I think about this whenever someone posts about yet another new immediate mode UI library, or a custom layout engine they’ve built on top of HTML canvas. Generally all these kind of approaches make your app invisible to screen readers.<p>The amount of work Apple, Google and others have put into making all this work is staggering, and life changing for people who are blind. Please don’t throw all that work away in your apps just because you think some UI toolkit is shiny.
Having several friends on the Apple a11y team, they really do work tirelessly to make the accessibility experience amazing. A lot of the engineers on that team have visual, audiotory, or other physical impairment as well, which is really cool to see and as a result they’re all really invested in making the product accessibility awesome.<p>Personal favorite “Easter egg” in their accessibility utilities is the baroque voiceover descriptions for the built-in wallpapers. A current colleague of mine shared it last week as part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day - <a href="https://twitter.com/mattt/status/1395439320652148736?s=21" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/mattt/status/1395439320652148736?s=21</a>
There will come a day when Apple will lean in heavily on Accessibility just like they've recently amped up Privacy in ads lately.<p>I, for one, absolutely love this about Apple! Accessibility is a beautiful core value to strive for (Privacy and others too). But I particularly appreciate Accessibility.<p>Good designs/affordances such as gestural trackpads or mouse cursor support on iPads are all accessibility features, except they cover a major swath of humanity rather than those traditionally considered "less-abled".<p>Disclaimer: I work at Apple so I'm biased. More likely, my heroes at Apple such as Sue Booker are accessibility experts -- so I'm always fan-boying over these features!
It really seems to me that people like to be mad, get upset about marginal things that would only affect a small percentage of users (eg inability to side load apps on non-jailbroken iOS) and generally just focus on the negative. Maybe you could call it Outrage Addiction?<p>So it's refreshing to see something like this where a modern smartphone has such a positive (even life-changing) impact on someone's life.<p>This is also one of the things I find depressing about a significant chunk of Americans. Many will dismiss things like public transit as "people want to drive". Of course we then design cities and subsidize driving so it becomes a vicious circle and any public transit become unviable (to retrofit).<p>But what about the people who can't drive? Or even can't afford to drive?<p>Basically the American response is "F em".
This is a good reminder to me that while sometimes it's a pain in the neck to make sure there are alt tags for every image, or make sure things are in text form rather than a pdf, that you can tab through a site, etc. - it makes it so everyone can use the internet more easily and that's important.<p>I work with restaurants a lot as a part of my job, and there's been a big push to make sure all the websites are ADA compliant; it's something all front end devs and digital marketers should keep in mind.
Speaking of visually impaired people, please consider joining Be My Eyes [1], if you are a sighted person or if you have impaired vision. It is a fantastic idea and I get a lot out of using technology to help people "see" even though it happens so rarely.<p>1. <a href="https://www.bemyeyes.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bemyeyes.com/</a>
A couple years ago we were able to hire someone with a visual impairment to do some testing on our website. I consider myself to be very knowledgeable about accessibility, I use a screen reader to test, etc.<p>But watching someone use something I made, and struggle to complete the task because of a fairly straightforward disability they overcome every day in many ways, but they couldn’t get that thing I made to work? That’s an incredibly humbling experience. Never felt anything like that before. I’d highly recommend doing some testing with a real user if you ever have the opportunity.
It's really remarkable what Apple has achieved here.<p>Random thought: She could turn down the screen's brightness all the way to save battery and improve privacy... ;-)
Interesting that she located the elements by tapping on the screen at certain positions, instead of using the left/right swipe _anywhere_ on the screen, which selects and reads the previous/next element.<p>Having seen a lot of these videos before (we've been working on making apps truly accessible), I never actually came across someone who didn't use the left/right swipe as a first plan of action, but hey ho, you always learn.<p>(I wonder if it depends on mental models, and whether you prefer building a 2D map of the screen to moving up and down in a 1-dimensional vector.)
One thing I've thought about – how much harm did the Chrome team do by adding default outlines to focused elements? Although well intentioned, I think making it the default for all users resulted in pretty much every website adding "outline: 0" to their css: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+remove+blue+border" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+remove+blue+border</a>, which ultimately harmed the ecosystem for keyboard only users.
I remember watching a blind man teach a group and he had in one earbud to his phone and was just using his thumb to flip back and forth quickly through his notes as he was speaking, and taking comments and questions. I was impressed at the multitasking. I don't think I could listen to two different things so well, or talk while also processing audio notes.
I've been talking to some visually impaired people here in Brazil, and despite being much more expensive due to taxes it is the most used phone between visually impaired people.
I recently posted this video playlist of quick accessibility tips for websites (each tip is just 1 minute).<p>Many websites don't follow these best practices. However, you might be surprised by how simple and low-effort it is to incorporate these tips into any website.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTqm2yVMMUKWTr9XWdW5hJ9tk512Ow0SE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTqm2yVMMUKWTr9XWdW5h...</a>
I'm not visually impaired but have been doing some work at a local institute for visually impaired people and did setup some phones for WiFi there. I have never tested these accessibility settings on smartphones myself so I have no idea why but ever single phone I saw there were Android phones. Now I'm curious why since it seems people here see iPhones as a better choice.
