A sad tale of (in-)accessibility
Jan. 20th, 2010 01:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liam_on_linuxBeing a multiplatform sort of chap, I've long sung the praises of Mac OS X when having geeky conversations with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ednun - but it's only when he started reading about the improvements in the VoiceOver screenreader in the latest version of OS X, "Snow Leopard", that he really got interested. So last Sunday, he booked an appointment to go into the Apple Store on Regent Street and have a demonstration of VoiceOver, both on OS X and on an iPhone 3GS, which also includes it. (The older iPhones do not.) He asked me if I'd like to go along, both to help him find the store & also to play with the shiny toys & maybe assist, as I am beginning to learn how using a computer & the Web via a screenreader works. (It's profoundly different from using a GUI with a mouse.)
We turned up at the appointed time. Nobody was there specifically to see us - there were lots of helpful sales assistants but they maintained that no special appointment was needed or had been made, anybody would be able to help.
The first chap was called Adam. He went over to a Macbook and pointed at a stool for Ed to sit on. Ed, unable to see either stool or pointing, just stood there, waiting. The chap said "over here." Ed asked, very reasonably, "where?"
At which point Adam stood up, muttered something like "I can't do this" to his colleagues and ran for it. A younger guy called Paul took his place.
He started by trying to show Ed the trackpad. Ed hesitated. Paul tried again. I leaned over and pointed out that Ed would not be using that. "But... what do you mean?" asked Paul.
"He doesn't use the mouse."
"What?"
"He's doesn't use the mouse. He can't use a mouse."
"What do you mean, doesn't use a mouse?" persisted Paul, signally Failing To Get It.
So I spelled it out.
"He is blind. He can't see the mouse pointer, or indeed the screen, so pointing is not going to help."
Paul did a double-take. "Oh. Oh. Er, right. Yes. Of course. Um. Right. Yes. OK... so... the keyboard, then..."
It went downhill from there. Paul did not know how to open VoiceOver. He started looking through System Preferences. I was going to show him where it was when Ed interjected: "you start it with Ctrl-F5, or something like that," he said. He'd been doing his research. He was right.
So we had a play with VoiceOver. It has a pretty good tutorial built in which it runs the first time you turn it on. I got a MacBook of my own and went through it. It's thorough, but v e r y s l o w. You can't adjust the speed of the voice or of the tutorial as a whole, and even I, a novice user of screenreaders, was boiling with frustration by the 2nd screen. I don't know how Ed managed it; he sets his to speak at a few hundred words per minute, about 10x faster than human speech - even after 5Y of practice, 99% of what his computer says is unintelligibly rapid babble to me.
I persisted. Ed did too on his own machine.
VoiceOver actually works fairly well, within some limits. We were both quite impressed by what you can do. The thing I found oddest, as a sighted user familiar with the Mac UI and with some prior existing screenreader experience, is that VO duplicates UI features. The Mac has keyboard UI for some things - navigating controls, turning checkboxes on & off and so on. VO adds whole new controls to do this as well as the existing ones. This seems odd and unhelpful to me.
(Perhaps it's for nonstandard apps that don't accept keyboard controls, like Dashboard or something; I don't know. I can't imagine a lot of use for Dashboard, Exposé and so on for a blind user, to be honest. I realise that there might be reasons, I just found it odd.)
He also tried an iPhone.
Now, to both of us, the notion of a keyless display-only phone for a blind user seemed ridiculous a couple of months ago. It has to be the worst possible phone for a blind person to try to use; they can't feel the on-screen buttons or keys, they can't hit scrollbars or other controls. However, the 3GS does have support for blind users and several of Ed's mates are using it -- and they mostly seem to report loving the phone. So, reasonably enough, he wanted to try one.
It was a trial in more than one sense of the word.
The iPhone UI changes totally in VoiceOver mode. You touch once to select, and the phone tells you what you're over. Twice to activate. Single-finger flicks and drags operate controls; their direction sets the value, they don't need to be over or even near the on-screen control. To scroll, you drag with 3 fingers. It's totally different; I couldn't navigate the phone at all, and I can see. Paul attempted to adjust the volume on my phone, turned the speech volume down to miminum and we couldn't get it back again, so I had to abandon the attempt.
