Tell HN: Today Is Global Accessibility Awareness Day
One way we can all directly make impact is making a commitment to make our software accessible to all, starting with educating ourselves about common mistakes folks make when designing UI that produce software that can't be used by folks who have temporary or long term low vision, low hearing, neurological, and other disabilities.
There are a ton of free educational events on accessibility going on today, and if you don't have time today, find a recording, or listen to a podcast, there is a huge opportunity to make impact once you better understand the challenges.
A couple of years ago while doing research on accessibility I came across the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and the GAAD foundation (https://accessibility.day/) - there are many such orgs, but if you consider yourself accessibility curious, today's a good day to get curious.
/PSA
64 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadSad, but true.
Eventually the company was sued by a former user who had been fired from a US government job for low performance when using the company's software. The company settled out of court for some amount of money, but never changed the company policies. To my knowledge, that company still doesn't take accessibility seriously despite the law and despite having settled at least one court case about it.
Perhaps the UK is able to enforce their requirements in a way to actually cause changes in behavior, but it wasn't the case in the US in the 2010s.
I wish more things were designed with an accessibility-first mindset - enabling edge cases might seem like overkill at first, but it could bring unforseen advantages.
- Have you also witnessed your product-business / employer ignoring user pain to chase MVP?
Maybe you can make the case for why every link and image should have aria tags, since it’s a new app and assets are more likely to be missing.
Or maybe you know that keyboard controls need to be implemented, but you didn’t consider focus trapping for assistive users.
Accessibility isn’t a binary, but a sliding scale. At the top of the market you get insanity like WCAG AAA, which straight up invalidates most of the modern web because it’s so restrictive.
A good example of this is tables. Tables are amazing at conveying large amounts of complex data in a very intuitive way. Not only that, it's great at manipulating data as well. It is not without reason Excel is powering a significant portion of the business world, and try as many startups have, it's very hard to pry Excel out of the hands of people who are using it. Excel is extremely versatile and very good at what it does, owing largely to the table metaphor.
Problem is that tables are also not very accessible. Among other things, they all but require sightedness. They also don't really work on mobile in any practical sense. At the same time, any accessible alternative to large tables are a strict utility downgrade for people who are able to partake in tabular data.
Starting with an accessibility first design principle, it would not be possible to produce something like Excel. We'd be stuck with a hell consisting of a million mobile apps, one for each conceivable workflow and task, rather than having one tool that can be made to perform any data manipulation task.
They did this on Windows and on Android. It didn't work. Try resizing a window on 4k screen in win 10. Or try to get rid of an error message in Android 10 (hint: there is no Ok or Cancel button and the error message obscures other UI elements).
Ultimately the visual medium permits random access 2D representations of information that just aren't viable in the sequential-access 1D medium of speech / small screens.
Sometimes accessibility improvements are to general benefit, but this isn't universally true.
Do some groups really need utility more than others? This seems to contradict the idea of accessibility in general.
> You can have normal excel and an excel that uses sound for blind people on the side. It's not one or the other, and the other in this case also puts utility first for the people it applies to.
It really is one or the other. You cannot represent an effectively infinite 2 dimensional grid in speech. This is impossible because speech is one dimensional. This 2d grid is not accidental to excel, it's at the core of its utility.
>Do some groups need really utility more than others?
Some people have a lot of utility at hand, and some people who have no utility at all, we can do some stuff so they also can use a tool.
>It really is one or the other. You cannot represent..
The 2d grid is stored in computer memory. You don't need speech to store it. Speech is just a communication medium. A lot of accessibility is just altering the communication medium. It has columns, rows, things that are described with words. You can index into the grid. It is true that sight is a good thing, but your total refusal to provide features to those with alternate needs is ableist. It doesn't matter if the visual component is the original source and I agree excel couldn't have been created without sight. Clay tablet accounting couldn't be created without sight. Doesn't mean you can't use other senses when something has been created. Why the refusal to share? It's pointless not to share. An ending note: Leonhard Euler was rather productive while blind.
Right, but the point is that we all need the same utility, right? Some people may presently have less utility available, but surely the goal is for the utility to be the same?
> The 2d grid is stored in computer memory. You don't need speech to store it. Speech is just a communication medium. A lot of accessibility is just altering the communication medium. It has columns, rows, things that are described with words. You can index into the grid. It is true that sight is a good thing, but your total refusal to provide features to those with alternate needs is ableist. It doesn't matter if the visual component is the original source and I agree excel couldn't have been created without sight. Clay tablet accounting couldn't be created without sight. Doesn't mean you can't use other senses when something has been created. Why the refusal to share? It's pointless not to share. An ending note: Leonhard Euler was rather productive while blind.
