
Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week - silktide
http://blog.silktide.com/2013/01/things-learned-pretending-to-be-blind-for-a-week/
======
digitalengineer
Here is a tip from someone who lost his sight last year: If you suddenly see
little black spots, don't f&##^ing wait and get your eye(s) checked out by a
specialist at once! Have a deadline? A demanding client? Or perhaps it's just
a really bad headache? Don't wait.

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.

~~~
morsch
I bet I'm not the only one frantically checking their field of vision for
anything resembling black spots after reading this. Glad you recuperated.

~~~
robotmay
Here's a good article on the floating black spots you can experience in your
vision:
[http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Floaters/Pages/Introduction.asp...](http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Floaters/Pages/Introduction.aspx)

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.

------
jareds
As a totally blind software developer everything he has in the article is
accurate. There are two things he did not do though which I do on a regular
basis and assume most other blind users do as well. First is using the feature
of screen readers that allow you to view all links on a page as one giant
list. While this isn’t helpful when initially browsing a page if you use a
site on a regular basis and know where you need to go it’s easy to bring up a
list of links and start typing to use first letter navigation to jump to the
link you need out of the 150 that may be on the page. An example of this is
typing “pri” to bring up the print link in order to view stories on a single
page. Second is the ability to use a find feature of a screen reader to search
for specific text on the page. Once again this is not useful for general
browsing but if you visit a site on a regular basis and need to repeatedly
access a section of the page that isn’t easily findable by links or headings
searching for a text string you know will be there is a god send.

~~~
chewxy
I don't mean to be insensitive, but I am morbidly curious about your condition
(mainly because 23andme said I am prone to macular degeneration, a thought
that terrifies me).

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?

~~~
jareds
I was born blind so have never known any different and have always done
everything on the computer with speech and brail. From talking to people who
have lost their vision later in life it generally seems the older you are when
you lose your vision the harder it is to adapt and live a normal life after
vision loss. Since you know it may be a possibility though I assume may have
some time to at least cope with the fact that you could lose your vision and
have a longer time to acclimate yourself to this fact rather than losing it
all in a hunting accident. If you have a MAC play with voiceover which is
built into the OS, it has a nice getting started tutorial. As for how I
program see the following stackoverflow question.
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-
progra...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-
youre-blind)

~~~
DigitalJack
Have you found some programming languages to be easier to work with due to
their syntax?

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.

~~~
jareds
I haven't used Clojure yet although have been meaning to give it a try at some
point. indentation is the reason I've never seriously looked at Python,
although I know there are blind programmers who use it effectively. What
matters more to me then the actual language is the variable names. If the
variable names read more like English or at least follow a standard it's much
easier to just listen to the code. The shorter the variable names the more
likely I am to read a lot of code using my braille display instead of
listening to it.

------
josscrowcroft
As great as this article is, the title should be "10 things I learned _about
accessibility_ by pretending..."

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?

~~~
nathell
Whenever you have the chance of being in Central Europe -- Budapest, Prague or
Warsaw -- don't miss the Invisible Exhibition.

<http://invisibleexhibition.com/>

I've been there, and it's been one of the most deeply touching experiences
I've ever had. Highly recommended.

~~~
chime
I visited "Dialog in the Dark" exhibit in Atlanta with my wife a few years
ago. It appears that is permanently closed but they opened a new one in NYC -
<http://www.dialognyc.com/> \- however due to Sandy, it appears that is
temporarily closed.

~~~
opminion
There is one in Hamburg [1], 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.

[1] <http://www.dialog-im-dunkeln.de/>

------
daniel13
I agree with some earlier comments about watching out for black spots. I lost
my sight in a grizzly bear mauling and learning to use adaptive technology was
a critical part of my recovery which lead me back into the work place. The
technology available is very helpful, but definitely has its limits and can
indeed be quite frustrating at times. Agree with the article that Facebook is
really not accessible in a meaningful way at all. While the mobile site is
slightly better, it has no structure and is essentially made up of
approximately 99 links on my mobile homepage. Like all skills though, you do
get better at using a screen reader with practice. I believe the brain's
neural pathways actually adapt to accommodate the way a blind user interfaces
with the screen reader much in the same way it does for other tasks such as
orientation and mobility (travelling blind). So, blind users actually do get
used to the super fast speech that may be unintelligible to most people. With
that said, I appreciate the article because there are very simple ways to make
websites user friendly to the blind. Headings that are not over used and well
labeled and having all controls on a site well labeled alone can make a huge
difference. The other key is really simplicity. Less is more for the blind
user for sure. I've tried to do that with my website (danbigley.com), but it
can be difficult to test and ensure accessibility.

------
ctoth
I'm a blind software developer who's been lurking on HN now for a couple
years. Every few months an article about the blind comes across and seems to
generate some discussion. I tend to stay quiet here on HN, as I generally feel
I have little to contribute to the latest discussion on whether or not
software is like a Japanese restaurant.

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.

