11 ms·

How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

• edu 3mo ago
  > It took 18 hours of work. So a couple of days plus a few hours. Seems reasonable.
  • harvey9 3mo ago
    Originally expected to take 2 hours. I think the writer is just saying it was a lot more than expected.
• jaffa2 3mo ago
  > Where I had control, I made changes. Unnecessary labels removed. Accurate alt text added — not filed-in-for-compliance alt text, actually descriptive alt text. The heading structure was cleaned up where I could reach it. For this project's SharePoint tracking page, I rerouted entirely: instead of asking users to fight through the noise, the system now sends an email update at every stage of the approval. seems to be the only bit of text that actually details anything that was done. I would liked to have read about the actual changes and steps taken to improve accessibility instead of some kind of low key rant about MS
  • cwmoore 3mo ago
    Not to your critique, but from the quote, I’m alerted to the idea that filled-in-for-compliance is malicious compliance or non-compliance. I can’t imagine the frustration multiplier it must be. So much is frustrating enough on the intended mass-audience happy path.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• Tepix 3mo ago
  While the content was interesting, the AI-slop-stench was repelling. Talking about AI (sorry!), perhaps an AI assisted screen reader could remove repetitive elements (it appends "(read only)" to every. single. field.) in a smart fashion? Does this already exist? We're seeing AI being used to improve a11y in quite a few places: (Live) transcripts for video conferences, image to text (VQA, visual question answering) etc.
  • zersiax 3mo ago
    No. There are certainly AI-generated accessibility solutions for single, existing applications, games and websites but no outright AI-powered screen reader. I'd think the token cost alone would make such a project prohibitively expensive, although one-off AI features are starting to sneak into JAWS and NVDA as we spaek, so who knows.
    • fc417fc802 3mo ago
      It's not as though the task requires a frontier size LLM. A small on device model should suffice for most clean up. But if you did want to run a full size model deepseek v4 flash is so cheap that I doubt even many hours of web browsing would have a noticeable cost.
    • RobMurray 3mo ago
      latency would be the killer. a very tiny delay between pressing a key and hearing a response can make a screen reader feel unresponsive.
    • Tepix 3mo ago
      A relatively small and fast LLM (30b MoE) would probably suffice. It‘s something you can run locally with a nice GPU.
• Planktonne 3mo ago
  > revealed invisible Interesting that the language of sight is so prevalent that it appears in this very title twice. Echoing other comments, this would be a stronger article if it went into more specifics, but the AI voice precludes that meaningfully.
  • thaumasiotes 3mo ago
    > Interesting that the language of sight is so prevalent that it appears in this very title twice. Well, it appears once in "invisible", and once in "blind"... but I don't see why "blind" is a surprise when talking about someone blind. There is no reference to sight in "reveal".
    • Planktonne 3mo ago
      Not an immediately explicit one, but to reveal is to unveil [1] is to remove a covering that blocks sight specifically. [1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/reveal https://www.etymonline.com/word/reveal
      • zersiax 3mo ago
        I always find it interesting to see that while we watch people struggle to get through a UI , unable to see the forest through the trees while they just want to get done with the task they, when they eyeball it, should only take five minutes but takes five hours instead, we get blinded by talking about the use of the word blindspot or the order in which we should say visual, impairment and person. meanwhile the UI never gets fixed and the cycle repeats when the next person shows up. As a blind person myself, I truly don't see the problem with using visual terminology given we don't live in a value, and while I understand some people go looking for a fight after the 30th inaccessible mandatory form they have to fill out that day, I've always preferred a more measured approach.
        • handoflixue 3mo ago
          The language isn't even being criticized here, just remarked upon. I think that's fair.
• bebe9494i4 3mo ago
  It is revealing how people with disabilities are treated, just to walk on sidewalk as a deaf person. Most cyclicts assume they have a priority on sidewalks, and will ring bell to enforce it. If you do not jump out of their way in 2 seconds, you get rammed. Cyclists know I can not hear them (I am wearing big noise cancelling headphones). Yet they still insist on their imaginary priority on sidewalks. I was forced to remove my noise cancelling headphones, just to hear their slurs! Cyclists on bike have no priority, they are not allowed to cycle on sidewalks! They should be using roads! I am allowed to wear my noise cancelling headphones on sidewalk! I looked it up!
