Communities like this (rblind.com) and r/blind are focused on serving the blind and visually impaired community, including friends and family. They’re also valuable as an opportunity for people outside the community to learn about the blind experience.
That brings us to the question: sighted friends, what have you learned that you’d like to share?
The use of accessibility tools including apps to be the eyes and ears off blind or deaf people. As someone with hearing damage who will likely lose a significant part of my hearing in old age I’m surprised and pretty happy with these services and how great they’ve become in such a relatively short time. That being said I have so many suggestions to make it easier and make the services better.
We really live in an incredible time - while many barriers are social rather than technical, the mainstream and assistive usability we have these days is nothing short of magical.
How incredibly good blind people can master the art of looking me directly into the eyes when talking to me despite not being able to see me.
Some of you are eerily good at locating my eyes based solely on the source of the sound of me talking.
@MostlyBlindGamer kind of random but when I met a Blind power user of text to speech who would listen to documents read aloud at a much higher speed and explained that “Robotic” sounding voices work much better for this than natural sounding synthesized voices. till then I always thought the ideal for everyone was the most natural sounding voice possible and that robot-like voices were worse
@MostlyBlindGamer @alttexthalloffame I was a bit surprised that there’s a sizable community of blind gamers.
One thing I’ve realized over the past few years is that it’s not the disability that keeps you from enjoying life, it really is about how the rest of the world treats you.
And it’s always great to see when people put in the effort to make sure everyone is included.
[raises hand] Yeah and it keeps getting better and better with improvements to mainstream videogame accessibility.
@MostlyBlindGamer That’s really great to hear!
I worked for a company that was hard core focused on accessibility. We had a tester with full blindness that would make sure we didn’t miss anything in our web apps. The thing that surprised me was how they oriented the phone. Facing away, using a special 8 finger key board. They fact they could operate any accessible website with that was amazing because they were also thinking about what they were doing and listening to the screen reader. A lot of split attention.
Ah, yeah, Braille screen input in screen away mode. Braille is typed out on a six key chording keyboard. Think home row mods.
When you don’t have to look at the screen, it’s more comfortable to hold a phone that way than to put it down somewhere to type, since you still need both hands.
Neat paradigm shift, for sure.
I never really thought about all the different types of blindness until I saw a video about a man getting kicked out of a restaurant due to his service dog. It was really surprising to me to hear about people with partial blindness that could benefit from tricks like using their phone camera and holding it close to their eyes to see better.
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@MostlyBlindGamer I’ve been surprised that blind programming is such a thing, because I’ve always considered programming so visual. But maybe that’s more about how I perceive it.
Having worked a bit with LabView, I’d almost agree, but isn’t it also like writing a letter to the compiler or interpreter?
A lot of the design, architecture, and algorithm work can be done in a very visual way, but it’s also a kind of storytelling.
Tommy Edison talked about how he just can’t wrap his head around photographs. I had never thought about it but if you mainly know your surroundings by touch, a 2D image might be weird to imagine.
He also hates spaghetti. He touched them when he was a kid and it felt super strange to him
That linux boot process is not accessible. Would’ve never thought should or shouldn’t be in the first place.
Yeah, Linux is… complicated. macOS, on the other hand, has screen reader support through the whole process, including recovery. Talk about a disability tax, huh?
