I once sat on a zoom call with a vision impaired user to do some accessibility testing on our site.
First, it was enlightening for me to see how she navigated through our site using her screen reader.
Second when she landed on our booking page we got so embarrassed because she couldn’t use our date picker. A basic HTML version would have done the job. But a few weeks back we had debated over which fancy jquery date picker plugin we should use without considering the impact. It was fancy alright, yet it wasn’t usable at all for this user.
I learned and felt many things that day as an engineer. Thinking in depth, across many different personas is a difficult thing to do, let alone building a tool that works well.
At my job we worked with an accessibility agency to train our devs and designers on web accessibility. It's really enlightening to see someone navigating smoothly with just sound or with 800% zoom. And very embarrassing when your menus just repeat the same "list item" label 5 times because of poor use of semantic HTML.
The devs of a site (or an application) are in a video call, with screen sharing or whatever is useful, with a user who has accessibility needs and is using their site/program. A bunch of other devs sit in on it, muted, just learning. Then the devs throw some money in the pot and the user who did the testing gets paid for their time. Everybody wins.
Oh, and if all participants agree, the stream is made available for subscribers, and then the user gets royalties off that, too.
You just described what is known as "user testing". They can happen in person, like a focus group, or remotely. Companies reach out to the public for "random" users that fit the given criteria and are paid for their time. You can also use a 3rd party service who will pair you with random testers, for example https://www.usertesting.com/
It's been a while, but I'm not convinced there is a truly accessible date picker out there. Allowing manual typing of the date seems like the best and only viable option.
Also just typing the date manually is almost always faster than using a date picker. Or at least that's how I perceive it, which is all that matters. I hate apps that force me to take my hands off the keyboard and use the mouse.
That makes me think, how does one learn to use a screen reader? (Or alternatives for other handicaps)
It seems fairly technical and challenging to learn, but I feel it would make sense for abled engineers to practice using those.
I personally wouldn’t even know where to start, I only enabled the screen reader a few times by mistakes and have no idea how I could learn to be effective with it if I need to at some point in my life.
I've been learning screen readers in my spare time because it seems like a nice screen off way to browse content in bed. It's servicable and maybe even viable way to work if more of the web was tailored for it.
I don't want to overdo it with high-falutin' theorizing, but I think your firm's definition of "fancy" might be missing some crucial aspects, or maybe "fancy" isn't the right term. Maybe it was "flashy," or "gaudy," or "decorative"? Maybe it was "branded"? Or did it actually offer sighted users a more effective UX?
In terms of web UX, one disability that hardly anyone considers is intellectual disability - but really many people who work in development (design, project management, programming) are outliers in terms of intellectual ability (albeit probably not as much as they think they are)
But we're all just temporarily smart as well, many people are not that bright before that first cup of coffee or if they are going through lots of stress (hence crunch time often decreasing productivity)
One of the problems I have is encountering design decisions that I think that must be a bug, only to have it turn out to be a real thing. This quirk in my character cost me a lot of money with the Danish department of business registration, - long story short when I said I filled out what they wanted filled out and speculated maybe their site was broken they said oh you probably made this specific mistake, everybody does that - but in the end I still had to pay thousands of dollars in fines and close down the company (it was when Denmark decided you had to specify the legal owner of an LLC or face forced closure with fines, about a year later they closed down all LLCs anyway)
on edit: of course a lot of devs have specific intellectual differences in ability - like ADHD.
My daughter has a very serious learning disability and she loves to swipe through home photos or videos on an android phone or on an ipad. She can mostly get on OK but when you look at it from her point of view, its _amazing_ how complicated 'swiping through pics' has become.
Swipe from the top? that brings the notifications
Swipe from the bottom? Brings up photo options. Press on one of those by accident and you end up in a nest of menus and features that can be hard to get out of.
Want to play a video? Tap once, the video controls fade in, you've then got to tap the play button in the middle of the screen within half a second or so, or it fades out again
Long press while scrolling through list of photos? Now you're in 'select mode' and every photo you press gets added to the selection rather than getting displayed. Can be very confusing.
Press the wrong button in IOS and you end up in very confusing picture-in-picture mode
One great thing about iOS is the 'guided access' feature, you can use it to lock the ipad into one app and even disable parts of the touchscreen so that a child can use the ipad without accidentally finding their way out of the app and into your email. I dont think Android has an equivalent. edit: ah yes it does - App Pinning - thanks
Yep, imagine how difficult it is for the blind. I had to explain that tapping and swiping this light brick in their hand could order pizza. Pretty much witchcraft.
Android does have that feature on some phones, it's called App Pinning.
Insisting on just one button for basic interactions and swipes for the rest was a mistake.
On top of that apps (looking at you, Instagram) are often simply buggy. You can have the same video play or not play depending on how the winds of load balancing blow. No graceful degradation or anything.
I friend of mine a few years back once said to me, "Some days ADHD is my most disabling condition." This is a person who often can't walk.
I was properly medicated (with non-stimulant medication) for ADHD a few years ago and looking back to my life before that, I realize how much ADHD has negatively effected my life. And yet never along the way did anyone look at me with any sort of compassion. It was always seen as a moral failing on my part, a "Why can't you do this? Everyone else can." And I had been given those messages so consistently that I came to believe them about myself.