Even the accessibility features of the Apple Watch are impressive. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXX1bMqe_gU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXX1bMqe_gU</a>
Have been discussing with a visually impaired friend how to rethink Accessibility. Over the last 20 years, I've seen him use Accessibility on Windows and then moving over to the Mac and finally the iPhone. The main problem is that VoiceOver is a speech+touch interface slapped onto a visual+touch interface. So, roughly 1/3rd speed. Moreover, 3rd party developers need to label elements, which they rarely do.<p>I remember walking out of an Accessibility meetup at SalesForce waiting for a ride and seeing an attendee struggling with hailing an Uber. She was an experienced user but still struggling with her new iPhone. It had a larger screen, so all her muscle memory was foiled; the buttons had shifted.<p>So, my friend and I are looking into rethinking the interface starting with 1st principles, like Fitt's Law. My guess is maybe a 9X improvement for visually impaired and 3X for folks with regular vision. Reserved the name touch.ai for that purpose.
If you want to get level with the user in that video, turn on Screen Curtain on your iPhone and try to use it. Very, very humbling experience as an iOS dev.<p>Here's how to turn it on: <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443</a>
I’m curious, is there a way for someone who is visually impaired to have the screen totally turned off and still use it like this?
Would make sense and save some battery.
How much do the vocal visually impaired use keyboards like the Braille keyboard shown and how much do they use voice to speech? A lot of people don’t want to talk to their phone, is the same resistance there for someone whose phone is always talking to them?
So, we see:<p>* Braille-keyboard emulation with regular keyboard tie-in<p>* Different responses to different touch and gestures, oriented towards the blind.<p>Is this iPhone-specific or is that available on Android phones as well? proper-Linux phones?
I'm a big believer in assistive tech. It isn't particularly difficult to implement, and the rewards can be great.<p>Nowadays, the apps I'm developing support things like accessibility labels (voiceover), high-contrast mode, and scaling, in addition to the localization that I've always had.<p>I also suggest using tools like Sim Daltonism[0], to evaluate colorblind accessibility.<p>[0] <a href="https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/" rel="nofollow">https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/</a>
Wow very impressive! She could probably save a lot of battery too, there is no reason for that screen to be on. Sort of mind blowing when you think about it as a seeing person.
On the flip side, I have a blind friend who is in the market for a new phone right now to replace her old nokia with custom text to speech software. Half the buttons have fallen off. It's very difficult to find phones with physical buttons nowadays and the specialist ones cost the earth.<p>As nice as touch screens are, remember that physical buttons are more helpful for blind people. She knows that text messages are 2 clicks down in the menu, calls are one click, contacts are 3 clicks, etc. rather than having to swipe around and find the app<p>There in lies another issue with iphones for the blind, you can't remove all the other gumpf you don't need. If there were just 3 big screen filling buttons with phone, texts and contacts, that would be easier to use than smaller icons.
When talking with my colleagues about accessibility I like to propose an exercise: “turn off your monitor and now try to use your feature.” After getting some uncomfortable laughs or overall confusion, it presents a great opportunity to demonstrate things like screen readers and keyboard navigation. A lot of people don’t even realize just how many accessibility features are built into operating systems these days.<p>These days if you’re a Windows developer Microsoft has some great a11y tools like Accessibility Insights that will do a lot of automated testing for you as well.<p>While I don’t rely on AT (even though I am an a keyboard navigation enthusiast) it’s an area I’m passionate about. I like to encourage others to not think of a11y as an afterthought.
Shameless plug: One of our engineer developed a Vision Impaired OCR app that scan and read text aloud in the user favorite language and accent with built-in TTS and translation service. Basically, the app is voice driven and require minimal interaction. All the user has to do is take a picture and the scan process starts immediately and TTS takes place after scan.<p>App homepage: <a href="https://i2s.symisc.net" rel="nofollow">https://i2s.symisc.net</a><p><a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/talkie-ocr-image-to-speech/id1512795289" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/talkie-ocr-image-to-speech/id1...</a>
This kind of thing is really inspiring to me. Are there any similar projects I can contribute to? I would love to work on software that has such a clear positive impact on someone's life, like in this video.
I worked many months making a couple of bank app accessible to visually impared people. Hard work. Luckly I had a team that would test every version until they could themselfs use the app correctly.<p>In the end I was so used to test apps in this mode,that I put a shortcut in my phone so I could used it with headphones while the phone was in my pocket in the subway, or while I'm driving so I don't take the eyes of the road.
Well I have a related question, maybe someone here has an answer. How can a paralyzed person hang up the phone / end a call? They can initiate a call using voice, but no way to hang up.<p>So now, either the other end has to hang up. Or there is a long timeout, like 10 minutes or something.
I just asked Kristy if she might "pop" by.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/vassudanagunta/status/1398017781040361482" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/vassudanagunta/status/139801778104036148...</a>
Really helpful resource for web devs:
<a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.2/" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.2/</a>
Imagine she would have the screen off, just holding a black glass slab... Sort of makes me feel like I am touch and hearing impaired in stead of her being visually impaired.
Could vibration be enhanced so that would create another dimention(s) of haptic feedback? Kind of vary on pitch, length, strength, and Morse-like patterns to augument voice over.
hey, quick question. can't iPhones for visually impaired users fix their brightness to ultra low(beyond standard lowest)? since everything is being read out, it'd probably save a lot of battery and make sure the phone lasts longer.