketed itself as a complete working solution, which it is obviously not." Really? I recall them having 3-4 stages before they called it done, the first of which called itself "frontier" precisely to discourage folks from thinking it was ready.

That said, I was somewhat horrified to see something as large as the DAO launch on an alpha platform, and not surprised to see it tank. Maybe Ethereum core developers in unofficial channels were more cavalier about its current state, but as a casual follower who read their blog for a while, I never got the impression presented in your comment.

In my experience, granted a bit limited but probably more than the average person has, these types of bullshit charges are generally thrown out. That, or they're held over someone's head, used to intimidate them into not doing other things. So it is more likely that these officers leveled a bunch of bullshit charges against folks that the DA didn't pursue, or that are being held in limbo to discourage them from, say, protesting and risking getting hit with new charges _and_ the old ones.

That said, I think we're in agreement that this is wrong. I'd just take it further and state that, if police officers file a charge, then I think they're obligated to do all the extra work to see that charge through, maybe within a reasonable window like 30 days. Subjecting someone to arrest, physical injury, and a night in jail only to throw out a charge as unfounded should come at some cost to the officers who caused it. If coders, lawyers and doctors did only a quarter of their jobs, or made a bunch of work for others that ultimately amounted to nothing, they'd be fired.

Yes.

I'm blind. Would you not rent this property to me because you fear for my safety therein?

Would it make a difference if I've said I've skied, biked solo, rock-climbed? If so, why should I have to do so when others don't, and are trusted to make up their own minds as to whether your property works for them?

Do you feel more confident than I am in determining my own limits?

Disclosure: I've been denied many opportunities because an unqualified person determined what was and was not safe/possible/healthy/OK for me to do, and find it upsetting to be denied my agency because of it. Glad to see these changes landing. If I've misinterpreted your post then I do apologize, but it looks like you're making choices and denying opportunities for capable adults, and I'm not OK with that if that's the case.

Haven't delved deeply into this, but does it let you do everything programatically, including track/catch pokeymon?

I'm blind and would be interested in there being an accessible version, but it's just not ever going to get made. Seems like pokestops or whatever they're called could be represented as a plain native list, with Maps integration for voice guidance to the point if you don't already know where to go.

And it looks like the in-game action is fairly simple. Could probably render it with positional audio, which has been done in accessible games for at least a decade [1]. I wear a bone conduction headset, so I could listen to the audio cues overlaying my actual environment. It may be hard to model the catch mechanics, but I assume they aren't too much more complex than "center one thing on another and throw," which again audio games have pretty much figured out.

Seems like a fun project. Might give it a shot if I can stomach the risk of getting randomly shut down one day.

Edit: Speeling

1. http://audiogames.net Kind of an annoyingly bad site in some respects, but useful info all the same.

http://escapepod.org/2010/07/29/ep251-unexpected-outcomes/ might have some ideas on that.

Make it a co-op. Build restrictions into the corporate bylaws such that classes of members can check and balance acts like this. Implement profit-sharing, so not only would that 1% increase in fees help fund development, but it would also be returned in part to platform members. Of course it may be necessary to increase fees once you've got an actual idea of what your expenses will look like, and profit-sharing may necessitate a larger increase, but then everyone has incentive for the platform to succeed.

Huh, will definitely do that, and will also file an issue for Java support in Realm. Thanks.

I'm looking for a good geospatial data store that works on mobile devices. Ran into an issue where Spatialite used to corrupt databases larger than 2GB on Android (as in, run md5sum on the database, open it read-only, run another md5sum, notice they've changed.) At the time when I investigated this, the Android support was scattered across both the initial project and a secondary build with a vendored Spatialite, it wasn't clear whose issue it was, and none of the projects seemed interested in claiming ownership or suggesting fixes. The whole experience left me a bit soured on Spatialite as a mobile geospatial data store if your intent was to, say, load large areas for offline navigation. Maybe it'd work better in the case where you're syncing up specific areas, but my interest was in prepopulating with specific datasets for large regions since I was often off-network and couldn't predict whether a dataset would run out in the middle of a dead zone.

Any chance Realm will or does support geospatial data? Couldn't find any indication that it does currently, so if I ever returned to this project then I'd likely suck it up and try to figure out why Spatialite corrupts larger datasets. But having an alternative would be nice.

"If i say "find me a good ticket for Chicago tonight". How will it know that i'm talking about the rock band that's playing tonight in Paris, France, since there's absolutely not a chance that a human being asks for a plane ticket for such a big trip just a few hours in advance ?"