~~~
ctoth
Just a quick note to say that I did not mean to encourage replies to this
comment by e-mail instead of using the comment system -- It's plenty useable
enough for me to engage, and it's not until I reread my comment after the edit
window had closed that I realized I gave that impression.

~~~
kaybe
I find your long comment somewhat hard to read because there are so few
breaks, especially in the second block.

(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.)

------
unimpressive
It's currently on my to-do list to try going without sight for a month while I
use my computer.

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.

------
embplat
Read about WCAG (<http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag>), that's what you need to
follow to make web sites accessible, not markup validation, which really means
"jack shit".

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.

~~~
nness
The Australian government made WCAG 2.0 a mandatory requirement of all
government sites. Many claim to conform to the Double-A requirement, but very
few bodies do accreditation and the standard itself is almost
incomprehensible.

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>

~~~
embplat
The Canadian government is in the same boat. In fact, they are offering an
open source framework that is modern, responsive and complies with WCAG
requirements: <https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew>

~~~
embplat
Here's a Wired article on this subject from today:
<http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/wet/>

------
lmm
Even as a fully healthy user, I often find the "mobile" versions of sites are
much easier to use. They tend to have a lot less junk on them and make the
actual content much more prominent.

~~~
alanctgardner2
I think "sighted" is preferable to "healthy". Just for future reference.

~~~
lmm
I was trying to find a succinct way to express that I had no disabilities
rather than just that I can see. I'm aware my phrasing was awkward but hope
people would realise there is no offence intended.

~~~
ebiester
The politically correct term is "temporarily abled." This sounds goofy at
first, until we realize that if we live long enough, nearly all of us lose our
abilities in one way or another.

~~~
ars
Have you never heard of the euphemism treadmill?

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.

~~~
tossacct
Regarding the "euphemism treadmill": sometimes it is necessary to coin a new
euphemism. For example, if the common usage of a word is different from its
original meaning. "Homosexual" was the name of a psychological disorder,
"moron", "retard", and "idiot" were all clinical definitions of mental
handicap.

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.

~~~
ars
That's the whole reason it's a treadmill: The new words will rapidly take on
the new, undesired but real, meaning.

~~~
tossacct
I think we agree that the euphemism treadmill(ET) exists, and that (ET) means
that our words constantly change meaning.

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.

~~~
lmm
But whether I say "cripple" or "disabled person" or whatever the current
euphemism du jour is, surely any audience understands what I mean equally
well.

~~~
tossacct
I think that we can agree that any _reasonable_ audience acting in good faith
_SHOULD_ understand, but I think we can also agree that most audiences are not
made up of reasonable people acting in good faith, which likely predisposes
failures of understanding.

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:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcM01akD0SA&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcM01akD0SA&feature=player_detailpage#t=165s)

------
Mahn
Am I the only one who thought this has startup potential? It sounds like a
problem in search of a solution. I can picture for instance a service that
would take a page, scan it, remove all the unnecesary clutter and make it as
much screen reader friendly as possible.

~~~
ZoFreX
> I can picture for instance a service that would take a page, scan it, remove
> all the unnecesary clutter and make it as much screen reader friendly as
> possible.

If this was technologically achievable, it would be in screen readers already
;)

~~~
DigitalJack
Something I have noticed on HN lately is our (and I do me _our_ ) tendency to
search for purely technological solutions and completely ignore the
possibility of manual labor.

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.

------
vnorby
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo&feature=youtu.be)

I was stunned by how fast the blind can "speed listen" in the linked video. Is
this something anyone can learn?