It was really eye-opening to have someone with a visibility tell me that sometimes their intellectual disability hampered their life more than their physical disability.
I use an adblocker, DarkReader, and reader mode, because of my ADHD. Even minor distractions or asinine GUI "features" can make it impossible for me to focus on the content of the page. I don't tend to think of myself as disabled, but I absolutely rely on accessibility tools (in all but name) to navigate the web.
I don't have ADHD but I have some neuro-visual impairments and movement + visual crowding are huge problems for me. It's basically really easy to turn things into an I Spy or Where's Waldo page for me where I can't see anything because there's too much going on. Lots of websites are problems.
One thing I also really like in addition to what you mentioned is greyscale mode.
Don't forget specific learning disabilities, either. I, personally, have a deficiency in visual-spatial processing. I can't say that it's come up in a web UX context before, but I can certainly imagine it doing so if a site decides to implement some kind of fancy spatial UI.
One of the things I gained an appreciation of was the editorial rule most newspapers had, but have now abandoned on the web, to write at or below an 8th grade level.
I know someone who has a 134 IQ (well above average) but also has a comprehension disorder. They work in tech, but often need to send articles/instructions to a peer for summary/interpretation. They have an extensive vocabulary but if there is an unnecessarily complex paragraph they just get lost between the beginning and end.
It’s greatly made me appreciate simple straightforward technical documentation beyond my existing appreciation because simplicity doesn’t waste my own time.
when I was in high school they gave me some sort of advanced IQ test, I scored in the top 1% of the population for reading comprehension and logic, and in the lowest 5% for visual spatial processing - I have however improved quite a bit since that time in the latter area.
We take it for granted. But intellectual decline is a real thing. My memory was superior before. And my work processes revolved around superior memory. Then I got sick for 19 days with severe headaches. And I was not the same after.
I deserved it too. I was too proud and demeaning others for not being able (like me) to remember things.
I became disabled after a music festival last year. The music was too loud and something broke in my ear.
Now every sound hurts me, my voice is far too painful, going for a walk outside is too painful. Basically I can't do anything but sit in a silent room and browse the internet.
Pain hyperacusis sucks. I wish I'd been more careful with my hearing.
Sorry that you're going through that. As someone who once had severe hyperacusis, I sympathize with your situation as my own whispers as well as keystrokes would hurt my ear. It was challenging to browse the web due to the inability to type in a website URL or input into a search bar.
One of the hardest parts of this disability is that it is invisible and so difficult to explain to a third party. People think you are overly dramatic.
In many cases, hyperacusis does get better on its own with time, so keep hanging in there.
These things can happen suddenly and without warning. When I was 18 I was in a nightclub, my mate shouted a bit too loud into my ear (because the music was loud) and permanently damaged my hearing in my right ear, it hurts to hear certain frequencies in that ear now, and sounds like water stuck in there when it happens.
I'm sorry to hear you have it (or something worse) in both
Got Tinnitus from working as a concert photographer. It's not so bad. I've learned to live with it. But yeah... It's permanent. So, to not make it worse, I've bought protection that I carry with me when I go to loud clubs or concerts. I use it religiously. Highly recommended! Especially if you work in a bar or club, or in some capacity at concerts. Do it now, because Tinnitus doesn't go away. Some of them are very discrete, but if you like making a splash there are ones that look quite stylish as well.
Original comment was talking about Hyperacusis, and it sounds like for them it's way worse than Tinnitus, causing them physical pain just going outside for a walk. I have Tinnitus also and going outside is actually soothing for my ears, as the ambient noise of nature masks the ringing a bit.
Tinnitus does interfere with my ability to concentrate from time to time, though. Not great for a job where concentration is required most of the time.
Is there any particular type or brand of earplugs you recommend, that are comfortable enough to wear for multiple hours and don't make the music sound too muffled (while still reducing the volume to safe levels)?
Standing too close to a speaker at a house party gave me permanent tinnitus. Took me a long time to accept it mentally and emotionally. Now I’m a lot more careful with my hearing.
Would recommend to everyone / have bought as a gift a pair of ear plugs that fit onto your key chain. They are like $10 and are honestly the most useful thing I carry on that ring aside from the actual keys. Plus they can be useful in random situations (Needed them to sleep while camping recently because the wind was so strong)
I realize this is going to sound dumb, but please also consider that we all (almost all) carry natural ear plugs with us in the form of our hands/fingers. When sound gets loud, do not hesitate to plug in quickly. Damage to our hearing apparatus depends on intensity and duration, so the sooner you plug the better.
It may be safer to plug your ears with your fingers quickly than to spend a few seconds looking for your fancy -33 dB ear plugs, as unexpected loud noises tend to surprise us but not last very long (ambulance, fighter jet, honking, etc).
In addition to this, there are lots of sound level measuring apps for our smartphones and it can be helpful to measure long lasting levels at venues (concerts, bars, etc). Airplane cabin noise is surprisingly loud. Noise canceling headphones are a great tool for this scenario.