Enough allusions to a nebulous solution that must surely somehow exist. How would you represent Excel to a user that is not sighted? A spreadsheet is not just a table, it's tables within tables. The data is scattered in tables around the sheet and inconsistently surrounded by areas of empty cells, the data is ad-hoc and user created and can not be assumed to have any standard headings or type annotations as many spreadsheets just don't. Unrelated tables may also be adjacent to each other within the sheet. A row of empty cells may be semantically meaningful, or just the space between two different tables. There may or may not be headings or column labels. Any cell may be represented both as a formula and a value. Formulas may refer to any cell both within the sheet and within other sheets in the workbook. It's as truest digital equivalent of unstructured writing with pencil on a blank sheet of paper.
Many of the things that make this a complete accessibility nightmare are the same things that makes it an extremely versatile and high-utility tool for abled people. The complete lack of structure and freedom to invent completely ad-hoc work flows that may or may not resemble structured data is exactly what makes it so incredibly powerful.
My entire point I've been trying to make is that there is an inherent conflict here. Pretending like it doesn't exist doesn't make it go away.
A voice presents the information structurally top-down recursively as needed. That's it. Braille displays may also be used. If the excel is unstructured, an inclusive organization makes sure such files are documented. Soon an LLM may describe the structure. And don't underestimate peoples intelligence if they happen to be alone without documentation, structure can be extrapolated. Let's not pretend things are impossible that aren't. A simple screen reader gets a lot done here.
>surely the goal is for the utility to be the same?
Not for the methods to be the same, the goal is for the output to be the same. To consider the majority's way of doing things the correct way is sort of discriminatory. To cram people with different needs into an existing framework doesn't always work, rather you have to meet their needs so they can provide the same value in alternative ways.
I like your point excellent job you're right of course it's a difficult problem. I won't be able to reply any longer. I hope you may generalize an appreciation of the willpower of people with functional variations and not try and fit them in a mold rather give them alternative interfaces that they need to produce the same results
2. "Tables" are primarily for static tabular data (but not exclusively). Excel is a "spreadsheet," a grid of interactive cells.
3. While accessibility is best thought of as an aspect of usability, the practical limitations of tables or spreadsheets on phones are usability problems for everyone, not just for people with disabilities. It's more about the touch interface than what you can see on the screen; a modern phone can display a lot more than the monitors used for the first spreadsheet programs.
4. While having vision can make it more efficient to take in and understand a lot of information in a table or spreadsheet, a screen reader user can navigate them in two dimensions if they're made correctly. Excel's core functionality is useable with a screen reader though not every single feature is.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/screen-reader-sup...
One of the most useful desktop applications uses a metaphor that is among other things, fundamentally incompatible with mobile devices, and also all but useless for blind people.
It's also important to note that Excel's value is not primarily as a presentation format, but a data transformation tool. Its strength is that it permits the user to define ad-hoc tables and then proceed to transform that data in completely arbitrary ways.
Adopting an accessibility first mindset, you can design software that does not use such a metaphor, enabling it to be accessible on mobile and for people who aren't sighted, but such a design would exclude a lot of the utility of Excel, since almost all of its utility comes from the grid metaphor.
> While accessibility is best thought of as an aspect of usability, the practical limitations of tables or spreadsheets on phones are usability problems for everyone, not just for people with disabilities. It's more about the touch interface than what you can see on the screen; a modern phone can display a lot more than the monitors used for the first spreadsheet programs.
This isn't actually correct. Modern phones have very high resolution, but also very high DPI. The amount of (readable) text is very low, even compared to an old 15" CRT on which you could read a 8x4 pixel font without much trouble.
No matter how high the resolution is, the fact of the matter is that a mobile phone is generously half the size of a page in a paperback. Even an old, small computer screen was the size of full two pages, if not more.
I've recently had surgery on my shoulder, and have to have my left arm in a sling with no use for 6 weeks. I've made heavy use of my phone's one handed mode, and window's sticky keys
When my partner goes to bed at night, I can keep watching Star Trek TNG with subtitles.
One lens for looking at disability is that a disability is a system’s inability to cope with a particular user’s set of needs.
I think the classic example of accessibility being better for everyone is the ramps at crosswalks. They help people with wheel chairs, they let blind people know they're walking into a crosswalk. But they also give people more traction, or help people with strollers move around.