  • jmyeet 3mo ago
    This went from "deaf people should be allowd to function in society", which is absolutely fair, to "I don't want to take any responsibility for being aware of my surroundings", which is what wearing noise-cancelling headphones in public is. You can do that but you then share some of the blame when things go wrong. Saying "well, deaf people have to deal with this so it's not my fault" isn't the defence I think you think it is. Do I close my eyes and walk blindly in public there are blind people? No. Accomodations are for people who need them not a shield for hyper-selfishness. I cycle and I either don't wear any headphones or I use the open ones where I can still hear my surroundings. I assume every driver is eitehr an oblivious idiot or is out to kill me. I assume it's every pedestrian's first day on Earth because that's how it seems. The level of entitlement I see on a daily basis is insane. Runners who refuse to get out of dedicated bike lanes, people who park in dedicated bike lanes, people who get annoyed that I go onto the road when I'm allowed to, people that get annoyed that I go onto the sidewalk or road because I have to (often because the bike path is blocked), people who walk 5 abreast on a shared pedestrian bike path, etc etc etc. But what really gets me is people who have elevated their own hyper-selfishness into some kind of virtue. "I'm going to block out all noise in a public space because that's what deaf people have to deal with" is a new one for me. Oh and as an aside, people who are deaf often aren't completely deaf. Deafness (and blindness) is a spectrum.
    • Retric 3mo ago
      People have zero obligation to be able to hear their surroundings. Listening to music on a walk is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. It’s very slightly less safe for them, but they aren’t risking other people so that’s fine.
• monster_group 3mo ago
  Note the irony in the title.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• miki123211 3mo ago
  The annoying and counterintuitive part of accessibility work is that there are some architectural decisions that are very hard to undo, don't seem that significant, but will absolutely bite you when you need to implement accessibility. If you decide on a GUI framework which doesn't communicate semantics to the underlying APIs properly, you have no good options. Either you rewrite your entire project in a different framework just to deliver one feature, dive deep into framework guts to fix the issue (which may be written in an entirely different language and outside your area of expertise), or do some ugly hack on top to sort-of make it work. A lot of accessibility issues, especially historically, essentially boiled down to "developer chose the wrong approach and didn't know how to get themselves out of the situation later." It's better now because we went from desktop frameworks drawing their own pixels on screen to web frameworks creating div soup, and div soup is much easier to fix than having pixels instead of native OS controls, but it still happens occasionally. The most recent one I personally ran into was WindScribe, who made a desktop GUI framework of their own for no good reason, and now they can't fix accessibility without a whole lot of work.
  • TimByte 3mo ago
    The web has its own problems, but at least bad HTML is often still visible enough to repair. A custom canvas-like desktop UI can be basically a black box to assistive tech
    • zersiax 3mo ago
      Very true :) I had this exact issue with the Elgato StreamDeck user interface, which renders the macro buttons as one big canvas only drag-and-drop interacts with. It's rare that I outright cannot figure out a way to make a UI accessible, but that one managed to break everything I tossed at it. I eventually switched my effforts to an open-source third party client which had a web UI, which is now accessible to screen reader users. As for repairing HTML, my last few engagements have clearly shown me that while HTML CAN be repaired, many devs these days wouldn't know where to even begin to do that. The amount of hand-holding I've had to do has made me suggest, several times, to just give me git access as it'd be faster if I just fix it myself.
  • 3mo ago
• TimByte 3mo ago
  The "read only" example is such a good illustration of how accessibility problems often aren't one big broken thing, but a bunch of tiny reasonable-seeming decisions stacked together
  • GarnetFloride 3mo ago
    So many things are like that. Trying to bolt on accessibility or security as an afterthought never work as well as making those things part of the initial design. I've been at this long enough that yes I know that just getting something out the door so we can make money is important. But this just creates another kind of technical debt that comes back to bite you.
• mamcx 3mo ago
  In general you WANNA see any people using your app. Read an "accessibility" spec or a requirement or a UX "good practice" is not a substitute for see how people use it! One of my anecdotes from back in the day: The secretary of a school that use the app I help develop call about problems reading data, that comes in CD. We can't do much by phone so I travel to the town to try to debug on site (bring dev tools in the day where that means diskettes and cds, we were transitioning from FoxPro 2.6 DOS to Visual Fox Windows 95). Eventually after some time the secretary put the coffee cup in the CD tray. Go figure!