Finally, remember that hearing damage is cumulative: what many of your peers will tolerate fine may not work for you and vice versa. Watch for "the straw that breaks the camel's back".
If your hearing apparatus has already been insulted, treat it with lots of care. If it hasn't already been insulted, treat it with lots of care.
I was standing near a speaker at a concert, and all of a sudden my ear just sounded like an amp that was overdriven, all distortion, fortunately I recovered, but I don't go near speakers at concerts any more.
I’m really sorry. I got temporary hyperacusis from a similar situation a few years back and wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It did eventually subside, and I hope it does for you too, although the time scale of recovery varies. I’m hopeful that people start finding ways to treat this as it’s probably becoming a bigger problem as our generation ages.
I have got my right lung busted by a sub-woofer at the techno rave party in 2011. Still hurts from time to time as there are some wierd scars left inside.
I think the concert\rave\nightclub sound levels should be revised globally. It is so stupid to blast mostly shitty music that loud. It will not make it better...
This is off topic but the last ten or so years, the volume level at shows has gone over the top. I did indoor and outdoor shows in the 80s and 90s without plugs and worst case was a little ringing the next day. I mostly did outdoor concerts in the 2000's so I don't know what indoor shows were like but in 2013 I started taking my daughter to shows and holly shit balls it was loud. The last show that I went to I had to step outside to get a break even though I was wearing -32db plugs.
So this is how I live my life - knowing that your good health and ability can always just end at no fault of your own. It still haunts me that my father had plans we always talked about, he was very active and loved going outdoors and travelling, mountain biking, hiking etc, he spent a crazy amount of time getting a Land Rover done up as a Camel Trophy replica for a big adventure we were meant to go on, and then basically got cancer and died couple months after his 50th birthday.
That's not to be gloomy and depressing - just that if you:
1) want to do something
2) have the physical health to do it
3) doing so won't put your family in a difficult situation financially or otherwise
Just do it. When my friends say "oh I'll do that when I'm retired" or even just "oh I'll start activity X maybe in a couple of years" I'm like.........why. You don't even know if you'll be fit and healthy next year, making plans for your retirement in 20 years or even postponing simple outdoor activities like mountain biking or camping for a couple years "when the time is better" is.....unreasonable to me.
Like the article says - we're all just temporarily abled. Maybe some of us if very lucky will remain abled for a long time. A lot of people will not. If you have the good fortune of being abled now, use it now.
Good advice, one of my dear family friends father passed away during Christmas in 2021.
I think the saddest thing was that they had been planning a trip to Spain and were putting it off to do other things instead, he was nearing retirement as well.
Since that day I've been more willing to do things instead of putting them off.
While I don't disagree there are certain activities (skydiving etc.) I'm happy to wait until retirement to try, given the consequences of something going wrong - if I miss out on my last decade or so of growing old peacefully, so be it. But I'm not quite so cavalier about it when I'm hoping I still have another 30 years of good health ahead of me.
I worked very hard to get into a very physical job and I made it. It was the beginning of my professional career, I wanted to do this since I was a kid. I was 22.
A few weeks went by, still couldn't believe they were paying me to do something I loved so much :) Of course, one regular day going to work on my motorcycle a distracted pedestrian crossed illegally and without looking. It jumped from behind a big truck, impossible to avoid.
Due to the collision I fell right on the corner of the curb. I was driving slowly, the height of the seat to the curb was high enough to break a vertebra and bruise my spinal cord. I became a paraplegic at that instant, for life.
He got a small crack in his arm.
My professional career and all my dreams vanished. I watched my colleagues and friends move on enjoying life and the fruits of that effort. I was very envious, but nobody could do anything about it. I felt robbed.
Obviously I can't walk but it's so much more than that. Surveys among fellow paralyzed tend to show "walking" as the last "feature" we'd all like to have back.
I can't feel anything from the belly button down either. Simple things like going to the bathroom are no longer simple. I enjoyed sex a lot, goodbye to any of that. I get regular annoying spasms. I hava to take a bunch of pills every 8h
I have severe chronic pain for which I have to take morphine regularly, which does not come without major side effects. I have to have surgery from time to time for adjustments and other stuff secondary to the injury.
Fortunately, I am happy. I was already a person who didn't grate at things out of my control, but learning stoicism cemented it. Just for the fact that I was born and have been able to look at the stars in our galaxy and others, I feel it has been worth it. I feel privileged.
I live with my amazing girldfriend, I enjoy stimulating hobbies and a day-to-day life that I don't take for granted.
It's heartbreaking to read! :( But thanks for sharing it. It's also a terrific reminder to those of us who are still "able" yet are dissatisfied with our lives for a variety of foolish reasons. And a good reminder that our lives may be turned upside down in an instant. I respect how you dealt with it while still enjoying life. Also good to hear that your girlfriend still loves and supports you. I wish you all the best!
How many people I know got hit by a car and had their life ruined horribly. Or a bad surgery. Things totally out of their control.
We need to see disability as a cost to society we must pay, not a failure of individuals which is more or less what were treating it.
The American disability system is basically proving (very painfully) that life is barely livable to get scraps of help. Like below poverty levels.