[1] It looked like this: https://www.coursearc.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Persona...
Don't take this as a snarky remark, but why are subtitles the solution to this over headphones?
That said, I'd say Global Accessibility Awareness Day is mainstream enough at this point to be called out, given that it's being mentioned at the bottom of Apple's press releases for accessibility (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/apple-previews-live-s...)
I figured he'd be interested in suggestions on how to raise the likelihood the occupants would know it's the police and not some gang bangers. Especially since it could save lives on both sides of an incident, including his.
He wasn't personally interested in yet another thing to carry/deploy/remember when he knocks on doors, and said we can't worry about every "edge case". Whatever I said, he tended to push back.
But after I pressed him some more, he said I could email a suggestion to my state's peace officer standards and training "POST" org. (usa)
Are there laws about sticking something under a door?
There are hockey-puck sized devices you can attach to surfaces, which can turn them into speakers. Perhaps you can make clearer, calmer announcements compared to yelling, especially if the device can take a second to calibrate itself against the material. Once it's attached, your hand is free to do something other than knocking. And the device can play some standard announcement, so your voice is freed up as well to communicate with other officers or whatever.
Yes such a device wouldn't be cheap, but if I were an officer and there's a risk of being misunderstood, I'd be interested.
We really have to train new attitudes into our police, starting with the idea that as peace officers, their first priority is to keep the peace, like "first do no harm" for doctors, and not roll into every situation expecting to get a chance to be Dirty Harry.
See BoldContacts.org, and you can email me at joel@joelparkerhenderson.com. I'm seeking help with app dev, healhcare outreach, and the UK visa.
Unfortunately there are more customers who aren't handicapped.
Small and Medium businesses "waste time" on all sorts of things, one anecdote that might help your libertarian leanings is that majority of disabilities are age related, and the majority of the wealth is controlled by older folks who are far more likely to just not spend money at said small/medium business without providing any feedback to said inaccessible business.
In general, I might look at the "curb cut effect". Curb cuts are those things you see on sidewalks that let folks roll bikes, carts, strollers, walkers, and even wheel chairs when cross streets. You might take for granted that the build environment for folks is far more accessible than it was in the 80s pre ADA.
My philosophy is well designed systems fully embrace the constraints and benefit everyone.
For example, there are still games created which do not support button remapping because why would they? It's an accessibility option, they don't need to support 'everyone'. But I, as someone who is not disabled, use it because it allows me to make the controls more comfortable.
I, perhaps naively, think that training a better model(s) that helps with accessibility is a much better path forward for users that need it. Just a genuine question, not sure why I am getting downvoted. By no means, I am implying that this is not important.
1: https://accessibility.day/events/
The main issue I see is that most devs simply do not care, and/or dev management not prioritizing it unless required by regulations.
The biggest problem I see is that isn't likely ever going to change.
In the olden days, people referred to the "curb cut" — the smooth cutout at the edge of a curb that allows a wheelchair user to traverse from street level onto the curb. This turns out to be useful for UPS drivers with dollies, parents with strollers, and many other users as well.
In the digital world there are other examples, including better SEO ratings for websites that have proper accessibility and can be more accurately parsed by web crawlers.
I've found that if you present both the accessibility benefits and the business benefits, you can make a lot more progress than if you just rely on one or the other.
A good ethos for accessible design is that making designs accessible and inclusive often the raises the bar for the average non-disabled user.
99% invisible has a good podcast on this with the development of the curb-cut. Oriignally it was for wheelchairs but it turns out to help parents with strollers as well!
Also love to point to the disability persona spectrum. Shows how disabilities can vary from permanent, temporary, and situational. I think the Microsoft's Inclusive Design Toolkit is partly responsible for it (but doesn't appear in the deck).
- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/
- https://infinum.com/handbook/img/accessibility/Persona_spect...
- https://scope.bccampus.ca/pluginfile.php/52293/block_html/co...
It's pretty amazing what you can accomplish with a philosophy of progress over perfection, the right framing, and some specific goals.
I'd challenge you all to set some public goals for accessibility (even if they are small) (for ideas: you could see what we've been doing, see: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/olarks-accessibility-journey-... , which links out to the goals and results for the past 3 years)
and then check back on them in a year. NOTE: if you are inside a bigger org, odds are you won't be able to post it super publicly, but at least write them down somewhere and come back to them to check progress, and set goals for the next period.
Stuff like Jupyter notebooks are also not accessible, making it a little bit harder for visually impaired people in stem