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Welcome everybody. Life in Toxic Bits of Boimer. We're starting with AJ Hamilton, who is presenting
a visually impaired perspective on technology. Welcome AJ Hamilton.
Hi, really excited to be here. First lightning talk of CCC. My name is AJ, my pronouns are
they them. My email is on the screen, aj@martinh.net. Here's my talk, a visually impaired perspective
on technology. I would like to start by saying I cannot answer any questions about things
like CSS or HTML because I do not have any design experience making accessibility features.
Apologies. But it's the truth. Okay. So, yes, I'm a visually impaired person. My condition
is a rare genetic one that causes my sight to sort of slowly get blurrier throughout
my life. And currently it's at a level where I basically use like zooming and stuff like
that just to do anything with technology. And I don't use screen readers. So you may
be familiar with screen readers. May not be. But basically they read out the screen for
visually impaired people. So here I've got what my vision looks like. This is through
a handy app which I can explain if anyone wants me to. It's got a bit of a complicated
set up but it can simulate different vision levels for a few conditions. So we've got
this here. This is me making this PowerPoint. I don't think you can see that well anyway.
But basically it's not very good. Then you've got here a bit of Terraria. And you can't
really tell what is going on on the screen. You can't see where the inventory is, what's
selected, anything like that. So some specific problems that I've highlighted as sort of
day to day problems that visually impaired technology users have. First one. I meant
to hide that slide. Fixed font sizes. So a lot of apps and some websites but it is mostly
apps for this problem do not have adjustable font sizes. And especially some of them don't
adjust to your system preferences which is quite annoying because, you know, you do all
this work to set up your preferences and then it's just ignored. And even the Apple notes
app which Apple is normally very good but the notes app has no way of changing the font
size. And then even when you do have adjustable font sizes, you can often get it to break
like this. So we have here we have three screen shots, one of Spotify where you've got some
menu items clipping into each other. Song names not being fully shown. You've got a
laundry app in the middle which is almost completely unreadable. And then you've got
a Sane 3's email there on the end which has text just completely squashed into each other.
It is really not very good. Old text. That has come out interestingly. Yeah, so old text,
if there's anyone who doesn't know what old text is, it is an alternative description
of an image for blind visually impaired people. So this was a tweet by Spencer Kelly, a tech
journalist with the BBC. Now the tweet says my dear friends came to visit today and they're
extremely gifted son provided this service free of charge. And it took him less than
a minute. Now this image did not come there was an image that came with this and it did
not come with any old text. So my granddad who sent this to me, he really he did not
know what was going on. Now eventually he managed to figure it out. It was this. A Rubik's
Cube. Now, yes, it is very important to have old text and especially old text generated
by humans because when an AI was used to attempt to generate old text for this image, it generated
a person wearing a red shirt and standing in front of a blue background. AI is not good
enough for this. You need humans. And okay, as a summary, I've put together four points
of general really basic things that can just make our lives a lot easier as visually impaired
technology users. We've got number one, make your font sizes adjustable and test them to
make sure that they work at all levels. Number two, always add old text, please, please, please.
It helps so many people and it saves a lot of time. Number three, test all of your accessibility
features and combine them. So for example, if you've got a colorblind mode and a dark
mode, put them together and see if you get a disco. And final one, number four, keep
your design simple and consistent. A simple design can be amazing because you don't have
to go around looking at 20 different buttons, trying to figure out what all of them do.
And consistency means that we can actually work by memorizing what the buttons do because
a lot of the time we can't actually see what we're clicking on. We're just memorizing positions.
So when your UI changes, it is a massive problem. Yeah. So try and keep UI changes to a minimal
or just better make it accessible in the first place. All right. And thank you for coming.
Yeah. My name is AJ, pronounce they/them, email on the board, and I will be around to answer
any questions, talk about accessibility, if you have any software you want me to look
at, anything like that. Thank you for listening.
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