I really wish that we moved away from pain oriented policy - - how much pain are you willing to tolerate so we can get you basic assistance and into some sort of way to guarantee that people live an okay life as a default. My dream is to see this sometime in my lifetime.
I have a child with autism. The American system is cruel beyond imagination.
To qualify them for social security and Medicaid I have to leave them impoverished. They can't have more than $2k worth of assets in their name. Instead it's a complex lawyer game of trusts to give my child any sort of inheritance. Yet they are basically guaranteed to end up in a group home (Even though I own my own home) because a caretaker after I go is unlikely. Further, what the trust can pay for is things not covered by Medicare and SS. So housing and food are limited to what the government would pay for.
And then there's the concern of how this all plays out if I get dementia or disability which requires substantial finances.
There's a reason people with autism tend to end up homeless.
I feel like the biggest thing the US could do is remove means-testing from our disability aid programs. Means testing usually does not feel like an effective way to distribute services.
I want millionaires to be using government aid to help their children: just like with free education, when everyone who needs help uses it, the richer parents will demand, and ensure we pay for, higher quality for all. Everyone who is currently able to can all just pay a bit more in taxes to cover everyone’s accessibility and aid needs. I don’t want it to be possible for a child’s needs not to be met just because the state thinks the child’s family has too much money.
Aid services should be treated like sidewalks and fire departments: almost everyone is going to need them at some point, why would you want to make it difficult to access?
You should also look into an able account. Your son can have up to 100k in assets invested in what's basically a 529 for people with disabilities. It can go towards housing and food. Get them on snap as well. Every little bit helps.
If you don't know already, go look up ABLE accounts. If your child became disabled before the age of 26, they can create an ABLE account and keep much, much more money in their ABLE account than they would otherwise be allowed to keep. ABLE account funds can be used for living expenses that cover the majority of expenses for most people- housing, healthcare, transportation, etc.
This seems like a lot of work that still leaves your child at the mercy of the American system. Have you considered acquiring a second passport for your child somewhere with better social policies? If you have the capital to setup a meaningful trust fund many CBI programs should be within reach.
>The American disability system is basically proving (very painfully) that life is barely livable to get scraps of help. Like below poverty levels.
Yep, SSI disability is a system designed to keep you in poverty. The current max benefit is a little more than $900 / mo. That's basically unlivable unless you also happen to have section 8 housing, which when I asked, had such a huge waitlist it was unusable. $900 / month is certainly not enough to have any sort of dignified life. It's a grim existence punctuated by constant worry over every purchase.
I was on it from 18 to my mid 20's. Thankfully voc rehab helped me scrounge enough grants and scholarships together to pay for me to get a CS degree in '08. I've done quite well for myself since, but it's been a long road.
Also, the second you have slightly more than pocket cash to your name, all your disability and SSI type benefits go away. You cannot work yourself out of disability, because getting a job that can't exclusively pay for all your needs will still kill your benefits, leaving you worse off than the horrid poverty of exclusively relying on the government.
So many people in America who are on government benefits for life would LOVE to work odd jobs or part time and contribute to the economy and buy like an xbox or something but they cannot, because they would then be kicked out of their housing program. It's absurd.
Then these people on fixed, abysmal incomes are preyed upon by an entire industry who exists to skim off fees from the poor for everything from cashing checks, to hounding them for debts, to things like Dollar Tree where you can pay double the unit rate to buy a small portion of a normal product.
The Canadian system for disability isn't much better... about the same. I grew up as a child of a single parent who was physically disabled and unable to work. I had to hold a job down on top of school from the beginning of high school onward. My grades suffered terribly and I couldn't get into university. My parent has been dependent on us our whole lives since then: poverty is forced on people in these situations and it becomes a vicious cycle.
The Canadian system has been systematically dismantled by the conservative movements for decades. Long term care was privatized and has been in a slow decline. I've been writing our ministers here for years urging them with solutions to fix the system. Meanwhile my Nan in her 90's, living with Type 1 diabetes, had to go hungry during the pandemic when they couldn't get workers who understood her dietary needs to prepare food she could actually eat. It's been a huge drain on her health in these years of her life and has left a terrible mark.
Definitely worth advocating for and joining movements to push for social programs and human rights. When everyone's quality of life improves so many other things are raised up with it.
It's not even pain-oriented. It's visibility-oriented.
I deal with chronic migraine and it's extremely difficult to get on SSDI for that disorder (unless it is secondary to something more visible, like a TBI). Other invisible chronic pain conditions (e.g. fibromyalgia) are similarly dismissed.
Or diagnosed as something they clearly are not, like depression. There are doctors who are willing and interested in doing the necessary investigative work to figure out what is going on, but they are an extremely small minority.
Off-topic, but have you tried a CGRP Inhibitor? That's a newish class of drugs specifically developed for migraine. Aimovig has been game changing for me.
My fiance had intercranial hypertension. Which is a complex way of saying "we don't know the root cause of why your spinal fluid is causing so much pressure in your head that you want to take a ice pick and poke a hole in it!" which also decreases EVERYTHING due to brain pressure, so more tired, less ability to think, less sensitive to all senses, less emotional control (especially because you're in constant pain / fear of sudden motions causing a lot of pain).