It was not a successful demo. After half an hour's work, Ed managed to type the word "on" into a text message. This was the longest string he managed to enter.
On the desktop, Ed & I puzzled it out between us. Paul had never used VoiceOver and knew nothing about how it worked. He was unable to advise on operating the Mac OS, because he could only think in terms of "this thing at the bottom is the Dock" or "click on the toolbar" or "click on the menu". He watched in amazement as I operated the Mac with the keyboard alone and told Ed the keystrokes. I got the feeling he didn't realise it could be done before that moment.
The screenreader is very thorough. It makes sound effects when going from line to line, column to column or row to row in tables and so on. It pronounces onscreen punctuation - toolbars become "send verticalbar receive verticalbar new message verticalbar reply" and so on. Very detailed feedback. Alas, as far as we can tell, what it can't do is be told to just read out a page or a screenful of text. I showed Ed how to manouvre down an email in Mail.app, paragraph by paragraph, when he'd concluded that it couldn't read the body, but he wanted to just tell it to read the message and leave it to it.
We tried Entourage, too. Even worse. VoiceOver couldn't read folder names, toolbars or anything, only plain text fields like name, subject, body, so the program was unnavigable.
Safari works rather better, but it's still clumsy compared to Windows screenreaders.
He came away quite happy. He didn't think Macs were right for him; he knows and likes Windows and Microsoft's various apps, which are all highly accessible. OS X 10.6 is way better than before, but it lacks customisability for him.
On Windows, he sets his preferred screenreader, Dolphin's HAL, to skip punctuation, linefeeds, etc. He also disables most of its informational sound effects and so on in the interests of speed. You can't do this on the Mac, as far as we could tell; you just don't get this level of control with VoiceOver. It has pane after pane of config settings, but even so, it's dwarfed by the customisability of HAL or rivals such as JAWS.
I found the experience interestingly reminiscent of fun arguments I've had withreddragdiva and others about KDE versus GNOME.
I used to use KDE, but I was always irritated by the profusion of settings to fiddle with. GNOME just sets sensible defaults and remembers where you left windows and so on. There is a lot less customisability exposed with GNOME, but it does the essentials well. KDE, to me, is a nightmare of twiddling trying to get it just right.
But comparing HAL to VoiceOver, suddenly things seem a lot clearer to me. I am not too fussy when it comes to GUIs - I can happily use anything from a classic Mac with System 6 up to Snow Leopard, GNOME or KDE or Xfce or several others on Unix, Windows from 3.1 to 7 and everything in between. It takes me 10min to set things how I like them - I don't customise much - and then I'm away.
But if you really need to customise - in the interests of speed and efficiency in a visual-dominated world, in Ed's case - then something where you can do it scores immensely over something where the defaults are not right and you can't fiddle. Suddenly it all makes far more sense.
(I'm still not switching to KDE though. Especially not KDE 4. Typing away happily in GNOME here and liking it. I just wish they'd fix vertically-oriented panels, that's all I ask.)
I am convinced now on the Mac-vs-Windows thing, though. Macs are nowhere near as useful for a blind user as PCs, despite all the built-in tools, and in non-Apple apps, all bets are off, just like in Windows.
If a blind computer novice came to me now and asked for help, I'd probably start with Ubuntu and Orca. Orca does a decent job. It's a bit slow and unresponsive - at least by Ed's highly-demanding standards - but a newbie probably wouldn't know or care.
But if money were no object, alas, I think Windows and MS apps would be the best solution.
Sad, but true.