Funny, your "absolutely not a chance" interpretation was mine. Maybe there was a death in the family. Maybe you need to visit a friend short notice. Maybe I'm being a bit pedantic, but I was with you until that point. :)

He mentions some smart glasses in that video, but says it kinda quickly and I can't ID them. Anyone know what they are? As a blind developer myself, I've pretty much been wanting to build this kind of app for a while. Even if facial recognition may not be good enough to identify someone accurately by name, for instance, just hearing "face, blue eyes, blond hair, male, 80% confidence" or something similar would give me a bunch of additional data points to identify someone when they say hello. I don't even know what color my own girlfriend's hair/eyes are. :P I'd love a set of these to develop my own apps with.

But this appears to blow all my ideas out of the water. I wonder how much work they had to do to obtain clean input (I.e. how many mis-identifications we didn't see.)

Edit: Ah, I guess it's these: http://www.pivothead.com/. SDK and dev kit pricing not available unless I fork over my details. If I have to ask how much it costs, I can't afford it.

Actually, probably better, aria-label:

https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2013/01/using-the-html-ti...

Edit: FWIW I as a blind user didn't notice the bar. Glad this story pointed it out. Kind of wish HN would update its layout to be more accessible. There are a ton of aspects of HN that are entirely unusable or painful--no easy way to navigate comments by thread, no accessible indication of downvote status, no easy accessible way to scan the front page other than pressing tab 6-7 times to navigate between entry titles... I suppose some of that isn't a huge deal--I just don't notice or care about downvotes and speak my mind (within reason) as a result--but the whole tabbing half a dozen times to hear each new headline is a bit ridiculous.

Anyhow, sorry to derail the black bar discussion. Respects to the deceased, but I'd still like to see HN become more accessible and inclusive. When you literally can't notice things like this then they become aspects of a community you aren't included in.

Thanks, I know it wasn't. Likewise, my intent wasn't to make you feel bad. I imagine this landscape is all very new to you, and recognize that it's probably lots to come to grips with and navigate. To that end, kudos for finding a problem and running with it. :)

It's interesting to read that you conceptualize screen readers as rendering a 2-D environment as audio. I'm a very visual/spatial person, but I've always conceptualized them as rendering a tree of GUI widgets, rather than a visual environment. I guess it's the difference between thinking of my desk as a visual collection of objects, and more as an object with an Arduino/RPI in the top drawer, papers and folders in the second, etc. Not saying either is wrong, just that maybe it's a matter of conceptualizing UIs as groups of collected and organized widgets, rather than as laid out on a map. I've come to enjoy developing with React because I can say "here's my workspace for a given task. It has a toolbar containing these related functions, these two loosely-related larger workspaces, etc." Then I let a visual designer come along after and make things look better. :)

Anyhow, I look forward to reading more about your SDK. Where can I learn more? I'm building an app that could benefit from a conversational UI on top of the traditional one and would be interested in reading up on what you offer, particularly as it's meant for blind users too.

That's fair, but my takeaway from this article was that screen readers were this whole other kind of thing that was so much more difficult to use. I could see that being true for someone who never used computers, or for someone used to using them a certain way and having to transition. And I worry that people will read it and come away with the impression that, since screen readers are hard, accessibility is harder and just isn't something they have time/money/expertise for. In actuality, much of accessibility is just using things as they were intended to be used, and attaching textual labels to visual-only elements. If web developers just used <button/> and <a/> instead of <div/>s for interactive elements, there's 90% of accessibility right there. You may be amazed at how hard of a sell just that much is. If the practice of attaching click/keyboard handlers to a <div/> were to be wiped from the face of the earth today and forever, I'd instantly love the web a lot more. :)

So yes, I generally agree that conversational interfaces are a good direction, and I'd like to incorporate them into the app I'm currently building. I just worry that the tone of this article makes the current state of the art sound terrible, when it's less the state of the art and more the implementation details of that state that makes things difficult.

Agreed, thanks for saying this. I'm always a bit weirded out when someone tries to tell me I'm not disabled because I'm successful, so of course I'm able. I get that, probably from a pure linguistic perspective, the word "disabled" has negative connotations. In actuality though, there's a rich disability community. Chicago (I think, anyway) has an annual disability pride parade. We live in a culture that tries to strip lots away from us when we're disabled, and sometimes it's all we can do to claw some of that back. So while someone may mean well by claiming that someone who is successful or competent shouldn't be called disabled, it takes away that person's autonomy and ability to self-identify, and also removes success and competence from what people think of when they think "disabled." IOW, if someone can say that the word "disabled" doesn't apply to a person because they do something well, others in the set of disabled people have it a bit worse off because they're both faced with a challenge and not able to handle it well.

