No that's cool, i thought you were coming with an antagonistic attitude in the first comment i just tried to play it cool and positive, i succeeded but you showed how you really felt above.
This product is not doing that to them, anymore than the visual world, and every image on the internet that isn't captioned in every detail is doing that to them. So don't pretend that it's somehow our fault that o
people are blind.
That's important. There are important issues here but too often i see people misusing the cause of disabled people as a fake pretext to abuse others, while pretending they're being righteous, by criticizing and trying to control others, driven by their own need to put others down and feel better than them, thinking they're found a legitimate way to perpetrate their abuse. But they haven't.
And that's why I'm really scared of talking with people about this because so many get caught up in that game. Especially worse when they say oh let's not care about the feelings of the developers. Because that's exactly what they intend to do... be abusive and then pretend they're righteous while disguising themselves in the cause of supporting disabled people. well they're actually hurting disabled people by proposing these ineffective solutions and poisoning the discussion about this rather than trying to constructively support effective solutions. so what I'm trying to do with this statement is bring it's important topic back from being this excuse for toxic behavior. That's not a respectful or a good use of this topic at all.
But separating that out, disabled people have a valuable contribution to make and their voice should be heard and they should have access. So there are important problems that need solutions but the solution proposed by a lot of these people being abusive is oh let's get every vendor to alter everything they do to make it conform to this standard...and agree the case of buildings it's important to have a disabled ramp or something... but in the case of software that's not a scalable solution. And it doesn't respect the developers. I think the better solution is something like a browser extension and I think the ultimate solution is to leverage The power of AI to direct that ability to create the accessibility trees and so on from websites without needing annotations surely that should be possible and I think that is the ultimate solution and you're only doing disabled people a disservice by focusing on these you know ineffective solutions when there are technologically much better and much more scalable and effective ones and then you're only doing developers or disservice by having this abusive attitude.
I'm not saying you were exactly doing that but I did detect that antagonism so it seems like you could get caught up in that too but I'm making a larger point about a dynamic that I see in these types of discussions.
so the short way of saying it is it's a really important topic so the most effective way to deal with that is to respect the developers, respectfully engage The stakeholders and try to leverage the most effective technology not to misuse the topic itself as an excuse to be abusive because you feel you need to do that.
I think in order to discuss this we'd need to be clear about the actual solutions we're discussing...I'm not right now I'm sorry, so I can say no more than, in general, any additional data you send opens up the attack surface.
Tho I can say that, relevant to your idea, at least, in my RBI product[0], you can click somewhere in the viewport and say "Copy text" and then you get a HTML dialog open over the canvas viewport with the text. A screen-reader could potentially then read that.
But I think actual accessibility tools need to do so much more...Forgive me, I'm no expert in them.
Re the above tho, I don't see that as introducing a greater attack surface (tho I might be wrong) because on the server side we're just getting the innerText of the element the client clicked on, and sending that text back encoded in base64 (IIRC).
> But I think actual accessibility tools need to do so much more
Screen readers do more, but they are not rocket science. I am no expert either, but I've worked on adding accessibility to a project that had none. Screen readers have proactive & interactive modes. In proactive mode, they read whats visible on the page, perhaps just the high-level components, giving a lay of the land. In interactive mode, it gives more detail on the control/item that currently has focus and the actions available (follow link, expand/collapse section, etc), and one would tab to move focus between controls.
I'm no expert on RBI, but I looked at your product and it appears to respond in real time to user interaction (hover over elements), perhaps what is missing is a standardized way to integrate Screen readers this "streaming" information; most accessible sites have plain-text ARIA tags/attributes meant for screen readers (with fall backs to 'title' or 'alt'[1]). However, this is just plain text, so sending text to the client adds an attack surface, but not a very large one, IMO.
I believe every developer who makes user-facing software should be forced to sit down and use their app/site with the monitor off, interacting with just the screen reader in their headphones. www.a11yproject.com has really good information on how accessibility ('a11y') works, and how to implement it correctly on the web.
1. I'm simplifying by a lot here -screen readers do a lot of heavy lifting, especially for sites/software not designed with accessibility in mind
I agree with much of your vibe and attitude here. But in general while SR may not be rocket science, solving the problem of accessibility in a general and scalable way is rocket science.
It's a really important problem, and a good cause. Disabled people, for example blind people, have an awesome contribution to make to society and we need their voices to be heard, so to speak. In other words, we need their contributions to be made. They must have access. But the question is how to go about solving that?
I think the posed solutions of getting every website to adopt a certain standard is not a good technical solution. I think pointing AI at the problem and working out how to parse accessibility hints, possibly in a personalized and contextual way relevant to the particular person as well, is one approach to the solution that's better.
This part,
I believe every developer who makes user-facing software should be forced to sit down and use their app/site with the monitor off, interacting with just the screen reader in their headphones
No, just no. I appreciate the desire to do good, but I think your attitude here is in danger of falling into the trap in this topic of being abusive to others under the mere guise of a "righteous cause" -- and in the process hurting the very cause you pretend to stand for. The misuse of this issue by some bully-like people who want to abuse others by trying to dominate them with criticism and control is one reason I'm so scared to engage with this topic. They use the seriousness of the issue as a fake pretext to case the world in their own self-serving and ego-serving view of good vs bad, and go nuclear on anyone who disagrees with their stance. But this is just ape brain shit of bullying for compensation to make themselves feel better by pretending others are worse....Just avoid that.
There is a serious issue here, and a good cause. And any statement that seeks to coerce or force or minimize the feelings of any group of people, who could just be working together on a solution, don't get suckered by the delusion that such things are somehow the right way, they're not. They're just people being bullies because their lives suck, and they take it out on others instead of fixing their own stuff. These abusive misusers of the issue give disabled people a bad name, and hinder the very cause they are pretending to stand for by, among other things, creating unnecessary friction to collaboration, and pushback.
If you care about this topic, maybe you can do some AI work on it.
