My Journey From Blindness to Building a Fully Conversational User Interface
So I&#x27;m not trying to discount the author&#x27;s company or experiences, but as a blind person myself, the tone of this article is confusing. My takeaway is that apps, screen readers and our current concept of computing are supposed to be terrible for me and difficult to use, but I don&#x27;t get that. I don&#x27;t doubt that someone newly blind after years of productive computer use or someone blind after a lifetime of being sighted would find things challenging. But if I suddenly found myself in a wheelchair, I&#x27;d likely find aspects of my daily life post-transition challenging, and would try not to write articles that made general statements about <i>every</i> wheelchair user&#x27;s experience and challenges. :)<p>Are screen readers difficult to use? Sure, but no more so than typical desktop environments. Describing them as &quot;requiring special training from organizations like the Lighthouse for the Blind&quot; feels like a bit of a stretch. Would some folks require training? Sure, just as they might require training to learn OS X if they&#x27;re familiar with Windows, but that&#x27;s true of <i>anyone</i> sighted or not, and hardly a requirement. Also, while I agree that licensing costs for some screen readers are enormous, just about every mobile and desktop platform has at least one free, competent alternative. Someone newly blind or blind after years of sighted life might certainly need training, but in general I find picking up a new screen reader to be no different than learning any other semi-complex app. If using Word&#x2F;LibreOffice is part of your job then you sit down, learn it and become competent with it over time, or you get trained. Categorizing screen readers as being different and worse in this regard feels unfair.<p>&quot;All of the time and energy that goes into creating the perfect user experience for an app is wasted, or even worse, adversely impacting the experience for blind users.&quot; Again, I strongly disagree with this. The problem is that UX time and energy is misspent almost exclusively on visual aesthetics, or even worse, on a certain <i>type</i> of visual aesthetic. For instance, say you use icon fonts because they&#x27;re a cool thing to do. That choice has accessibility impact beyond blindness. Had a UI&#x2F;UX designer focused on universal design and on crafting experiences that both look well and perform nicely from a keyboard&#x2F;switch user&#x27;s perspective, that interface will be visually appealing, nice to use via the keyboard, easy for users with low hand dexterity using switch controllers, etc.<p>Again, kudos to you for driving innovation in this space. I wish access tech didn&#x27;t always feel like an industry stuck a few decades in the past, or wasn&#x27;t being driven forward by companies with a medical-model concept of disability who view us as a market to be pitied rather than sold to. To that end, I like seeing exciting tech in this space, even if I can&#x27;t imagine ever preferring to shop by a conversational interface. But I read headlines like &quot;Apps are a nightmare for the visually impaired&quot; and think &quot;huh, <i>I&#x27;m</i> building an app for the visually impaired and hope it isn&#x27;t a nightmare.&quot; And I worry that, rather than learning about how universal design can build experiences that look and work well for <i>everyone</i>, software developers and companies will read this post and think &quot;I don&#x27;t have to make my app accessible because blind people are using special custom interfaces anyway, so when a blind person tells me my app isn&#x27;t accessible, I can pretend ARIA attributes are hard and write them off.&quot; Again, not trying to be negative, I just wish folks understood that we don&#x27;t need separate interfaces and experiences.