That said, I didn't think this was the author's intent. But I can't count how many times someone didn't think I was blind because I wrote well, and they couldn't conceive of how someone who couldn't see could write a coherent sentence. :) Try applying for jobs in that expectational landscape and, well, it's challenging and is why I don't even like working for others anymore.

So I'm not trying to discount the author's company or experiences, but as a blind person myself, the tone of this article is confusing. My takeaway is that apps, screen readers and our current concept of computing are supposed to be terrible for me and difficult to use, but I don't get that. I don't doubt that someone newly blind after years of productive computer use or someone blind after a lifetime of being sighted would find things challenging. But if I suddenly found myself in a wheelchair, I'd likely find aspects of my daily life post-transition challenging, and would try not to write articles that made general statements about every wheelchair user's experience and challenges. :)

Are screen readers difficult to use? Sure, but no more so than typical desktop environments. Describing them as "requiring special training from organizations like the Lighthouse for the Blind" feels like a bit of a stretch. Would some folks require training? Sure, just as they might require training to learn OS X if they're familiar with Windows, but that's true of anyone sighted or not, and hardly a requirement. Also, while I agree that licensing costs for some screen readers are enormous, just about every mobile and desktop platform has at least one free, competent alternative. Someone newly blind or blind after years of sighted life might certainly need training, but in general I find picking up a new screen reader to be no different than learning any other semi-complex app. If using Word/LibreOffice is part of your job then you sit down, learn it and become competent with it over time, or you get trained. Categorizing screen readers as being different and worse in this regard feels unfair.

"All of the time and energy that goes into creating the perfect user experience for an app is wasted, or even worse, adversely impacting the experience for blind users." Again, I strongly disagree with this. The problem is that UX time and energy is misspent almost exclusively on visual aesthetics, or even worse, on a certain type of visual aesthetic. For instance, say you use icon fonts because they're a cool thing to do. That choice has accessibility impact beyond blindness. Had a UI/UX designer focused on universal design and on crafting experiences that both look well and perform nicely from a keyboard/switch user's perspective, that interface will be visually appealing, nice to use via the keyboard, easy for users with low hand dexterity using switch controllers, etc.

Again, kudos to you for driving innovation in this space. I wish access tech didn't always feel like an industry stuck a few decades in the past, or wasn't being driven forward by companies with a medical-model concept of disability who view us as a market to be pitied rather than sold to. To that end, I like seeing exciting tech in this space, even if I can't imagine ever preferring to shop by a conversational interface. But I read headlines like "Apps are a nightmare for the visually impaired" and think "huh, I'm building an app for the visually impaired and hope it isn't a nightmare." And I worry that, rather than learning about how universal design can build experiences that look and work well for everyone, software developers and companies will read this post and think "I don't have to make my app accessible because blind people are using special custom interfaces anyway, so when a blind person tells me my app isn't accessible, I can pretend ARIA attributes are hard and write them off." Again, not trying to be negative, I just wish folks understood that we don't need separate interfaces and experiences.

It's hard to answer your questions definitively but I'll give them a shot:

What device do I use?: I don't use any one device. My main computer is a laptop running Linux and the Orca screen reader, but I've used Windows and NVDA before. I've had multiple Android phones/tablets and have used IOS. Last decade I used OS X heavily but transitioned away after a few years. Most devices have some level of accessibility built-in these days, so there isn't one single thing I'd use, just as a sighted person might use a laptop/desktop at their desk, a phone on the go, etc.

What do I do for work?: Again, probably the same as many here. I've done contract development on Android and the web, and am currently launching my own company. Nothing surprising or different.

What technology interests me?: I guess it depends on the day. :) I'm a web and mobile developer so tend to be more up on things like React, React Native, etc. I particularly enjoy working with mobile tech because there are lots of ways in which a mobile device with camera/GPS/lots of processing power/numerous connectivity options can tell me things about my world given the right apps and services. 8 years ago, running an errand meant I grabbed my phone, MP3 player, bluetooth GPS receiver and the PDA to which the receiver paired that ran accessible mapping software. Now I just grab my phone and it's much more capable on its own, handling GPS, OCR for reading documents, etc. I think there are a number of ways mobile tech can improve how we interact with our world, and I'm starting companies to explore those.

Sure, but you can't necessarily know that automatically reading any new piece of text is any better than not reading new text at all, and even if one screen reader can handle this particular case just fine, it seems like anyone targeting a whole community should just use ARIA and best practices for rendering modal content accessibly.

