Forums » Smalltalk » AMA: Legally Blind

By "legal blindness" I mean that I can see, but my eyesight is incredibly poor. It affects everything about my life and even influences how I approach art and creativity.

I was born with cataracts in both eyes that needed to be removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract

As a result, I am missing the part of my eyes that focuses objects (the "lens") and need to wear thick glasses to compensate. Even then, I still cannot see as well as a normal person and my eyesight continues to degrade overtime.

I develop new problems as I get older. I have difficulty seeing handheld game console screens now whereas I used to be able to see them just fine, and I've bumped up my PC's text size a couple times over the years. Technology is an integrated part of my life simply because it provides more accessibility than using a magnifying glass on physical books, heh.

In some hilarious twist of fate though, I have one extra rod in both my eyes that allows me to perceive a wider spectrum of colors than most humans. This has definitely affected my art, and I tend to draw with color, light, and shadow in mind more than defined shape and form.

I also stream video games sometimes. It has become a common thing for co-hosts or my audience to point out something obvious that I am missing just because I can't see it. Through this, my friends have (by their own admission) learned far more about accessibility in video games than they might have otherwise, and I continue to stream games because I think it's important for a disabled person to show how they approach games.

I want to dispel a myth: It is commonly believed that physically disabled people have their other senses pick up the burden when one of theirs isn't working. That isn't true. My hearing is not supernaturally good just because my sight is weak. I have learned to use my ears more, but that's out of necessity. Anyone can learn the same skill regardless of their impairments, it's just that I've had to focus on that more out of need.

I hope my thread is not too thorough. This is my first time making one. Please, feel free to ask me anything.

In life in general (and in any specific situations you'd like to additionally share), how well accommodated do you feel you are? Do you find there are specific, common areas that need to be improved on, are there so many problems that it would be difficult to specify any as outstanding, or do you feel there are actually pretty good accommodations in place?

In life in general (and in any specific situations you'd like to additionally share), how well accommodated do you feel you are?

The world is largely set up for the able. Disabled people of all stripes have little inconveniences that add up overtime. In my case, and especially because my problems require ongoing attention, it's a bit uncertain at times. There are definitely things I can't do, but a saving grace is that I have a support network of people who are willing and able to help me with basic things like reading small print or getting a ride. A lot of disabled people don't have these luxuries.

Do you find there are specific, common areas that need to be improved on, are there so many problems that it would be difficult to specify any as outstanding, or do you feel there are actually pretty good accommodations in place?

There are definitely specific common areas that can be improved, but I can't really comment on them in detail, as they graze the "no politics" rule. I will say that living in America as a disabled person, with what our health care system is like, is a bit of an existential nightmare, and on top of daily struggles, I and every other disabled person also have to live with the reality that our survival and well-being are politicized at all.

A more tangible complication I face is that America is a very car-centric nation and I am legally unable to obtain a license. This means relying on public transit - of which there is spotty infrastructure where I live at best - or calling cabs/Uber, which gets expensive. This is actually a pretty big problem for myself and my family, since our disability is genetic.

(Moving to Europe someday is definitely a life-goal, haha.)

Since I spend a lot of time on the internet, there are small things that either help or hurt me. Sites which support dark modes, force readable fonts, and allow me to zoom in or enlarge the text are godsends. Ironically, most of the best accessibility features are still on Desktop. Mobile versions of websites often do not allow you to zoom in, which, well, it's a tiny screen and therefore seems like being able to zoom in would be a given, but I suppose I'm not really a web developer and am not privy to the infinite wisdom of creating such locked-down environments.

Indie game developers are also a lot more conscious about accessibility in their games, and I've had a lot of productive talks with indie devs about ways to improve things like font scaling and gamma adjustments. Video games feel like a more equalized environment than most other activities when a person is disabled, so I'm glad a growing and thriving sect of game development has bent an ear to our needs.

Do you ever use a screen reader for assistance? Do you anticipate you might need one in future if your eyesight continues to get more problematic?

What is using the RPR with limited eyesight like?

Do you ever use a screen reader for assistance? Do you anticipate you might need one in future if your eyesight continues to get more problematic?

