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.
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.
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?
