This Visually Impaired Software Developer’s Request to Fellow Developers

For most of us if we need to read a book, we could get it from either a library or a shop. Not for me, who’s visually impaired. To read a book, I need to first get it converted. That’s because the book, usually only in print, may not have been converted into a regular audio format.

Challenges I grew up with and how I tackled them

As a student, I wanted to study Mathematics, but couldn’t access any book here in India. I discovered an audio book library in the US that had those books. But one needed a special cassette player to ‘listen’ to those books and that would have cost me an exorbitant Rs. 10,000. After some reading and tinkering, I could modify a regular cassette player for a paltry Rs.100.

After high school, I was introduced to the screen reader and I immediately realized that it would transform my life! A screen reader is a software that helps blind people work with a computer using a synthesizer (artificial voice). But at that time, it cost Rs.45,000 and it didn’t work for Indian languages. Being a developer myself, I developed an open source screen reader that worked for Indian languages in collaboration with the National Association for the Blind (NAB), Delhi. This helped many students take their exams independently.

The screen reader and other assistive technologies have literally transformed the lives of persons with disabilities. But they have their own limitations. If an assistive technology is a vehicle that helps us go places, it requires good roads to work properly. It’s often a software and it can understand structured information with well-known standards. If an information is unstructured, i.e., an image or an audio video, a software may not be able to process it.

Opportunities in front of developers

That brings us to the opportunities developers have today. Can they really solve challenges people like me face? The relevant technology is already developed, but while designing their solutions, developers need to be mindful of the special needs of people with disabilities. Here are a few tips:

1. Make your interface available for multiple senses. If there is an image, provide alternate text for it. If some information is in audio, then provide caption or transcript. Subtitles help many users without disabilities as well whose primary language is not the same as the audio. In case of a video content, there must be an audio description explaining significant visual information.

2. Give programmatic access. Use semantic information. For example, in HTML, use proper tags such as table, heading etc. instead of just using stylesheets to mark important information. Similarly, use standard User Interface controls that come with your development platform as these are often accessible. If you must use custom controls, use accessibility Application Programming Interface (API) to support accessible interaction with your controls. An example of Accessibility API: Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) which allows developers to make custom html tags to be more accessible.

3. Design device-independent interactions. Taking the HTML example, if you use only mouse events in your code, keyboard users would not be able to work with your interface, and a significant number of users prefer working with keyboards. Similarly, if you use keyboard specific events, mouse users would not be able to work with the interface.

4. Go for simple and consistent navigation. Many users with or without any disabilities could be more effective if you design your interface consistently and do not put too many items on a page or screen. Keep the language simple because many users may not be able to understand complicated language.

Most well-known platforms have guidelines or standards to make them accessible. For web applications, check out the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0).

Even people who do not consider themselves disabled, benefit from good contrast, resizable text, subtitles, and voice guided navigation. Accessible technology is like insurance for all of us. We buy insurance to protect ourselves against exigencies. If we could make technology accessible for people with disabilities, such an environment will reduce anxiety even for those who are not disabled.