~~~
IvyMike
It's nothing close to that video, but I use VLC's "playback speed" settings to
watch TV at around 160%. It is definitely something you adapt to...I used to
have trouble at 130%, and now that seems slow.

(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.)

------
dmlorenzetti
As a similar, but easier, experiment, try listening to Adobe Acrobat read a
PDF file out loud-- especially if the PDF contains anything at all
interesting, like mathematics, figures, tables, or any kind of "float" that
pegs to the top of a page as the text flows around it.

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.

------
septerr
Shouldn't websites start having an accessible version, like they have mobile
versions of their sites? These would be free of too much JavaScript fu and go
directly to the meat of the matter. In fact it is possible people with no
physical challenges would start preferring these simpler faster versions too.
Maybe in near future, the latest trend in web will be less JS, less graphics,
less animation and more matter.

~~~
ctoth
This is an absolutely terrible idea that seems to refuse to die. No, it is not
reasonable to put the accessible content in some sort of blind-only ghetto.
Amazon do this, for instance, with a text-based version of their website. It
makes it more difficult to maintain unless you've architected from the
absolute beginning for it, and over time the text-based version becomes
useless. Think of it from the perspective of someone adding new features to
your webapp. Let's put it in HN terms -- you're building your MVP, launching
in three days or something absurd... Are you really going to go build a text-
based version of your website? Are you going to keep that updated? No. The
only solution is to make the actual web, the one we all use, accessible. This
doesn't mean changing what individual developers do so much as making sure
that it's harder to be inaccessible than to be accessible with technical
fixes, I.E. fixing Bootstrap so all Bootstrap sites are more accessible.

~~~
septerr
Why shouldn't companies (their developers) put in the extra effort needed to
keep both versions up to date? They can come up with a framework for it. It
may not necessarily mean two totally separate code base. You could design your
framework so that both versions feed off the same backend. And don't they have
to put in that extra effort to make sure their mobile versions are up to date?

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.

~~~
ctoth
Because they won't. I'm commenting from the perspective of a blind user--I
know of what I speak. Note that I explicitly said you would have to architect
for it, which you reiterated in your point. Doesn't it make far more sense to
make the underlying tooling accessible rather than ghettoizing the content? My
main point here is, if there's extra work to be done to make content
accessible, that work simply won't be done. Hell, I wouldn't do it either -- a
whole extra site template's worth for what? 1% of users? and I am totally
blind.

------
zplesivcak
Just a note of marginal importance: I'm pretty sure that speeding up movie 1.5
times would bring its runtime from 2hrs to 1hr:20mins (not 1.5hrs as
mentioned). With 24 frames per second 2hr movie has 172800 frames. Speedup
brings framerate to 36 fps, and dividing we get 4800 seconds, or 80 minutes.

Edit: Thank your for pointing that out leberwurstsaft!

~~~
leberwurstsaft
you missed to multiply by 2h. 86400 frames equal only 1h.

------
hamidnazari
By W3C validator do you mean the Markup Validation Service or the Web
Accessibility Initiative aka WAI? I think WAI validators were introduced to
address the issue you raised in your experiment. Is this true?

Anyhow, I can't agree more, "being W3C valid means jack".

~~~
kjhughes
While being "W3C valid" (passing validation according to a DTD or schema for
the HTML) is insufficient, it's still useful in that tools, including screen
readers, can more reliably process the content of a valid page than an invalid
page.

~~~
silktide
Yeah I agree, it's useful as an absolute bare minimum. But you shouldn't just
get the green tick and rest on your laurels

------
baalexander
Has anyone had experience with newer versions of Chrome Vox
(<http://www.chromevox.com/>)? Would that improve the experience over the
other screen readers for web browsing?

~~~
silktide
I did look at this before doing testing for this article, but I assume not
many blind users will use this setup. When I tested websites I tried to make
my experience match the majority of blind users.

------
bauc
Very interesting experiment. Sighted people often take their vision for
granted. I know I do and I try to think of what I would do if I lost my vision
but we can all work on improving accessibility in general.