As a member of this product's target market (blind myself) I wish they'd put a bit more effort into making their site accessible. There appear to be various images with no useful alt text, for instance. I also wish the front page actually tried to market to me. Would be nice to know what OS this is running, whether it's a full-featured Android device or just something I can send files to, whether I can run it as a peripheral with my desktop, etc. I'm a bit worn out on all the fluffy "making blind people more independent and employable" messaging I see from these types of projects which seems to ignore the fact that I'm already quite independent and employable, and maybe at the end of the day I think about things other than my "independence and employability metric."

Interesting tech, and if the price isn't prohibitive I'd be down to buy one. But I wish more folks in this space designed traditional landing pages and actually made them accessible. Too many access tech companies don't focus on their message or don't convey it in a way that lets me know what any reasonable buyer would want to know.

Ugh, WTF, so I click on their preorder link, which is apparently a JavaScript anchor, and my screen reader gets no indication that a preorder page/box/whatever has come up. Maybe I could poke the page a bit longer and find one, but I think I'll pass. I hope the final product is built better than this landing page. Don't like being so critical but it doesn't look like any usability testing for the target market was done with this page and it kind of befuddles me.

I use Sandstorm daily. Private/company projects are run in Gitlab instances, though I may switch to Gitweb if a minor cosmetic issue is resolved (Gitweb in Sandstorm can only host one repo by design but you still have to click through to it when viewing the instance, which is mildly annoying when all other apps come up ready to use.) I have a bunch of Wekan boards managing everything from coding projects to my GTD buckets to separate boards for random home improvement projects. I prefer Wekan to spreadsheets because I can track work through arbitrary workflows and annotate items with additional data, and Sandstorm lets me manage that without having to maintain and secure a separate Wekan server that any random person could find and exploit. My blog is hosted in Sandstorm WordPress so I have the niceness of its admin interface but none of its security risks, and all the speed of a static site. A small 2-person bootstrapped startup I've cofounded uses it for many of the same use cases plus hosting our app's Piwik instance, again so there's literally no non-Sandstorm-secured user-facing attack surface other than Piwik's API endpoint. I have an idea for a platform co-op in the middle distant future, and if I manage to launch it then I'll run it via Sandstorm-hosted Loomio, which I'm actively attempting to port and am fairly close to completing.

Sandstorm is a great platform, and the community comprises some of the nicest, most dedicated folks I know. When my cofounder messed up our install a bit, Kenton talked us through fixing it on a weekend no less, right down to giving us database queries to run and then patching Sandstorm to handle our edge case the next week. Awesome people.

HTML rendered via what? nw.js? Electron? I feel like the former is a bit more solid by virtue of having been around longer, but unfortunately both ecosystems are such a mess a11y-wise that I haven't really delved into them. In any case, it's probably a safer bet than something like GTK/QT which is either entirely or mostly inaccessible. But HTML rendered in a browser at least has the potential to be highly accessible, and one workaround for poor a11y implementation of nw.js/Electron would be exposing the HTML to another browser over a local port with functions callable via JS over the server port.

Cool, glad to know this is on the radar! Out of curiosity, what are you using to render the current GUI? Toolkit/framework choice unfortunately has pretty significant a11y ramifications.

Here's a question for you, then. Has any thought been given to the accessibility story for Eve and tools like it?

As a blind developer, I always get a bit nervous when the future of programming is discussed in terms I've read used to describe Eve. It seems like a very useful way of developing apps, but one that can easily exclude a subset of the population if a11y issues aren't thought through in advance.

Also, part of me is tempted to dismiss Eve because I suspect we'll always have the current way of developing software to fall back on. But when I consider it more, I don't find that line of thinking productive for me. For instance, lots of folks might be tempted to dismiss GUIs for blind users because graphics, but there are actually huge advantages to representing UIs as trees of objects that can be introspected and interacted with. I can write code that scans the accessibility hierarchy for a specific element and reads it, for instance. In a command line interface, that code would need to either scan for a non-specific set of characters that a curses app might use to draw a thing that looks like a button and make a guess at its contents, and even then that logic would be very brittle. So even if Eve and whatever comes after derives lots of its power from rendering concepts visually, the underlying primitives needed to do so might have beneficial a11y implications and shouldn't be discounted because the end goal happens to look nicer than a wall of text.

Anyway, would be nice to see that on the roadmap if it isn't already. Even if only 20% of programming is like this in 10 years, that's still a substantial subset that might exclude me by virtue of the accessibility story not being thought out first.

An old 90s-era laptop with a monochrome display whose brightness I could turn down to 0, a screen reader that let me arrow around all the tiles, and a bunch of long boring high school classes where teachers thought I was such a diligent student, always taking such great notes.

:P