And on a totally different note: as something of an Apple fan, I felt really seriously let down by the Apple Store on Sunday. This is not the superior experience I expect from Job's Mob. They should have at least one person who knows VoiceOver and the accessibility features, and when a customer books a demo thereof, that person should be there. If Sunday wasn't convenient, another time could have been arranged. But to have a pre-booked appointment for some specific features to be shown off and to have nobody available who knew even the first thing about them is pretty damned poor.
ednun - but it's only when he started reading about the improvements in the VoiceOver screenreader in the latest version of OS X, "Snow Leopard", that he really got interested. So last Sunday, he booked an appointment to go into the Apple Store on Regent Street and have a demonstration of VoiceOver, both on OS X and on an iPhone 3GS, which also includes it. (The older iPhones do not.) He asked me if I'd like to go along, both to help him find the store & also to play with the shiny toys & maybe assist, as I am beginning to learn how using a computer & the Web via a screenreader works. (It's profoundly different from using a GUI with a mouse.) We turned up at the appointed time. Nobody was there specifically to see us - there were lots of helpful sales assistants but they maintained that no special appointment was needed or had been made, anybody would be able to help.
The first chap was called Adam. He went over to a Macbook and pointed at a stool for Ed to sit on. Ed, unable to see either stool or pointing, just stood there, waiting. The chap said "over here." Ed asked, very reasonably, "where?"
At which point Adam stood up, muttered something like "I can't do this" to his colleagues and ran for it. A younger guy called Paul took his place.
He started by trying to show Ed the trackpad. Ed hesitated. Paul tried again. I leaned over and pointed out that Ed would not be using that. "But... what do you mean?" asked Paul.
"He doesn't use the mouse."
"What?"
"He's doesn't use the mouse. He can't use a mouse."
"What do you mean, doesn't use a mouse?" persisted Paul, signally Failing To Get It.
So I spelled it out.
"He is blind. He can't see the mouse pointer, or indeed the screen, so pointing is not going to help."
Paul did a double-take. "Oh. Oh. Er, right. Yes. Of course. Um. Right. Yes. OK... so... the keyboard, then..."
It went downhill from there. Paul did not know how to open VoiceOver. He started looking through System Preferences. I was going to show him where it was when Ed interjected: "you start it with Ctrl-F5, or something like that," he said. He'd been doing his research. He was right.
So we had a play with VoiceOver. It has a pretty good tutorial built in which it runs the first time you turn it on. I got a MacBook of my own and went through it. It's thorough, but v e r y s l o w. You can't adjust the speed of the voice or of the tutorial as a whole, and even I, a novice user of screenreaders, was boiling with frustration by the 2nd screen. I don't know how Ed managed it; he sets his to speak at a few hundred words per minute, about 10x faster than human speech - even after 5Y of practice, 99% of what his computer says is unintelligibly rapid babble to me.
I persisted. Ed did too on his own machine.
VoiceOver actually works fairly well, within some limits. We were both quite impressed by what you can do. The thing I found oddest, as a sighted user familiar with the Mac UI and with some prior existing screenreader experience, is that VO duplicates UI features. The Mac has keyboard UI for some things - navigating controls, turning checkboxes on & off and so on. VO adds whole new controls to do this as well as the existing ones. This seems odd and unhelpful to me.
(Perhaps it's for nonstandard apps that don't accept keyboard controls, like Dashboard or something; I don't know. I can't imagine a lot of use for Dashboard, Exposé and so on for a blind user, to be honest. I realise that there might be reasons, I just found it odd.)
He also tried an iPhone.
Now, to both of us, the notion of a keyless display-only phone for a blind user seemed ridiculous a couple of months ago. It has to be the worst possible phone for a blind person to try to use; they can't feel the on-screen buttons or keys, they can't hit scrollbars or other controls. However, the 3GS does have support for blind users and several of Ed's mates are using it -- and they mostly seem to report loving the phone. So, reasonably enough, he wanted to try one.
It was a trial in more than one sense of the word.
The iPhone UI changes totally in VoiceOver mode. You touch once to select, and the phone tells you what you're over. Twice to activate. Single-finger flicks and drags operate controls; their direction sets the value, they don't need to be over or even near the on-screen control. To scroll, you drag with 3 fingers. It's totally different; I couldn't navigate the phone at all, and I can see. Paul attempted to adjust the volume on my phone, turned the speech volume down to miminum and we couldn't get it back again, so I had to abandon the attempt.
