Very nice article effectively. But accessibility is not only good for old people or ones with a visual disability.
I discussed with a 16 year old a couple of weeks ago and asked what she though about the iPhone and the Nokia (she had a Nokia in hands).
She did only one thing in front of me: Unlocked her phone, wrote an SMS, sent it, everything without even having a glance at the screen. Then she smiled, looked at me and said "Can you do it with an iPhone?".
Yes, the blind community are quite positive about their iPhone experiences. Last month, Artur Ortega, an accessibility evangelist at Yahoo, demonstrated how he uses an iphone in every day life.
Effectively the touchscreen is a big thumb-pad, and using easy to understand gestures he is able to use most of the functionality on the phone, including the Safari browser.
The main limitation of the iPhone, currently, is the inaccessibility of the Facebook application. Pity since the first Facebook app on the iPhone had decent accessibility.
Apple have done an interesting job on iphone accessibility. It's one of the rare devices where the screen reader is built into the operating system, thus essentially free.
Very well written article that touches on some of the more important points about accessibility. I've seen the attitude that they mention in too many developers. What they don't realise is that for people with a visual or motor disability, a computer and the internet can make possible things that weren't earlier possible or make easier things that were hard.
If you'd fractured both legs or you're allergic to sunlight, would you prefer to get your milk at the local grocery store or to order it online and have it home delivered? If you had a visual disability and had to rely on audio cues, would you prefer a conversation in a crowded room full of people or IRC?
I don't know if toucscreen devices can replicate the kind of tactile feedback you get from a physical keyboard. I've heard of research in this area that uses tiny electric pulses or vibration, but I don't have a source to cite right now. It may be some way off, but just dismissing it by saying it's not necessary isn't the solution. We're all smart enough to figure it out if we first identify it as a problem.
Remember some of the first FORTRAN and COBOL programmers are in their 70s now. Arthritis and visual problems aren't that uncommon at that age. Will PHP, Python and Ruby programmers still be able to use a computer when they turn 70?
I wish this article would get past the "disabled people don't use computers" straw man (at least, I hope none of OP's technical friends really espouse that) and address the reasons that designers marginalize accessibility in real decisions.
For one, most of us are ignorant as to just how many users fall outside the "able" use case, and in what ways. Among product managers, if you can't quantify that unusual use case, it's going to be termed the "10% case" or the "1% case". And that is the kiss of death.
For another thing, few of us have any idea how people outside the majority want to use software. It's just as ludicrous to assume that a legally blind person will use a cameraphone the same way as you do as to assume that she won't use a cameraphone at all. Perhaps she's far more likely to use it for document scanning, and far less likely to demand the option to apply a wacky sepia tone effect to her photos.
Getting the answers to these questions into designer's heads is going to have more impact than any number of "come on, you guys" appeals.
Incidentally, in the specific case of colorblindness, I think the abovementioned type of awareness is starting to permeate the industry. You can especially see the results in games, which sometime include a colorblind-friendly display mode.
actual tactile feedback. A major feature of real buttons. This is what they refer to as affordance. A button, by its nature, is meant to be pushed, and obviously so, even when you aren't looking at it.
The more interesting trend to me, which seems to be true for both touchscreen and accessible design is... no mouse. There's a shake up from which ever way you look at it.
Accessibility is much about understanding what can be perceived and understood. Yes, non-tactile buttons aren't great for people who rely on touch - but that doesn't matter if there's a better interface that is accessible.
A visual person looks at an iphone and sees the touch screen as a series of hotspots, something akin to a button. But, it's a flat surface, it doesn't have to be interpreted as non-tactile buttons.
Look at an iphone touchscreen when the phone is switched off. Now look at a Macbook touchpad. If the touchpad - with no 'screen' behind it, or no display at all - how would you use that to navigate around the various features of an iPhone like OS?
Very quickly you'd land on the idea of gestures with spoken output. You'd create a navigation of gestures. Swipe left to move to the next application. Swipe right for the previous application. Double tap to activate the selected application. That's just for starters.
