disabilities

[Eric S. Johansson]

On 5/24/2010 5:52 AM, Bruno Girin wrote:
\>
> There are more than disabled people on standard committees than you
> think. In practice, the problem is not with web and accessibility
> standards themselves, they are with their implementation in browsers and
> how well (or not) they are followed by web site designers...

this common experience is why I've come to the conclusion that are accessibility 
APIs and design models are fundamentally doomed to failure. Why? History. Also 
because anytime you expect somebody else to change something to accommodate you, 
they will not do it. Having been in the software biz, having run companies, I 
will tell you accessibility needs fall dead last both in terms of project and 
financial expenditures. They fall dead last because they do not add anything to 
the bottom-line. The number of disabled users of software is almost vanishingly 
small when compared to the larger market.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1417-Accessibility-How-Many-Disabled-Web-Users-Are-There-

unfortunately, the article above doesn't deal with upper extremity disabilities 
like mine so one probably should assume the numbers given are the lower limit on 
disabled users. They estimate something like 7% of the population is disabled. 
That's on a par with number of Linux users and we see how well the marketplace 
accommodates TAB users who have disposable income in contrast to disabled users 
who have trouble finding jobs and have correspondingly less disposable income.

I think the current models also doome because it puts the administrative load 
for accessibility on every system to disabled person uses. Further increasing 
cost for little benefit especially for employers which will probably never see a 
disabled person cross the threshold to apply for job let alone hold 
one.remember, 7% disabled in a total population approximately works out to 
something like one person in 20 to one person 30 in the actual working population.

In my 30 year career, I'm the first, maybe second disabled person I've seen in 
any of the companies I worked for and these were not small companies.

So, how do we change this? We changes by minimizing the changes necessary to 
applications and hopefully, embed them in libraries so they are used 
automatically without any work on the part of the developer.  We built clients 
to handle the disability user interface and talk to the back doors in those 
libraries to do the disability work. We lower the costs/barrier to entry for 
employers and application developers alike and we end up with a greater range of 
applications that can be used.

cultural and technical challenges discussed later if you care.


> It's true, as a person with no disability, it took me a long time to get
> it. And I don't think I completely get it yet but at least I'm now able
> to make a judgement call on whether some code uses techniques that are
> likely to cause accessibility issues. This is to be expected: it is
> extremely difficult for someone who does not have a given disability to
> understand what it is like to live with that disability. In fact, I
> suspect it is difficult for a blind person to understand the challenges
> faced by people with motor disabilities for instance.

I'm puzzled by this. If you going to work with disability issues, one on 
handicap yourself in the same way. For example, gloves that restrict finger 
movement or induced pain when you touch something. Blind folds or having someone 
remove your keyboard, or worse, generate random keystrokes when you touch a key? 
I would think that a couple of days with nothing but speech recognition and the 
mouse would give you a feel for the panic the disabled user feels and a week 
might give you the first glimmers of understanding to how the solver is 
problems. A month, and you'll be one of us. :-)

> All this to say that to solve accessibility problems, we need to talk to
> each other and understand that "getting it" is very difficult for able
> people. Which means that able people need to be ready to listen and see
> their assumptions and "cool ideas" challenged; while disabled people
> need to be patient in explaining why a particular design doesn't work
> for them and suggesting constructive alternatives.

good point. I will also add that patience runs out somewhere around 10 to 12 
years of explaining to yet another generation of clueless programmers what's 
wrong with their approach and being told "get off of your own fucking lawn 
grandpa, we know what we are doing" only to see them crash, burn, and walk away 
saying "that wasn't really an interesting problem after all".