
The Veil of Ignorance - wallflower
http://mrmrs.io/writing/2016/03/23/the-veil-of-ignorance
======
bpchaps
I love this. Nothing really groundbreaking here, but it's still true from my
experience.

A few weeks ago, I went to a hackathon for domestic violence. It was..
interesting. Lots of cool designs and products came out of it, but none of
them actually had any interest in designing a problem that had a broad and
proper enough solution. The biggest problem? Everyone created a smartphone app
except for mine and two others'.

One of the lawyers who hosted the event and I had a conversation about this
and agreed - this is the class of problem that prevents _so many people_ from
getting the help they need. They're simply aren't represented because they
don't have the luxury of having a smart phone or constant internet access.

(mildly shameful plug) - My submission [0] was a map of all DV centers, as
nothing like that exists or even close. It was made by scraping
domesticshelters.com's center names and plugging it into a geocode service.
domesticshelters' owner refuses to use it because of the privacy issues of an
abuser being able to find a shelter just as easily as the abused - which is
easily solved by mapping to a city center as my code does with an attached
phone number. I received last place, with 'honorable mention'.

Point is, very few in tech really ever want to take on these hard issues since
they're not fun, or they're not easy, or they involve social interaction with
those they're helping. It's sad.

red-bin.github.io [0]

~~~
CM30
To be fair, couldn't that just be because generic mobile apps are seen as a
way to get rich quick?

Okay, maybe you'd expect a bit more from someone attending a hackathon, but
from my experiences, every time I mention the word 'startup', someone
immediately suggests or asks about a mobile app.

For them, the only use of tech is mobile app that somehow blows up like Uber.
It might be less about whether it's fun or easy or involve social interaction
and more about whether the founder can see the dollar signs in his/her eyes.

~~~
bpchaps
Yes, I think that's exactly the reason. Which is also why I'm a critic of SV.

There definitely are great things that come out of the ability to quickly
identify and create helpful apps/sites, but these days I'm wondering if the
nuance of those who needs help is far more nuanced than app developers think.
Or that maybe they they're aware, but they think "good enough" will inspire
others to create their own, better/helpful service.

In my personal experience again, the problem happens when the need for wages
and time (jobs, unemployment, family, health, etc etc etc,..., etc) completely
de-mantles that motivation. It's these sorts of things that make basic income
seem to make sense.. as in, if addressing socioeconomic nuance is solvable
only time and motivation, the only limiting factor is money on an individual
level.

My cynic side wants to call this "wage slavery", despite fucking hating that
phrase.

\--- For what it's worth, the hackathon winners created an app for reporting
DV by hiding it as a calculator with a passcode. It was neat, but after having
dated someone VERY technical and someone who's NOT technical, these sorts of
things would fall flat on their face. It's surprising how far their technical
thoroughness went in both cases.

non-tech girl: "My friend told me how to look at DNS cache and you were
clearly looking at porn earlier."

tech-girl: "I sniffed my ex's AIM traffic to find out he was cheating. Don't
cheat on me."

------
sago
On the topic of physical disabilities in particular (social and intellectual
challenges are more tricky) - I think we need better ways of simulating
disability for able-bodied folks, and more willingness to have people use
those tools.

This can be as simple as a tool on your desktop that limits the color output
of your machine (in various types of color blindness), or blurs the screen to
particular partially sighted simulations. Not in-app, but general. And we need
to enforce their use as part of development.

Physically, there are companies that will train staff by putting them in
wheelchairs and asking them to navigate their space. How welcoming is it for a
wheelchair user? Can they get through the pull to open door? Can they get into
the bathroom to get as far as the accessible stall? As a wheelchair user
myself, I often get the feedback that people just didn't realise how difficult
things were in their ADA compliant buildings, because nobody had tested it
out.