It was not a successful demo. After half an hour's work, Ed managed to type the word "on" into a text message. This was the longest string he managed to enter.
On the desktop, Ed & I puzzled it out between us. Paul had never used VoiceOver and knew nothing about how it worked. He was unable to advise on operating the Mac OS, because he could only think in terms of "this thing at the bottom is the Dock" or "click on the toolbar" or "click on the menu". He watched in amazement as I operated the Mac with the keyboard alone and told Ed the keystrokes. I got the feeling he didn't realise it could be done before that moment.
The screenreader is very thorough. It makes sound effects when going from line to line, column to column or row to row in tables and so on. It pronounces onscreen punctuation - toolbars become "send verticalbar receive verticalbar new message verticalbar reply" and so on. Very detailed feedback. Alas, as far as we can tell, what it can't do is be told to just read out a page or a screenful of text. I showed Ed how to manouvre down an email in Mail.app, paragraph by paragraph, when he'd concluded that it couldn't read the body, but he wanted to just tell it to read the message and leave it to it.
We tried Entourage, too. Even worse. VoiceOver couldn't read folder names, toolbars or anything, only plain text fields like name, subject, body, so the program was unnavigable.
Safari works rather better, but it's still clumsy compared to Windows screenreaders.
He came away quite happy. He didn't think Macs were right for him; he knows and likes Windows and Microsoft's various apps, which are all highly accessible. OS X 10.6 is way better than before, but it lacks customisability for him.
On Windows, he sets his preferred screenreader, Dolphin's HAL, to skip punctuation, linefeeds, etc. He also disables most of its informational sound effects and so on in the interests of speed. You can't do this on the Mac, as far as we could tell; you just don't get this level of control with VoiceOver. It has pane after pane of config settings, but even so, it's dwarfed by the customisability of HAL or rivals such as JAWS.
I found the experience interestingly reminiscent of fun arguments I've had with
reddragdiva and others about KDE versus GNOME. I used to use KDE, but I was always irritated by the profusion of settings to fiddle with. GNOME just sets sensible defaults and remembers where you left windows and so on. There is a lot less customisability exposed with GNOME, but it does the essentials well. KDE, to me, is a nightmare of twiddling trying to get it just right.
But comparing HAL to VoiceOver, suddenly things seem a lot clearer to me. I am not too fussy when it comes to GUIs - I can happily use anything from a classic Mac with System 6 up to Snow Leopard, GNOME or KDE or Xfce or several others on Unix, Windows from 3.1 to 7 and everything in between. It takes me 10min to set things how I like them - I don't customise much - and then I'm away.
But if you really need to customise - in the interests of speed and efficiency in a visual-dominated world, in Ed's case - then something where you can do it scores immensely over something where the defaults are not right and you can't fiddle. Suddenly it all makes far more sense.
(I'm still not switching to KDE though. Especially not KDE 4. Typing away happily in GNOME here and liking it. I just wish they'd fix vertically-oriented panels, that's all I ask.)
I am convinced now on the Mac-vs-Windows thing, though. Macs are nowhere near as useful for a blind user as PCs, despite all the built-in tools, and in non-Apple apps, all bets are off, just like in Windows.
If a blind computer novice came to me now and asked for help, I'd probably start with Ubuntu and Orca. Orca does a decent job. It's a bit slow and unresponsive - at least by Ed's highly-demanding standards - but a newbie probably wouldn't know or care.
But if money were no object, alas, I think Windows and MS apps would be the best solution.
Sad, but true.
And on a totally different note: as something of an Apple fan, I felt really seriously let down by the Apple Store on Sunday. This is not the superior experience I expect from Job's Mob. They should have at least one person who knows VoiceOver and the accessibility features, and when a customer books a demo thereof, that person should be there. If Sunday wasn't convenient, another time could have been arranged. But to have a pre-booked appointment for some specific features to be shown off and to have nobody available who knew even the first thing about them is pretty damned poor.
