How much overlap is there between the accessibility needs of differently abled people (e.g. blind) and the needs of typically-abled people that want more modes of interaction with their devices?
The reason for my question is two-fold: I am not vision impaired (yet) and, selfishly, I would love to be able to interact with a powerful small computer (e.g. smartphone or a car/bike computer) as richly as I do with my desktop without having to look at it. And I imagine, if that modality of interaction becomes mainstream for geeks/hackers then it would greatly accelerate the development of tools that the blind community would benefit from.
Any suggestions for tools that I can play with in this context?
It's more than an overlap: I would argue that there really is a _spectrum_ of interaction wants and needs.
On one end, you have people with no vision at all. Some of them prefer extremely high speech rates. Others do not. Some may additionally have other interaction limitations (motor control, etc).
Then, you have sighted people who cannot look at a screen at the moment — e.g. because they are driving a car, because their device is at some distance, or because the device doesn't even have a screen.
You have sighted people who get tired reading long form text, or who need text read back to them as they type to support their spelling.
So screen readers are absolutely not a one size fits all product. Even Apple provides a ton of user configurable choices for their screen reader.
If you have iThings, try using them with VoiceOver and screen curtain[1]. I have a blind friend with absolutely no usable vision, not even light sensitivity. She uses VoiceOver and screen curtain along with a pair of AirPods and uses her device as well as anyone. One thing she does is turn the text to speech speed way up.
Edit: Also as a piece of trivia, the blind community generally uses the term "sighted" to refer to people with normal (or at least correctible) usable vision.
This is an important factor in the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires accommodation when buildings are renovated, accessible govt web sites etc): everybody benefits.
Everybody has a (often slightly) different set of faculties and they can often change transiently (e.g. even a skilled athlete can injure a limb).
Making things “accessible” can be useful in unanticipated ways.
I use hunt-and-peck and vimium for navigating websites and desktop windows. They weren't created for people with disabilities but they work well with my dictation software (Talon) so I can work when my arms fail on me.
Talon might also be worth your time. Since you're able-bodied you'd find it inferior to keyboards for most things, but it's a very hackable way to interact without using your hands. Combined with a screen reader you'd be all set for using a computer while biking.
Hi, TheFake VIP here, the other co-developer of Yggdrasil. It's great to see there's some interest in this project!
As many of you have pointed out, our current name is long, hard to type and spell, and hard to pronounce. There's also not really any good domain names available, so we decided to change our name. We've come up with a few ideas ,and we'd love your feedback. We created a Github discussion to discuss this, and a NextCloud poll to gage what people think the new name should be.
hello there!
my name is Alberto, one of the two founders of the yggdrasil screen reader project.
first, we are glad our project made its way to hackernews, though I admit I didn't expect for it to happen so soon, when we only have some prototypes to show. Since I'm posting this comment here, I will also address some points:
First, I'm amazed at the accessibility of this site as well as its responsiveness with screen readers, great job. Somehow, with its tabular structure, this entire site makes me think of a linux terminal, showing the output of some command like ls, a design I never saw before. However, contrary to popular belief, this is indeed a new approach to design in my perspective, but it's actually accessible which we know it's the opposite in most cases. Again, good job!
Next, about screen readers, one such program doesn't read the screen as it is, performing ocr on the window and reading the text in that way. Everything is about a compromise between the UI library, native to the OS or third-party, and the screen reader, they usually share a protocol so to speak. Most protocols present all accessible elements rendered by a compatible UI library as a tree of abstract components, which contain information about the actual control, such as name, description, approximate position on screen, status(a checkbox is checked or unchecked), etc. What apple, google, microsoft, soni, etc have is not only a screen reader, it's called an accessibility suite, or this is how we call it anyway. This suite contains things for most kinds of disabilities, for example a way to controll the device via a component based on camera technologies called a switch for the motor impared), screen readers for blind people, visual alerts and text captions for the hearing impared, etc. Of all those tools, the only official screen readers are voiceover on apple platforms, talkback for android, narrator for windows, etc.
about the name of yggdrasil, there has been another complaint regarding the fact someone couldn't pronounce it, however it's a strong symbol for everything we stand for, accessibility uniting people across the world, across devices and platforms, allowing the visually impaired person to work as efficiently on any of them as the sighted(most of you) would. Windows has good accessibility, mac is debatable but generally good, linux is the one with tec debt in this department, we're trying to fix that. Maybe the name is indeed hard to pronounce, though my speech synthesizer pronounces it right. We'll think about changing the name though, maybe Sequoia would be easier?
about providing alternative input methods like voice controll and so on, yggdrasil will be scriptable through either lua, js, rust, probably a raw C interface would be exposed too, though with some limitations since C is very insecure if not used correctly, we won't want it to crash the screen reader due to some null pointer dereferencing or buffer overflow or whatever else. With that interface, alternative ways of controlling the screen reader could be developed, so yggdrasil could become a platform upon which other useful tools are built.
The reason for my question is two-fold: I am not vision impaired (yet) and, selfishly, I would love to be able to interact with a powerful small computer (e.g. smartphone or a car/bike computer) as richly as I do with my desktop without having to look at it. And I imagine, if that modality of interaction becomes mainstream for geeks/hackers then it would greatly accelerate the development of tools that the blind community would benefit from.
Any suggestions for tools that I can play with in this context?