As the iphone demonstrates, there's a rich language for interacting with the device that seems to be enough to navigate around the various features of the phone.
Accessibility is about providing the equivalent functionality. No-one ever said the way of using it had to be the same, just equivalent. A different interaction allows access to the same functionality.
I remain deeply impressed with Apple for producing a mobile device that for the blind community absolutely rocks. It's a pity that Google's equivalent device is not as well thought out or implemented, sure it works for TV Raman, but others I've spoken to have concluded that Google's attempts are nowhere near iPhone quality.
I recently made the mistake of buying a Cowon touchscreen media player to use as portable music player. It had no control buttons apart from very bad volume buttons so i could not control it "blindly" when it was in my pocket. Sold it weeks later to get a proper player.
EITHER flat touchscreen devices are inherently unusable OR designers don't have to make major compromises to provide accessibility. One or the other — not both. This article spends half its time bashing touchscreens and the other half brushing aside designers' objections that they'll have to make sacrifices to achieve the kind of accessibility he's looking for. Not even arguing against the objections, just saying that it's not really a problem and the real issue is those darn lazy designers who "don’t prioritise the effort."
It would have been really cool and useful and might have actually changed some minds if he'd included practical advice into his post rather than just gripes and platitudes. Brushing aside the objections of the people you're trying to convince is pretty much the worst argumentation tactic imaginable.
This is a very important issue, and touch screen devices present new challenges to making applications accessible, but it does not appear that the problem is being ignored.
I was going through a Section 508-derived set of standards today for a government project, and it was surprising just how many of the implementation requirements were really just best practices for semantic markup. Isn't that the way forward for accessibility everywhere? When data, interaction, and presentation are properly modular, it's much easier to replace parts of the system for those unable to use them.
I've also seen this attitude in discussions of new user interfaces for computers. Whenever some new GUI show up here (or yet another post shows up about that awful 10/GUI system), many people get defensive or dismissive about the idea that some thought should be spared for those without 20/20 full-color eyesight and normal dexterity.
Why should everyone be limited to the subset of designs/techs that are accessible? Choice is a good thing, we can have both unaccessible and accessible designs at the market, and let the people choose what they want and can use.
That's true, choice is a good thing until you are blind and then you have no choice. In the US, the whole point of Section 508 is to protect the minority. If you left it up to the market, the majority of people who have no disabilities would be the ones who are catered too and a secondary market attempting to address the needs of people with disabilities would have to spring up. Most likely, things in that market would be inferior on the whole to their counterparts in the mainstream market simply by virtue of there being a lot less invested in them. That is not what we want, someone who is disabled should have the same choices as someone who does not.
The iPhone works fantastically well for bond users, thanks to the brilliant design of VoiceOver. It turns out tactile feedback isn't nearly as essential as one might expect.
For how many of the applications available for touchscreen phones and tablets is the touchscreen really necessary? For some of them(fast-paced games, visual-arts-related things, etc.), the touchscreen is key, but those are largely inherently inaccessible to the blind. Not as much to arthritics and others with decreased manual dexterity, but they'd probably be better off with a mouse.
For most iPhone/Pad apps, the touchscreen, at best, makes the UI more convenient. It is not at all integral to the functionality. One of the frequent criticisms of Android is the risk of fragmentation of the platform between devices with very different capabilities, but this is one situation where that could actually be a good thing. There's no hope that a blind person will ever be able to use an iPhone or an iPad, but there is at least a chance that HTC or some other company will release an Android device targeting people who have difficulties with touchscreens. It probably would be a much worse experience than a normal Android device for people who can use touchscreens, but the decision for those that can't wouldn't be between a normal smartphone and one without a touchscreen, but between a phone without a touchscreen and no smartphone at all.
I discussed with a 16 year old a couple of weeks ago and asked what she though about the iPhone and the Nokia (she had a Nokia in hands).
She did only one thing in front of me: Unlocked her phone, wrote an SMS, sent it, everything without even having a glance at the screen. Then she smiled, looked at me and said "Can you do it with an iPhone?".
Me: speechless and lesson learned.