Hard to explain to people that she's not just lazy. Thankfully a relatively easy procedure helped and now she's on the road to a slow recovery.
Edit: Maybe it is just empathy. It is hard to see my tax money going towards turning brown kids into skeletons, and not making people who's life already sucks suck a lot less.
Any system can be hacked, including empathy. We call it "fraud" and unfortunately it seems that the number of humans who can keep two concepts in their head at the same time are vanishingly rare. So you end up with a useless "empathy vs fraud" debate repeated endlessly, roughly corresponding to the left and the right, and it doesn't go anywhere. Of course, what we need is a synthesis. The left needs to be more attuned to fraud that targets empathy, and the right needs to stop using the risk of fraud as an excuse to do nothing.
Sharing someone else's dream is empathy. Wanting people to be treated with dignity is just plain decency.
The issues the parent poster brings up are policy choices. I think it is good to believe people when they say they are suffering, but a better start is to vote for folks who are willing to treat people like people.
> We need to see disability as a cost to society we must pay, not a failure of individuals which is more or less what were treating it.
You frame this as a binary choice, but it's clearly both.
I understand the desire to destigmatize and focus on systemic problems. But I really hate when health issues are framed as only societal/systemic problems. Doing so is factually incorrect and worse, robs individuals of their sense of agency.
One of the main failure modes I see of progressivism (which I am otherwise happily a member of) is treating all problem's as society's fault. And then progressives wonnder why they feel so dispirited and defeated all the time. Maybe it's because we adopted a worldview that gives us no sense of agency over our own lives?
(Of course, one of the well known failure modes of conservatism is blaming individuals for everything.)
The right answer is that it's both. Like the serenity prayer says, do the stuff you can and accept the stuff you can't. Both are equally important.
> We need to see disability as a cost to society we must pay
Nonparticipating Product Hunting lifehacking hustlebros don't see things that way. They are the worst voters: they don't care about other people's problems and they don't care about problems that are even likely to affect them personally. They only care about the now.
ACA enabled nonparticipation. 18-26 year olds got insurance and checked out. Why do you think Republicans supported it? It got passed but it wasn't radical. That's the point.
> My dream is to see this sometime in my lifetime.
Make the radical thing happen by picking a side. If you feel strongly about this, align with something that activists have been advocating for for decades instead of "pain oriented policy" or something idiosyncratic like that. You have way more agency than you think.
My dad went from someone I can chat with every day about something or build something together to partially disabled due to first stroke and now unable to communicate fully or easily due to the second stroke at 65.
He lost his job and sadly there are few things to help with those who are unable to communicate.
That sucks. If it happened recently, though, don't completely lose hope. My mother-in-law had a stroke with a poor prognosis, and years later she's fully recovered and teaches piano!
Indeed. And we are all born disabled (in that we are unable to sustain our own independence and wellbeing without assistance), and will likely all be disabled at the door of death. For such a universal experience, you’d think healthcare was more central a tenet of civilisation… As available and freely usable as the roads we drive on. Not just that, but our very way of work. 40+ hours a week is plainly ableist yet it persists as an almost unshakable norm. If my brain can only handle a couple hours a day, finding regular employment is nigh impossible.
The problem is you can’t go into a “healing tube” like from sci-fi movies and get fixed. Medical workers are real people with their own wants and opinions on their compensation, just as we are as technologists. It’s so funny that everyone on HN expects to make tons of money for little effort, but when doctors and nurses want to be paid huge bucks society balks.
America’s model is where the UK, Canada, and other subsidized healthcare systems are going. Our doctors make way more, but there is recognition that every doctor is not a replaceable cog - the good ones build up names and reputations for themselves. We have quietly built a large system of cheaper options including tele health, urgent care, and primary care (like CVS Minute Clinic) while enabling nurse practitioners to handle ever more procedures and tests. This is how the system will have to scale given the increasing safety net and huge immigration inflows.
Medical care costs money. I’d rather have choice and options than pretend it’s free, which it isn’t.
Private and well-compensated medical workers still don't offer a sci-fi "healing tubes". Private healthcare is maybe marginally better for 1% of the population, but far more expensive.
> America’s model is where the UK, Canada, and other subsidized healthcare systems are going
Well there are other ways to scale - look to China' system - which has a massive throughput of patients in large regional medical centers - primary doctors there see like hundreds of patients a day - but don't do anything but recommend and if you can't get it resolved, they have an escalation mechanism where you see more and more specialized doctors (same day) until you either stump the most specialized docs or they have an action plan for you.
So you could automate the work away or you could create a system that scales through production-line efficiency.
Readit News
First, it was enlightening for me to see how she navigated through our site using her screen reader.
Second when she landed on our booking page we got so embarrassed because she couldn’t use our date picker. A basic HTML version would have done the job. But a few weeks back we had debated over which fancy jquery date picker plugin we should use without considering the impact. It was fancy alright, yet it wasn’t usable at all for this user.
I learned and felt many things that day as an engineer. Thinking in depth, across many different personas is a difficult thing to do, let alone building a tool that works well.