We test things on multiple devices, with multiple sets of capabilities, but we
don't do a good job of testing as users with multiple sets of capabilities.

~~~
mwcampbell
It's pretty easy to approximate the experience of a totally blind user if you
use a Mac. Just turn off your monitor or put on a blindfold, then press
Command+F5 to enable VoiceOver. On iOS, you can find VoiceOver in Settings ->
General -> Accessibility. For Android, there's TalkBack. Windows has a built-
in screen reader called Narrator, but it's still limited enough that
practically nobody uses it as their primary screen reader, so instead I'd
recommend NVDA ([http://www.nvaccess.org/](http://www.nvaccess.org/)). For
desktop Linux, there's Orca.

There's a danger, though, that a sighted person using a screen reader for a
short time will come away with misguided ideas about what is practical for a
blind person that uses these tools day in and day out. For example, see this
thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284567)

~~~
sago
Yes, the same is definitely true of wheelchair use - you get the problems
without the hard-won tactics for coping. I'm going to navigate a space better
than you in a chair, mostly. Simulation is not perfect, but lack of
simulation- just thinking hard - obviously doesn't work, to anyone who's
rolled around shaking their heads at 'best practice'.

Still, having a worse-case experience is not necessarily a bad thing. There
are people who are newly blind, people who are newly disabled, people who are
newly incapacitated.

------
GabrielF00
My experience has been that the thought process involved in creating
accessible designs results in systems that are easier to use for people
without disabilities. For example, curb cuts were designed to benefit people
in wheelchairs, but they make life easier for delivery people with hand
trucks, people with strollers, etc.

It's the same for UX design. Features designed to increase accessibility, such
as better contrast, reasonably large fonts, etc. seem to make software more
usable period.

~~~
adiabatty
Sometimes, but not always. While I'm a fan of larger fonts and click targets,
a lot of people like to have these thugs be a lot smaller so they can have
more information-dense screens.

…which itself is an accessibility issue; if you have good eyes but rotten
limbs, you'll want to increase the information density of your screens so you
have to scroll as little as possible. Most voice recognition systems accept
one or more of:

\- space

\- page down

\- scroll down one page

Now imagine needing to say that every time you want to page down; you'd turn
the font size down as low as possible, sit closer to your monitor, and turn it
90° so it's taller than it is wider.

It's nice when accessible designs provide benefits to people who don't _need_
them, but sometimes a design that's better for people with one class of
disabilities will end up being a worse design for normal people or differently
disabled people.

~~~
jacalata
Sure, but if you do the work to make it user resizable then you help both
groups.

------
barrkel
I'm a big fan of Rawls' Veil and use it in my own thinking about what is just.

I do want to add, though: "No one complains that typefaces set at 20px are too
big to read." \- I do, very often, when reading on my phone. If the font is so
big that only three or four words fit on a line, I cannot read the paragraph -
the vertical scrolling & concentration required is too fatiguing. I'd say it
happens on 10-20% of mobile sites today, and it's an increasing proportion. I
strongly prefer tiny text with very little scrolling to the opposite. Browser
text size preference don't help much; the setting often doesn't have any
effect.

This site is fine on mobile (for me), though. And I fully agree with the
message, with my caveat.

------
aetherson
I'd like to see a source to the claim that at 40, fully fifty percent of the
light that reaches your eye didn't get to the retina.

~~~
trurl
Yeah, I'm only a couple years off from forty and I'm pretty sure my vision is
not nearly fifty percent dimmer than twenty years ago. Certainly my glasses
prescription has changed slightly, but that is more about redirecting the
light.

~~~
coldtea
Having 50% less light getting to the retina is not necessarily that it looks
50% dimmer subjectively.

E.g. it's not like having a dimmer for your room lights at 100% and 50%.

I guess it's more like a 1-stop difference in photography (where again, half
as much light hits the film/sensor from one stop to the next).

Here's an example with half the 50% less light hitting the sensor between the
two pictures. It's not as dramatic as you expect (except in the "depth of
field", e.g. how focused stuff is):

[http://www.adammoroz.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/10/Untitled...](http://www.adammoroz.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/10/Untitled-1.jpg)

------
justin_vanw
I think this isn't fair to Rawls. If you had to design the internet today, you
would probably design the internet just as it is today. Not because you want
to exclude 'people that are 80 and have really bad vision', but because even
if you made every page have high contrast and an 60pt font, there are almost
no 80 year olds on the internet compared to 20 year olds, and you have to
cater to your actual audience, not your 'in some universe where old people
were on the internet what would be the best way to make it easy for them'
universe.

This isn't really so crazy, and it's not some kind of ableist ageist blind
spot that content creators have. There is no demand for 60pt fonts, the people
that need them, who are extremely few, are more able to adapt the world to
their needs than the world is able to adapt itself. Or maybe their needs are
totally missed, but you can say that about literally any tiny group.

------
sheharyarn
This was a very interesting read!

