muchtooarrogant | The Chasm Between

LJI Week 1: Someone who will love you in all your damaged glory
I’m one of those geeky guys who loves techy things, but like an elephant in the room I can never ignore, there’s always been a dichotomy splitting those cool gadgets down the middle. No, not cost, although okay, I do rather expect to be priced out of the first viable robot companion that hits the market. I’m a blind guy, and for me, the issue digging that trench betwixt the good and the bad is accessibility. In my case, whether it’s a computer or phone app, accessibility means that whatever screen reader I’m using can read and maneuver through the app interface.

On the good side of the gap, the example I'll use is reading a book. When I was a kid—keep in mind I'm old, so this would be the 1970s-80s—the only two ways I could read a book were if:

Someone embossed it in braille. Braille was and is time consuming and expensive to produce, so books like this were rare, but I do have memories of lounging on the couch and reading James and the Giant Peach, so not impossible for all that.

Someone was recorded while reading the book aloud. While this has become popularized today by organizations like Audible, back in "the good old days" I relied on a government outfit called the National Library Service, who have the nifty motto, "That All May Read." Books from NLS were ordered by phone, and received through the mail in containers which originally contained records, then tape cassettes, and eventually digital cartridges.

A bit later on, optical character recognition became advanced enough that, if you had the stamina, you could plop down a book on a scanner and laboriously scan in each and every page. This is not to say that the scanned version would be free of errors, oh no, but think of the freedom! Instead of waiting months, or years, or sometimes never for a favorite book to be recorded or brailled, I could travel to a bookstore immediately after a book was released, hand over some cold hard cash, obtain the book, travel back home, scan pages for three to five hours, and read it (assuming I still had the energy.)

And today there is … Amazon Kindle! Because Amazon made this app accessible, I can browse, order, and read books on my phone, just like everyone else. Granted, it took something like forty years of my own life experience to finally arrive at this exalted point, but arrive I did.

What's that? You want to hear about the bad side of the gap?

Beware, the bad side of the gap is an enormous wasteland. No worries though, I'll ease you in by describing something that's just annoying. Our home has a smart garage door opener, and as you would expect, on my phone there's an app which gives me access to the door's functions. When I launch the app, I can read how long the door has been open or closed, a settings button, a button to add another door, and tabs for Home, History, Users, etc. Notice anything that's missing?

How about a button to actually open/close the door in question?

Nope, not there!

Maybe if I tap where it tells me how long it's been open or closed?

Nope, nothing happens.

The answer. There's an area of the screen which appears blank to the screen reader where it consequently says nothing. If I tap when I reach the silence, the door magically opens/closes. Go figure!

Next up, there's Wordle. Initially, when Josh Wardle released the game, I was disappointed to discover that it only used colors to call out various letter categories—absent, present, and correct. Then, a really clever programmer wrote a script that would, if you ran it before playing the game, verbally identify letters tagged with a color.

"Excellent!" screeched the blind man, began playing Wordle daily, and swiftly addicted other family members such as his wife.

Well, you know what happened next, in January of 2022, the New York Times bought Wordle. Shortly thereafter, the development team over at the grey lady decided to "enhance" Wordle's letter colors, and that broke the script the afore-mentioned clever programmer had written. I contacted the script programmer, but received no response. I also contacted the NYT, and was met with extreme bafflement.

"Blind? … accessible? … screen reader?"

See, that's the thing about the bad side of the gap, besides being crammed full of poorly written apps, it is also populated with people who, although they are not evil per say, are profoundly ignorant!

After a week or two spinning my wheels, I eventually reached a lady who headed up the NYT's game development team, and after she listened to my complaints, told me that they were working on a solution to the accessibility issue. (Accessibility is actually a civil right, and not simply a pesky bug that needs to be squashed, but anyway.)

The end result? After almost a year of randomly checking to see if by some miracle the app had started to work, one day it did. Which brings me to the moral of this tale. Even if an ap is "born bad," redemption is possible! Sure, it would be better and I would prefer it if all apps were "born accessible," but that's not the world we live in.

I love technology because even with all its flaws and shortcomings, it can do amazing things, and that's because it's powered by amazing people.

Author's Note
Although the topic of inaccessible content shouldn't be viewed as trivial, you may have noticed that my allegory of the good and bad sides of the gap was pretty lighthearted. The reason is that dealing with inaccessible crap is my daily life experience. Whether I'm paying bills, viewing bank transactions, or just trying to read a stupid newsletter sent out by my HOA, lack of equivalent access is always an issue. I decided to use a bit of humor because it's often more fun to land punches that way, has the added benefit of keeping my stress level down, and hopefully avoids sounding too preachy.

Thanks for reading.

Dan

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

pixiebelle

Thank you for sharing your experiences with us. It’s not something I have had to think about before, so I appreciate learning about accessibility and how far it’s come - but also how far we still need to go with it.

From:

Only 7 Chromosomes

The Chasm Between

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