• 8bitsrule 3mo ago
  Revealing that, after 30 years of Internet, someone's actually confronting this situation for the first time. So's the word 'gaps' ... as if the English Channel is a 'gap' for swimmers. Equally revealing is the audio quality of most CPU screen-readers (regardless of platform). Usually, not far from the crappy first attempts of 30 years ago. But then, hey, it's a small market, right?
  • asadotzler 3mo ago
    Most people who depend on screen readers prefer the synthetic voices for their consistency which can allow them "read" at far faster speeds. I've been working for a couple of years to reach the speed one of my friend regularly works at, about 900 WPM. I topped out around 550 WPM with the human-sounding voices and then almost immediately got to 650 moving to a synthetic voices. Still a long way to go to hit 900, but I'm certain it's possible, and nearly certain it's impossible with text that's voiced to sound human-like.
    • lproven 3mo ago
      I've been occasionally helping a blind friend of mine with his PC since 2005. His screenreader talks at about 600wpm or more and after 20 years of practice I can't understand it. I speedread and can read text faster than his computer's voice -- but not by much. It is very impressive, and very hard to use. But I am the only sighted person he's met who can use his PC. I navigate Windows mostly by keyboard, and he has no mouse. It slows me down slightly but I can still use it. (He does have a screen on his family computer, so sighted family and friends can watch films with him. His work one has no screen.)
• zersiax 3mo ago
  Honestly the fact that this article still needs to be written in 2026 is the designated real-big-sad imho. Screen readers almost entirely ignore the visual layer of any UI, and are entirely dependent on the layer that most developers ignore because it's not the visual layer. It's a perfect storm. It stands to reason that someone who's actually used to using a screen reader should be brought in to verify what you've built actually works well for that target audience. I'm a fully blind accessibility auditor, remediator and trainer myself, but I wouldn't dare to assume to know how a mobility-impaired user using eyegaze tech fares on a website I've audited. My eyes don't gaze, so I don't have the context to make those calls. On that note: I'm looking for work, anyone need me to tell them how their UI is bad for accessibility and fix it for them so they don't get sued later? :P
  • neverartful 3mo ago
    I'd like to connect with you offline for further conversation. I didn't see any contact information in your profile (and there's none currently in mine either).
    • zersiax 3mo ago
      I'm not a hard person to find. My hackernews handle into a search engine gets you myriad ways to contact me (Mastodon, LinkedIn, etc.) but I'm at florianbeijers [at] google's mail service if email is your preferred mode of communication. I have a website at florianbeijers.xyz with a contact form, its just very much a placeholder and not really currently meant for public consumption until I revamp it
• neverartful 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• gaoshan 3mo ago
  My company has a team of accessibility impacted testers who will assess any web/device work we do. It is invaluable and they can always find things that were missed regardless of how many tools we use to help in development.
• bradley13 3mo ago
  I'm a teacher and I've had blind students, so I am aware of the barriers. But: do an honest evaluation of the costs of full, correct accessibility vs. the number of people who benefit. A cold-blooded calculation for a company putting out a project. It honestly is not worth it. Huge costs, and you sell...maybe an additional license or two. So no one does it.
  • neverartful 3mo ago
    I understand your point, especially for company websites whose products/services aren't oriented to the blind. However, there are many companies with products/services that are just as much for the blind as the sighted (government, insurance, legal, medical, etc.) and many of them don't even make an attempt. The blind are still people and they should have equal access.
  • toast0 3mo ago
    The carrot is clearly not enough for accessibility. That's why the ADA provides the stick. There's a large benefit for society when society is more accommodating. It's easier to notice the accommodations for limited mobility; but if you have a new limit to your mobility, you'll notice everywhere they aren't. Accommodations for limited vision are often less noticable if you don't have experience with limited vision, but many of them are not very expensive if done at the right time in the project.
• devoncox 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• Havoc 3mo ago
  Recently went to a restaurant that is fully blacked out and has blind waiters. Pretty fascinating experience. The inability to identify food when you take away visual clues was much much worse than expected. Even just beef vs chicken which I would have laughed at if you suggested that to me beforehand. But nope…one slightly exotic sauce on chicken and everyone was confused.
• troglodytetrain 3mo ago
  So, at this point any company that doesn’t want ai agents navigating on their webpages have to kill the accessibility. And they do and will. Blind users are a tiny tiny part of users. But hurting usability for the disabled is bad PR. So of course they do it “accidentally”.