The devs of a site (or an application) are in a video call, with screen sharing or whatever is useful, with a user who has accessibility needs and is using their site/program. A bunch of other devs sit in on it, muted, just learning. Then the devs throw some money in the pot and the user who did the testing gets paid for their time. Everybody wins.
Oh, and if all participants agree, the stream is made available for subscribers, and then the user gets royalties off that, too.
Does this exist? Can someone make it?
That is the only sensible format for dates, and while all developers probably agree on that it isn't a given that all your users will.
It seems fairly technical and challenging to learn, but I feel it would make sense for abled engineers to practice using those.
I personally wouldn’t even know where to start, I only enabled the screen reader a few times by mistakes and have no idea how I could learn to be effective with it if I need to at some point in my life.
VoiceOver on Mac or NVDA on Windows are good, free options.
There's an accessibility playlist on Youtube that provides an introduction to both:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R-6WvAihms&list=PLNYkxOF6rc...
A more in-depth demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0m7VEHoXMI
I don't want to overdo it with high-falutin' theorizing, but I think your firm's definition of "fancy" might be missing some crucial aspects, or maybe "fancy" isn't the right term. Maybe it was "flashy," or "gaudy," or "decorative"? Maybe it was "branded"? Or did it actually offer sighted users a more effective UX?
Dead Comment
But we're all just temporarily smart as well, many people are not that bright before that first cup of coffee or if they are going through lots of stress (hence crunch time often decreasing productivity)
One of the problems I have is encountering design decisions that I think that must be a bug, only to have it turn out to be a real thing. This quirk in my character cost me a lot of money with the Danish department of business registration, - long story short when I said I filled out what they wanted filled out and speculated maybe their site was broken they said oh you probably made this specific mistake, everybody does that - but in the end I still had to pay thousands of dollars in fines and close down the company (it was when Denmark decided you had to specify the legal owner of an LLC or face forced closure with fines, about a year later they closed down all LLCs anyway)
on edit: of course a lot of devs have specific intellectual differences in ability - like ADHD.
Swipe from the top? that brings the notifications
Swipe from the bottom? Brings up photo options. Press on one of those by accident and you end up in a nest of menus and features that can be hard to get out of.
Want to play a video? Tap once, the video controls fade in, you've then got to tap the play button in the middle of the screen within half a second or so, or it fades out again
Long press while scrolling through list of photos? Now you're in 'select mode' and every photo you press gets added to the selection rather than getting displayed. Can be very confusing.
Press the wrong button in IOS and you end up in very confusing picture-in-picture mode
One great thing about iOS is the 'guided access' feature, you can use it to lock the ipad into one app and even disable parts of the touchscreen so that a child can use the ipad without accidentally finding their way out of the app and into your email. I dont think Android has an equivalent. edit: ah yes it does - App Pinning - thanks
Android does have that feature on some phones, it's called App Pinning.
On top of that apps (looking at you, Instagram) are often simply buggy. You can have the same video play or not play depending on how the winds of load balancing blow. No graceful degradation or anything.
I was properly medicated (with non-stimulant medication) for ADHD a few years ago and looking back to my life before that, I realize how much ADHD has negatively effected my life. And yet never along the way did anyone look at me with any sort of compassion. It was always seen as a moral failing on my part, a "Why can't you do this? Everyone else can." And I had been given those messages so consistently that I came to believe them about myself.
It was really eye-opening to have someone with a visibility tell me that sometimes their intellectual disability hampered their life more than their physical disability.
One thing I also really like in addition to what you mentioned is greyscale mode.
I know someone who has a 134 IQ (well above average) but also has a comprehension disorder. They work in tech, but often need to send articles/instructions to a peer for summary/interpretation. They have an extensive vocabulary but if there is an unnecessarily complex paragraph they just get lost between the beginning and end.
It’s greatly made me appreciate simple straightforward technical documentation beyond my existing appreciation because simplicity doesn’t waste my own time.
I deserved it too. I was too proud and demeaning others for not being able (like me) to remember things.
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Now every sound hurts me, my voice is far too painful, going for a walk outside is too painful. Basically I can't do anything but sit in a silent room and browse the internet.
Pain hyperacusis sucks. I wish I'd been more careful with my hearing.
One of the hardest parts of this disability is that it is invisible and so difficult to explain to a third party. People think you are overly dramatic.
In many cases, hyperacusis does get better on its own with time, so keep hanging in there.
Good luck to you.
I'm sorry to hear you have it (or something worse) in both
Take care of your ears, folks.
Tinnitus does interfere with my ability to concentrate from time to time, though. Not great for a job where concentration is required most of the time.
Somehow it never bothered me.
Would recommend to everyone / have bought as a gift a pair of ear plugs that fit onto your key chain. They are like $10 and are honestly the most useful thing I carry on that ring aside from the actual keys. Plus they can be useful in random situations (Needed them to sleep while camping recently because the wind was so strong)
I realize this is going to sound dumb, but please also consider that we all (almost all) carry natural ear plugs with us in the form of our hands/fingers. When sound gets loud, do not hesitate to plug in quickly. Damage to our hearing apparatus depends on intensity and duration, so the sooner you plug the better.
