I find that people were a lot more helpful with old people back in the day. Now it’s seems we are just in the way and get bumped and jostled.
Ignored, mostly. Sometime between age 50 and 60, people started looking right through me.
I used to work for Comcast and one of my responsibilities was making sure their mobile apps passed their annual accessibility tests. The company faced enormous FCC fines for failure to pass these tests, but somehow the only person aware of this was me and I was only a contractor. Comcast has thousands of vice presidents of this and that, and one of them should have been on top of this stuff, but their turnover rate was so high that they never usually even lasted a year in one position, so it was up to me to explain the situation to each new one and try to convince them that it was even important.
You wouldn’t think that a person at that level would ever say “who cares about blind people?” but they almost all said that or something to that effect, until the reality of a million-dollars-per-month fine set in. They even at one point hired a vice president of accessibility – a man who was himself blind and obviously never said “who cares about blind people?” – but he quit after less than a year because of his frustration with getting the company to give a shit.
A dog taught me about crosswalk accessibility. I was walking someone’s blind dog, and we were waiting at the crosswalk. When the opposite side of the street started chirping when the light changed (as it always does), the dog started crossing the street toward the source of the sound before I ever indicated it was time to move. I’d never thought much about the chirping sound until then.
Wheelchair ramps are for sick… BMX tricks
I try to implement color-blind safe color palettes in my presentable work. Weird part is i started doing it after a color blind person was an ass to me for completely unrelated reasons.
Maybe I thought other color blind people are just humans and not represented by this guy.
Playing games enough times with my RG colorblind friend, I am now livid when a game gives us color taska but doesn’t have a colorblind mode.
Or those puzzles that need to be solved through audio clues but closed captions aren’t available. (Don’t get me wrong subtitles are great but there is still a lot missing without cc - sadly most games don’t have them but it should be the standard.)
Myst is unsolvable for the deaf, isn’t it? There’s at least three audio-based puzzles in it.
Not just myst. Imagine spending days trying solve a puzzle, convinced you must be missing something. And when you finally get frustrated enough to look up the solution online you read something infuriating like “listen to your walking sounds, you are on the right path when you hear yourself walking on gravel” or “the portal is random, listen for the one that has music coming out of it.”
Ocarina of Time did that with the Lost Woods. A maze of mostly identical square rooms, at one point you’re supposed to listen for the doorway the music is coming from. On the N64 you could at least tell which entrances would lead back to Kokiri forest because there was a kind of glow in them, the 3DS port eliminated that AFAIK.
This is why, if I want to upload an image that needs a circle drawing attention to some part of it, I use blue instead of red. Useless red circles become even more useless when someone struggles to see red, but the most common forms of color-blindness show a distinction for blue.
I have an app on my phone that simulates different types of color blindness (Chromatic Vision Simulator, or CVSimulator. Free, no ads, it just does the thing it’s designed to do.) Sometimes I use it to make art that can be accessible for people without a full range of color perception, or to make something that is designed specifically for them. Sometimes such limitations encourage creativity, and if it means more people can enjoy a piece, I’m all for it.
Don’t use color, use different line types. Hatching, cross hatching, zig zag, dotted line, dashed line.
I will mention this becomes quite messy sometimes. But simpler charts absolutely. Line thickness and lightness can also be used but a surprising amount of software has insufficient rendering capability for these.
Yes a lot of software is absolute shit at support for the color blind or visually impaired. Even so called “508 compliant” applications are a joke. We validate our software where I work, and certify it to be 508 compliant since we have government customers. But it’s a complete joke. Just a formality and afterthought. Anyone actually trying to use it with accessibility tools would have a hell of a bad time. One reason I prefer Linux is the desktop and most apps tend to be a lot more configurable than other OSes. Which allows you more control over color and font size.
Great advice! That sounds like a fun way to add character to an art piece too.
Interesting, what is the app called?
Its name is Chromatic Vision Simulator, or “CVSimulator.”
Had this the other day with my NAS!
Just for fun I tried the “locate disc” function, which supposedly changes the colour of the LED of the tray of the specific disc.
Only after manually finding the correct tray and starring at the LED for a couple of seconds I could see that it was slightly oranger compared to the others. I think.
I do hate the blinkinlights for that reason. Green? k. Amber? Not quite the same as green… is there a green nearby to compare? Orange? Different than amber, maybe? Red. K definitely not green.
People have always loved to rip on Windows, but Windows 95 and its follow-ons were designed to be fully usable by the blind and people with vision problems. Not just in the color choices but in how the various controls worked. There’s no way Windows 11 is still that useful as far as accessibility is concerned, though – it just has too many different fucked-up ways of presenting things.
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I was recently in a somewhat large city and was doing a bit of StreetComplete and it has a bunch of questions that try to figure how accessible a route is and I noticed how fucking bad it is. As it was a larger city there were at least those bumpers at traffic lights, which is not the norm everywhere in my experience, but that was about it. Sometimes the curb was lowered on one side so you could easily traverse it with a wheelchair etc. but it was only on one side of the road, the other side was at complete height (at least 15cm). This meant you might easily get on the road but head no way of properly getting of.
That’s one thing that struck me about the last time I was in the US. The cities are SO incredibly inaccessible. All the buildings need to be compliant, so once you make it through the door, you’re fine, but getting there is basically impossible for people with disabilities.
No sidewalks, almost no public transportation and where it exists, it’s impossible to get in or out. Cars can turn right on a red light in SO many places, so you can basically never know when you can safely cross what should be clear path.
Right on red could be OKish if majority of drivers followed even a fraction of road laws and made even a half attempt at stopping first, before looking, then finally starting the turn from a complete stop.
Could be, but won’t.