There is a real possibility that I might need one in the future if my eyesight gets significantly worse. Given the state of the internet, that would be a real problem, because of how prevalent just screenshotting posts on social media is, but there are also people on sites like Twitter who take it upon themselves to post "Alt Text," basically reading off what a screenshot says for the benefit of screen-readers. These are usually individuals who are accessibility-conscious though, and though I commend those people for their service, there are not a lot of things out there which broadly make screen-readers viable for most of the internet given how much humanity itself relies on videos and images.

Having said that, something I learned during the brief stint I had trying to make a Twine game was that part of why Twine focuses on running in a browser is because screen readers in web browsers are much more advanced than even Windows' own inbuilt accessibility features, which are severely lacking in many ways, honestly.

Speaking of desktop accessibility... Last year, my mother and I split the cost on what I consider to be a very good laptop. It's a refurbished Surface Book 2 that I found on Newegg for a lot less than the cost of a new one. And... That was how I found out how difficult it is to use a screen with any resolution above 1080p. I had to take the resolution down pretty far just to make the Windows taskbar not impossibly small to see, as well as resizing the text in Windows itself.

And unfortunately, that little adventure - because Windows tends to bury these options a bit farther than they should - taught me that not all programs will readily comply with Windows' accessibility settings. Over the years, I've had to make a number of posts on forums, send a number of feedback messages, or just invade some random software dev's given email about the same types of accessibility problems (Inability to resize text, illegible fonts, lacking dark modes, icons being too small, application colors being obnoxious or lacking contrast, etc, etc, et cetra-cetra-cetra) that could honestly all be enforced client-side or just mandated by Microsoft in order to get certified. As it stands though, I have to be a broken record in some poor guy's inbox and hope my voice isn't so small that the request gets ignored. (Disabled people with accessibility needs are still a minority, and while I'm glad that most people don't live with what I do, it does make it hard to relate the need as important even if most people are genuinely well-meaning.)

What is using the RPR with limited eyesight like?

Oh, it's an absolute nightmare- nah I'm joking, it's mostly fine. The first things I checked for when I joined were resizing text, and I found all the options I need pretty easily. The default site layout is also pretty easy on my eyes even in the normal "lite" mode, though I'm glad the options for other color modes exist. I do have some sensitivity due to migraines as well, so I will probably flit between those options as needed, and I'm glad they're easy enough to find.

It's when you get into groups or user profiles that I see a lot of problems. The 'templates' (at least, the free ones) seem fine to me, but then you get into some Epic templates or custom templates that were probably made by individuals that become harder to read.

The biggest things people do are:
-Use obnoxious neon colors everywhere, usually turning the saturation all the way up on both the text and the background.
-Make their fonts too small to read, usually below standard size.
-Use a font that is difficult to read. (I don't know if this is an eyesight thing but I actually cannot even read cursive or the cursive-adjacent fonts on some templates, and then there's people who take that and make it even more of a cipher.)
-Mix all of these together... even on normal posts on the site. (Like when someone uses different colors to represent different characters speaking, as if this is a sprite comic from the early 2000s...)


...But there are things I do myself that I try to be conscious of, such as my use of collapsing text, which apparently does not always play well with screen-readers. (Or so I've been told in the past.) I'm not a developer though, and I don't really know how to solve problems screen-readers may run into with BBcode, but apparently that is broadly an issue on most forums and not really specific to RPR.

Something I think could be improved, though, is for users on the client-side to be able to "force" standard font for everything regardless of if it's on a group or user page. I might not have found that option though, if it already exists, and I apologize if this is redundant, heh.
It would save me having to copy-paste peoples' posts or text in their profiles into Notepad++ to force plain text though, which I definitely do, and no one can stop me. You can't stop me from plain-texting your posts, mwahahaha.

That's all the weird, esoteric instances I can think of though. This is me picking my brain for every agonizing little thing, most of which is currently difficult to fix with humanity's level of technology, but I do see all of this improving overtime and the best thing web developers can do is be mindful and aware, which I would say RPR has been so far.

Perhaps some kind of PSA about user and group pages, and readability, might be a good idea every so often? I haven't been here long enough to know if that is already something that is done, but I would volunteer to add advice if necessary.