People with Disabilities Use the Web

One story of incaccessibility:

An online bank does video verification. Being deaf, I couldn't complete the verification because I didn't understand the instructions. I asked someone for help, but the bank said, I need to do the verification alone.

What went wrong: The application didn't offer the possibility to send written instructions. The fallback of having support by someone else was declined. I offered to call a professional interpreter but that was declined, too.

I think accessibility should be the basic of all website and search engines should promote SEO based on and ON TOP OF accessibility.

Currently, if anything, it's more like websites first and foremost try to be "semantic web", that matters to no one other than Google. Accessibility comes as separate mark-up enhancements, an after thought.

The web should be for humans before it conforms to some standard that only benefits some big corp.

In this topic, there is a wonderful summary of concrete examples of dos and don'ts:

https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-o...

Is anyone else surprised by the physically-disabled people in their user stories using a regular MacBook keyboard as their primary input device? Ok, the man with quadriplegia also uses a joystick. It amazes me how inaccessible better hardware is.

The woman who is deaf blind uses a refreshable braille keyboard. I looked up the cost and it's ~$3000USD. Even if some nonprofit organization pays for this, you still need parents and caregivers that know to take advantage of this.

I have no hardware experience, but I think I may take on the task of making life easier for some people with disabilities.

Quick ideas that popped to mind while watching the user stories: 1. Using AI to transcribe videos for people to have a standalone captions source other than their video player. 2. Several of the users use the tab key to fill out forms. Hell, Google search is nigh-impossible to use as keyboard only; Good luck with smaller sites. Some sort of open source project for handling tabbing logically would be awesome. Maybe a chrome extension that lets devs interface with it a la sponsorblock. 3. I'm fascinated by refreshable braille now. It's expensive because the technology seems pretty niche. I'm very uneducated on this topic but it feels like a cruder technology would also work, at the cost of size or throughput. There also don't seem to be any phones/portables with this capability.

I'd love to get into something like this, but don't know how. If you are in this sort of space, I'd love to talk.

HN really needs to turn off that regex that removes the word “how” from the beginning of article titles.