Fun fact: right turn on red came about in response to the oil crisis. It wasn’t legal by default before that. My local streets advocacy group wants a city no right on red law, but I don’t see how it’d happen in the current environment.
No sidewalks
There’s been a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that resulted in a consent decree forcing local governments to put in ADA-compliant ramps at intersections. But the lawsuit apparently didn’t also include the sidewalks themselves, so now there are useless “ADA ramps to nowhere” everywhere. It’s fucking infuriating!
Wow, that’s just… sad and infuriating.
The older and/or more rural the community, the worse it gets. Basically any building and infrastructure built after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities act (2001-ish) are more or less reasonable.
Anything before that, and you’re in for a bad time.
I had that experience as well, it also asks whether the traffic lights make a sound. I hear it all the time, never need it and never realised I might hear it all the time, I dont hear it at every crossing. Suddenly it felt so random whether or not it was doing the ticking or not.
The non ticky/beepy ones should have a tactile knob on the bottom of the box that spins when it’s safe to cross.
Some did, but most of the ones that had no sound had no tactile thing either. I expect the bussier center to have better coverage of accessible traffic lights, the experience I had was in a low traffic area on the outskirts of that town.
In my city in Canada you need to hold the crossing button for like a second or two and then it’ll do the noise. Maybe that’s why it seems random? I know its easy to do by mistake
That’s a good one, the ones with a tactile thing require a touch whereas others are a physical buttons. It could be true that these need to be pushed longer for a sound. But at the same time, some make a sound when the light was red too. I’m gonna try it when i come across one of those kind of buttons.
I’ve recently been spending time somewhere that has street crossings that talk to you. Its annoying in a cute way to have a voice clearly say something to the effect of “the light to cross x street is lit, you may cross” (the annoying bit is that until it’s lit it says “wait” repeatedly)
I don’t need it, but if I did that’s exactly the sort I’d want. Its so clear! Zero confusion! I didn’t have to look up from my phone to cross the street! :p
You still should check! Lots of idiots out there.
Lifts in train stations and other public infra. I don’t need them right now but I know they are so essential for lots of different people.
We are all the same height once we are fallen.
Everything is about the young and beautiful and exploited being overdriven or neglected so he/she becames a cripple. It is like the worst cult. The temple of disease. A serious and operational effort for self destruction. The only thing operational. The way of the modern life.
I am baffled how everything gets a solution, but these ones are swept under the rug. Then people go who wants a cripple in the penthouse.
I am also sad nobody made MK Jax like prostethics for an accessible price.
I sometimes go around with a pram. Prams you can lift up and down stairs if needed, but you’d rather avoid it. It’s a quick and painless way to become more mindful of the accessibility of the environment around you.
I am also staunchly against “anti-homeless” architecture. People might need to lay down! Let them. And set up programs against homelessness, not against homeless people.
I was recently noticing how the newest wave of hostile architecture has changed as I walked around my city.
In the past couple of decades, anti-homeless architecture became so profoundly hostile that it was almost unusable even for its intended purpose.
Benches so sloped you couldn’t sit on them at all. Spikes sticking out of everything. It became obvious to anyone that the whole purpose of the furniture was to be unusable, that it existed only through spite.
Everyone hated it.
And so the latest generation of hostile architecture has now “evolved”. It’s hostile but only subtly so, in a way where most people might not notice.
Things like trendy wooden slatting instead of anti-skate spikes. Benches that look and feel normal to sit on, but are intentionally just a little too short to lay down on.
We could fix homelessness, but instead an incredible amount of effort has been poured into refining and “perfecting” hostile architecture so it achieves the purpose of deterring homeless people, but in a subtle way that conceals its true purpose.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Microblogmemes, whilst this post is inciteful, it didn’t belong in this community
blind to our privilege
Every doorway in a house should be at least 36" wide. For each level of a house, the floor should be flat, no steps between slightly different levels. Every house should include at least one ADA compliant bathroom.
Very few houses or apartments are fully accessible. Closet doors are 28" wide, there are unnecessary steps between indoor and outdoor spaces, showers are too small, etc.
Why 36" ?
On a related note, I want to plug an app that I have had installed on my phones for a few years called Be My Eyes. People with reduced/no vision use it to ask for help from a sighted person. I recommend everyone install it to help out!
As a sighted user, my experience goes like this. I get a phone call that is simultaneously ringing to several helpers’ devices. If I picked up first, I am connected to the helpee in a one-way video call. 1 I say hi, the helpee says hi, and they ask for help. I try to help them, and the helpee ends the call. It usually takes <5 min.
Here some of are the calls I’ve answered:
- A teacher wanted to sort “thank you” cards made by the students into piles by recipient.
- “Why did my washer not finish the cycle?” - I read the LEDs and knob positions to determine that it hadn’t drained, and suggested settings to run a quick drain cycle.
- “What is my clothes dryer set to?” - I described the two knobs and listed their options in order, and confirmed their current settings.
- “Which vitamin bottle is which, and what is the dosage?” - I asked them to move the camera and bottles so I could read the labels.
1 If I don’t pick up, it will keep ringing the other helpers until it finds someone. I assume there’s some logic that picks helpers based on how often they have picked up, because once I finally answered a call in time, I started getting more.
I only had one encounter with Be My Eyes of someone trying to classify their comic book collection by the year printed on the cover which was too small for them to read. It was pretty neat and I was happy to help, but it took way longer than 5 minutes, haha. I think though that with computer vision, a lot of the requests aren’t routed to volunteers anymore though.
I watched a movie where a blind girl used that to navigate around her house to escape a home invader. Didn’t realize it was real
Fascinating! Do you recall the name?
I had to do some searching, it’s called “see for me” .