It may be safer to plug your ears with your fingers quickly than to spend a few seconds looking for your fancy -33 dB ear plugs, as unexpected loud noises tend to surprise us but not last very long (ambulance, fighter jet, honking, etc).
In addition to this, there are lots of sound level measuring apps for our smartphones and it can be helpful to measure long lasting levels at venues (concerts, bars, etc). Airplane cabin noise is surprisingly loud. Noise canceling headphones are a great tool for this scenario.
Finally, remember that hearing damage is cumulative: what many of your peers will tolerate fine may not work for you and vice versa. Watch for "the straw that breaks the camel's back".
If your hearing apparatus has already been insulted, treat it with lots of care. If it hasn't already been insulted, treat it with lots of care.
I think the concert\rave\nightclub sound levels should be revised globally. It is so stupid to blast mostly shitty music that loud. It will not make it better...
That's not to be gloomy and depressing - just that if you:
1) want to do something
2) have the physical health to do it
3) doing so won't put your family in a difficult situation financially or otherwise
Just do it. When my friends say "oh I'll do that when I'm retired" or even just "oh I'll start activity X maybe in a couple of years" I'm like.........why. You don't even know if you'll be fit and healthy next year, making plans for your retirement in 20 years or even postponing simple outdoor activities like mountain biking or camping for a couple years "when the time is better" is.....unreasonable to me.
Like the article says - we're all just temporarily abled. Maybe some of us if very lucky will remain abled for a long time. A lot of people will not. If you have the good fortune of being abled now, use it now.
I think the saddest thing was that they had been planning a trip to Spain and were putting it off to do other things instead, he was nearing retirement as well.
Since that day I've been more willing to do things instead of putting them off.
Be mindful to take chronic pain into consideration for any plans later in life, especially if you've not been the most disciplined with your health.
Also get up and stretch more. Please.
I worked very hard to get into a very physical job and I made it. It was the beginning of my professional career, I wanted to do this since I was a kid. I was 22.
A few weeks went by, still couldn't believe they were paying me to do something I loved so much :) Of course, one regular day going to work on my motorcycle a distracted pedestrian crossed illegally and without looking. It jumped from behind a big truck, impossible to avoid.
Due to the collision I fell right on the corner of the curb. I was driving slowly, the height of the seat to the curb was high enough to break a vertebra and bruise my spinal cord. I became a paraplegic at that instant, for life. He got a small crack in his arm.
My professional career and all my dreams vanished. I watched my colleagues and friends move on enjoying life and the fruits of that effort. I was very envious, but nobody could do anything about it. I felt robbed.
Obviously I can't walk but it's so much more than that. Surveys among fellow paralyzed tend to show "walking" as the last "feature" we'd all like to have back. I can't feel anything from the belly button down either. Simple things like going to the bathroom are no longer simple. I enjoyed sex a lot, goodbye to any of that. I get regular annoying spasms. I hava to take a bunch of pills every 8h
I have severe chronic pain for which I have to take morphine regularly, which does not come without major side effects. I have to have surgery from time to time for adjustments and other stuff secondary to the injury.
Fortunately, I am happy. I was already a person who didn't grate at things out of my control, but learning stoicism cemented it. Just for the fact that I was born and have been able to look at the stars in our galaxy and others, I feel it has been worth it. I feel privileged.
I live with my amazing girldfriend, I enjoy stimulating hobbies and a day-to-day life that I don't take for granted.
We need to see disability as a cost to society we must pay, not a failure of individuals which is more or less what were treating it.
The American disability system is basically proving (very painfully) that life is barely livable to get scraps of help. Like below poverty levels.
I really wish that we moved away from pain oriented policy - - how much pain are you willing to tolerate so we can get you basic assistance and into some sort of way to guarantee that people live an okay life as a default. My dream is to see this sometime in my lifetime.
I have a child with autism. The American system is cruel beyond imagination.
To qualify them for social security and Medicaid I have to leave them impoverished. They can't have more than $2k worth of assets in their name. Instead it's a complex lawyer game of trusts to give my child any sort of inheritance. Yet they are basically guaranteed to end up in a group home (Even though I own my own home) because a caretaker after I go is unlikely. Further, what the trust can pay for is things not covered by Medicare and SS. So housing and food are limited to what the government would pay for.
And then there's the concern of how this all plays out if I get dementia or disability which requires substantial finances.
There's a reason people with autism tend to end up homeless.
I want millionaires to be using government aid to help their children: just like with free education, when everyone who needs help uses it, the richer parents will demand, and ensure we pay for, higher quality for all. Everyone who is currently able to can all just pay a bit more in taxes to cover everyone’s accessibility and aid needs. I don’t want it to be possible for a child’s needs not to be met just because the state thinks the child’s family has too much money.
Aid services should be treated like sidewalks and fire departments: almost everyone is going to need them at some point, why would you want to make it difficult to access?
Yep, SSI disability is a system designed to keep you in poverty. The current max benefit is a little more than $900 / mo. That's basically unlivable unless you also happen to have section 8 housing, which when I asked, had such a huge waitlist it was unusable. $900 / month is certainly not enough to have any sort of dignified life. It's a grim existence punctuated by constant worry over every purchase.
