
Do We Get What We Pay For? (2014) - Tomte
http://www.chrishofstader.com/do-we-get-what-we-pay-for/
======
salawat
Excellent article.

I've done accessibility testing for a firm before, and in general it goes like
this:

"Here's a JAWS license. Take a week, make sure the tabbing works okay. Don't
sweat it, it's low priority."

The thing that kills me is that for a while in my life, I was legally blind.
I'm not now, but I was. I'd not had much experience with screen readers, but
it was "eye-opening" in the sense of having to learn how to build a mental
model of a screen without "cheating" by looking at it.

It really is infuriating. Here's an example.

Imagine a screen with three columns, each filled with a series of questions to
be answered; some text, some radio button, some checkbox. Each column's state
can have an effect on whether another column's state is submittable or not.

Now let's run some tests at various visual/auditory fidelities:

Full visual: works just fine. All fields and values can be read, screen reader
isn't necessary/tends to be distracting. Error text tends to be
crossreferencable based on visual cues.

Partial vision: (I simulated visual degradation via forcing myself to read
through a badly focused set of optics, my TLAR (That Looks About Right) set
point for testing being when the image was distorted enough that text was no
longer decipherable, basic shading/shapes were about the best visual
information I was getting, and field focus information was only gleanable from
text fields by holding down a key to dump in enough junk text to change the
perceived shading.)

Now's where you start to have to build your mental model from the screen
reader. This is where someone who hasn't had to master screen reading starts
running into pain and flailing about.

Your brain tries to hang onto those text fields or exploit every trick it can
to try to utilize the visual cues you'd tested with before. I actually had to
force myself to let my aural processing take over. The first thing you realize
is that everything requires a good deal more attention. You're much more
dependent on tab order, and remembering where your interface "focus" is in
relation to the information on the screen. Most error messages become nigh
impossible to make heads or tails of without significant domain knowledge,
because screen readers can't communicate visual trickery at all. If you're
generous, you can assume a visually impaired person can pick out formatting
tricks, but I tend to be more conservative and assume it's broken even for
them.

Full visual impairment: _TLAR set point: What Screen? There is only Tab, and
the voice in my head._

In a lot of ways, using a screen reader is easier when you can just ignore
visual stimuli altogether. Unfortunately, the specter of visually biased UI
design still predominates the experience. You need to get to that question in
Column 2 that can invalidate an answer in Column 1? Enjoy the tab spam. Or
enjoy having to get intimately familiar with the decided upon presentation
structure of the page if it's accessible to the screen reader. After a while
though (and I don't know of this can be counted upon for those visually
impaired or blind from birth), your brain will start to kind of generate a
logical structure from the sound, and I found myself increasing the reading
speed to just barely incomprehensible after some use, and found that I was
able to make some sense, and speed out of the setup. The quick near
incomprehensible overreads of the screen defined the structure, and a slower,
more understandable read for specific content. Error parsing and
crossreferencing was still a nightmare though.

Overall, the tech world doesn't care for impaired user's except for the bare
minimum required to still be eligible for Government contracts, and the bar
for that is painfully low in terms of pleasant or intuitive experience for the
user. As a programmer, I can see how some programmer's worst nightmare is
going blind. No reading design docs, every architect diagram is suddenly
locked away from you, and that screen that used to tell or show you anything
you wanted is just so much plastic and silicon.

I can guarantee that even the best Accesibility implementation out there is
not delivering the usability the User is paying for. Time/money/practicality
is only a cop out in the grand scheme of things dictated by a society that
prioritizes the profitability of an endeavor over delivery of a thorough high
quality solution for everyone involved.

Accessibility is the Neglected Tropical Disease of the software world, and I
see no signs of change to that state of affairs. The population of the
severely visually impaired will always be at best treated as a "charitable
gimme" on the road to tapping government contracts as a revenue stream.

Designing for an effective experience would require too much overhead in the
form of actually hiring designers to overhaul outdated and "good enough"
visually biased layouts and workflows, as well as a body of experts who are
fluent in the world of accessibility solutions, while also avoiding the bias
of the unimpaired to adapt a solution that works for them rather than truly
designing an experience that increases the productivity of those they are
designing for.

Trust me on this one. I've tried.

------
ohWowReally

      they prefer a user experience 
      that is less efficient, less 
      “pleasant” as they seem to 
      believe that doing things in 
      a simple and intuitive 
      manner somehow offends their 
      religious fixation with 
      living in the technological 
      equivalent of a hand built 
      survivalist type cabin in 
      the woods where they can 
      live out their fantasies of 
      technological and moral 
      superiority.
    

Except that’s wrong.

The argument is not against inuitive convenience. It’s against exploitation.

Those that would sell us the convenience and comfort know that they must,
because it’s the only way to bait the trap.

No one is against convenience or good design. The motive isn’t to achieve
authentic credibility by earning what you make with your own hands.

The sad fact is that durable text mode command line shells are mostly the best
that small DIY grass roots communities can slap together on their own.

The point of complaint is that large companies with profit motives design
systems intended to screw people over, but use the cookie of convenience to
lure and entrap their user base.

The End.

~~~
lolc
Yep. I was surprised by the limited perspective of the author.

Sometimes I do feel "amish" (as in quaint) when I refuse to use, say, one of
those messengers. But the reason for the refusal is not their user-interface.
It didn't even enter into consideration. The reason is the dependency I'm not
willing to enter into. I feel "amish" because it can be argued that that ship
has sailed and we should all accept our tech-overlords. Well, I still
disagree.

------
mwcampbell
I'm surprised to see this blog post here. It was part of a larger discussion
in a specific community (blind smartphone users) several years ago, and I
imagine it won't make much sense to people outside of that context. So I have
a question for the HN submitter (tomte): What part of this do you think is
relevant to a wider audience today? I'd just like some context on why you
think this was worth submitting.

~~~
Tomte
I was thinking about blind computer users again recently, when getting an
iPhone. I have submitted a few stories like "how to use iOS' accessibility
features", remembered an article I came across a long time ago, didn't find it
when searching and submitted another one I stumbled upon and found relevant.

I think it makes sense outside that specific conversation, but I suppose it
had more meaning for the people involved back then.

------
jchw
I hope you all consider accessibility important too. A large portion of
potential users have visual and hearing impairments, tremors and other motor
skills impairments, and of course about 4.5% of the world is colorblind. If
you can't do it because of compassion for others, do it for selfishness that
someday it could be you.

Hopefully the story around Android accessibility has improved since 2014.

(The usual disclaimer: I work for Google, I don't work on Android.)

------
AmericanChopper
>I am also going to explore the titular subject of this article, “Do blind
technology consumers get what we pay for?”

This just seems like such an obvious ‘no’ to me, that I lost interest in
reading the article at that point. Blind users obviously pay for a huge amount
of features they can’t use, that were made for non-blind people, and have a
disproportionately small amount of features tailored for their use. Unless the
blind consumer market becomes bigger than the non-blind market, I’d expect
this to always be the case.

------
perl4ever
Apologies for responding only to the title, but there's a book called "You
Don't Always Get What You Pay For" that I rather liked.

[https://www.amazon.com/You-Dont-Always-What-
Privatization/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/You-Dont-Always-What-
Privatization/dp/0801487625)

