!!Con 2016 - How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! By Sina Bahram

I would recommend that everyone go check out Sian Bahram’s 2016 talk on computing while blind. At around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user: ▶ this video

I recommend that everyone go check out Sian Bahram’s 2016 talk on computing while blind. At around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user: ▶ this video

There's an amazing 10min !!Con 2016 talk by Sina Bahram, How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! I use a computer very differently than most people, because I’m blind. When I’m surfing the web, tweeting, checking email, reading the news, and writing code, I’m doing so because a program called a screen reader is reading me what’s on the screen. I happen to listen to it read me this text at a thousand words per minute! Join me in listening to how I experience some common user interfaces. Yes, I’ll slow it down for you. I also have a challenge for everyone in the audience. Can you get through a day only using the keyboard? What about not looking at your screen? Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include high-tech startups, fortune 1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums. ▶ this video

Hopefully this will be helpful: I found Sina Bahram's talk at !!Con 2016 How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! inspiring and incredible. He's blind and has his computer read everything out ridiculously quickly, and apparently gets input that way much faster than sighted people can read! Amazing. I use a computer very differently than most people, because I’m blind. When I’m surfing the web, tweeting, checking email, reading the news, and writing code, I’m doing so because a program called a screen reader is reading me what’s on the screen. I happen to listen to it read me this text at a thousand words per minute! Join me in listening to how I experience some common user interfaces. Yes, I’ll slow it down for you. I also have a challenge for everyone in the audience. Can you get through a day only using the keyboard? What about not looking at your screen? Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include high-tech startups, fortune 1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums. Talk: ▶ this video Text copied from this page: link

Here's a talk by Sina Bahram from five years ago -- at around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user. Nothing that he mentioned has been addressed: ▶ this video

I lost the video a while back, then finally re-found it. Here's a blind person showing how Hacker News sounds over JAWS: ▶ this video (Headphone warning: the volume is unfortunately all over the place, the screen reader is way too loud and the speaker volume is way too soft.) TL;DR, the page design places so much emphasis on visual table layout that it doesn't incorporate a single <h1> or <h2> anywhere , and it is effectively impossible to read the site rapidly without unconditionally listening to all the Hacker News. Page has 224 links. Hacker News visited Unlabeled graphic Graphic y18 link Hacker News link new vertical bar link past vertical bar link comments vertical bar link ask vertical bar link show vertical bar link jobs vertical bar link submit. link login at the top of every single page. I just got mad and got JAWS working in demo/evaluation mode. Here's what blind users hear every time they visit HN: Table with 3 columns and 61 rows. 1. link upvote link Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane left paren link nature.com right paren 115 points by link jnord link 1 hour ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 46 comments. 2. link upvote link Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition link vinepair.com right paren 131 points by link harambae link 4 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 42 comments. 3. link upvote link SoftBank’s Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO left paren link reuters.com righ

For what it's worth, my own desire to see if I can help out somehow has definitely only increased over the past few months as I've noticed the messages at the tops of threads about pagination. I don't have any particular skills that would make me a hand-in-glove fit (eg, I'd need to learn Arc...), but surely there are tons of little boring things I could usefully do that would take the heat off. If I'm thinking this way, surely there are (many?) others...? For example, something tiny that I'd love to fix is to split vote() in half and move the UI update logic into an Image.onload handler, so that the UI only changes if the upvote absolutely committed. I'm OCD about this because I actually use voting as bookmarking, and recently realized that some unknown percentage of my upvotes/bookmarks have sadly been lost because the auth= value had expired (eg in the case of a weeks-old tab) or because I was on bad 4G on my phone, but the UI state has no bearing on the network response. Something else that I'd be very happy to put effort into, after being told how to approach the problem :), would be to make the site screen-reader-accessible: ▶ this video (size-XL volume warning - unfortunately the speaker volume is like 5% of the screen reader volume). A longer-term project that I also think would also be very useful would be to implement OAuth2, so that users would be able to safely attach external logins to their accounts without needing to supply their actual user passwords (which thankfu