I was on it from 18 to my mid 20's. Thankfully voc rehab helped me scrounge enough grants and scholarships together to pay for me to get a CS degree in '08. I've done quite well for myself since, but it's been a long road.
So many people in America who are on government benefits for life would LOVE to work odd jobs or part time and contribute to the economy and buy like an xbox or something but they cannot, because they would then be kicked out of their housing program. It's absurd.
Then these people on fixed, abysmal incomes are preyed upon by an entire industry who exists to skim off fees from the poor for everything from cashing checks, to hounding them for debts, to things like Dollar Tree where you can pay double the unit rate to buy a small portion of a normal product.
The Canadian system has been systematically dismantled by the conservative movements for decades. Long term care was privatized and has been in a slow decline. I've been writing our ministers here for years urging them with solutions to fix the system. Meanwhile my Nan in her 90's, living with Type 1 diabetes, had to go hungry during the pandemic when they couldn't get workers who understood her dietary needs to prepare food she could actually eat. It's been a huge drain on her health in these years of her life and has left a terrible mark.
Definitely worth advocating for and joining movements to push for social programs and human rights. When everyone's quality of life improves so many other things are raised up with it.
I deal with chronic migraine and it's extremely difficult to get on SSDI for that disorder (unless it is secondary to something more visible, like a TBI). Other invisible chronic pain conditions (e.g. fibromyalgia) are similarly dismissed.
https://www.webmd.com/migraines-headaches/cgrp-inhibitors-fo...
Maybe a good start is to believe people who tell us they're suffering, even if what they're suffering from isn't obvious and physical.
Hard to explain to people that she's not just lazy. Thankfully a relatively easy procedure helped and now she's on the road to a slow recovery.
Edit: Maybe it is just empathy. It is hard to see my tax money going towards turning brown kids into skeletons, and not making people who's life already sucks suck a lot less.
Any system can be hacked, including empathy. We call it "fraud" and unfortunately it seems that the number of humans who can keep two concepts in their head at the same time are vanishingly rare. So you end up with a useless "empathy vs fraud" debate repeated endlessly, roughly corresponding to the left and the right, and it doesn't go anywhere. Of course, what we need is a synthesis. The left needs to be more attuned to fraud that targets empathy, and the right needs to stop using the risk of fraud as an excuse to do nothing.
The issues the parent poster brings up are policy choices. I think it is good to believe people when they say they are suffering, but a better start is to vote for folks who are willing to treat people like people.
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You frame this as a binary choice, but it's clearly both.
I understand the desire to destigmatize and focus on systemic problems. But I really hate when health issues are framed as only societal/systemic problems. Doing so is factually incorrect and worse, robs individuals of their sense of agency.
One of the main failure modes I see of progressivism (which I am otherwise happily a member of) is treating all problem's as society's fault. And then progressives wonnder why they feel so dispirited and defeated all the time. Maybe it's because we adopted a worldview that gives us no sense of agency over our own lives?
(Of course, one of the well known failure modes of conservatism is blaming individuals for everything.)
The right answer is that it's both. Like the serenity prayer says, do the stuff you can and accept the stuff you can't. Both are equally important.
> We need to see disability as a cost to society we must pay
Nonparticipating Product Hunting lifehacking hustlebros don't see things that way. They are the worst voters: they don't care about other people's problems and they don't care about problems that are even likely to affect them personally. They only care about the now.
ACA enabled nonparticipation. 18-26 year olds got insurance and checked out. Why do you think Republicans supported it? It got passed but it wasn't radical. That's the point.
> My dream is to see this sometime in my lifetime.
Make the radical thing happen by picking a side. If you feel strongly about this, align with something that activists have been advocating for for decades instead of "pain oriented policy" or something idiosyncratic like that. You have way more agency than you think.
Building our entire society and physical space around cars is a poor choice, or set of choices: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...
Bit by tick and get Lyme disease. Get virus and get chronic fatigue syndrome. Get hit on head and get TBI. Don’t even know what causes fibromyalgia.
I have chronic vestibular migraine, which means dizziness and fatigue, but can work most days.
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He lost his job and sadly there are few things to help with those who are unable to communicate.
This all happened over a single weekend.
We're about a year in and he's gotten to the "I can do this myself, I'm not depressed" phase, haha!
I make sure to enjoy every day as much as possible now.
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America’s model is where the UK, Canada, and other subsidized healthcare systems are going. Our doctors make way more, but there is recognition that every doctor is not a replaceable cog - the good ones build up names and reputations for themselves. We have quietly built a large system of cheaper options including tele health, urgent care, and primary care (like CVS Minute Clinic) while enabling nurse practitioners to handle ever more procedures and tests. This is how the system will have to scale given the increasing safety net and huge immigration inflows.
Medical care costs money. I’d rather have choice and options than pretend it’s free, which it isn’t.
Well there are other ways to scale - look to China' system - which has a massive throughput of patients in large regional medical centers - primary doctors there see like hundreds of patients a day - but don't do anything but recommend and if you can't get it resolved, they have an escalation mechanism where you see more and more specialized doctors (same day) until you either stump the most specialized docs or they have an action plan for you.
So you could automate the work away or you could create a system that scales through production-line efficiency.