!!Con 2016 - How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! By Sina Bahram

I lost the video a while back, then finally re-found it. Here's a blind person showing how Hacker News sounds over JAWS: ▶ this video (Headphone warning: the volume is unfortunately all over the place, the screen reader is way too loud and the speaker volume is way too soft.) TL;DR, the page design places so much emphasis on visual table layout that it doesn't incorporate a single <h1> or <h2> anywhere, and it is effectively impossible to read the site rapidly without unconditionally listening to all the Hacker News. Page has 224 links. Hacker News visited Unlabeled graphic Graphic y18 link Hacker News link new vertical bar link past vertical bar link comments vertical bar link ask vertical bar link show vertical bar link jobs vertical bar link submit. link login at the top of every single page. I just got mad and got JAWS working in demo/evaluation mode. Here's what blind users hear every time they visit HN: Table with 3 columns and 61 rows. 1. link upvote link Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane left paren link nature.com right paren 115 points by link jnord link 1 hour ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 46 comments. 2. link upvote link Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition link vinepair.com right paren 131 points by link harambae link 4 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 42 comments. 3. link upvote link SoftBank’s Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO left paren link reuters.com right paren 126 points by link gaius_baltar link 4 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 24 comments. 4. link upvote link You can change your number left paren link signal.org right paren 508 points by link feross link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 300 comments. 5. link upvote link Finding the average of two unsigned integers without overflow left paren link microsoft.com right paren 249 points by link mlex link 8 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 119 comments. 6. link upvote link IRS to ditch biometric requirement for online access left paren link krebsonsecurity.com right paren 328 points by link bonyt link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 112 comments. 7. link upvote link KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE left paren link complete.org right paren 167 points by link jrepinc link 9 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 65 comments. 8. link upvote link Some mistakes Rust doesn’t catch left paren link fasterthanli.me right paren 118 points by link jacobwg link 6 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 17 comments. 9. link upvote link Flexbox Froggy – A game for learning CSS flexbox left paren link flexboxfroggy.com right paren 210 points by link mrzool link 9 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 21 comments. 10. link upvote link Ask HN: How to raise funds for rare disease research? 204 points by link halukakin link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 127 comments. That doesn't sound too bad, but as outlined (somewhat) in the video above, blind users typically don't go for walls of text like the above, they typically navigate interactively by virtually zooming "in" and "out" of the navigation hierarchy in a document. This does not work with sites that do not have any headings - and HN has none. You'd better not be blind and have ADHD! Not only do you have to listen to all the navigation cruft, you have to listen to the entire front page as a well of text and lean on working memory, because the lack of headings makes it nontrivial to pause/rewind. Now, 75%+ of the material linked here can be expected to have a minimal level of reasonable common sense with regards to semantically-structured layout, so once you've left the link and title soup you can probably expect to listen to some proportion of articles and information in relative peace. But hang on...

For what it's worth, my own desire to see if I can help out somehow has definitely only increased over the past few months as I've noticed the messages at the tops of threads about pagination. I don't have any particular skills that would make me a hand-in-glove fit (eg, I'd need to learn Arc...), but surely there are tons of little boring things I could usefully do that would take the heat off. If I'm thinking this way, surely there are (many?) others...? For example, something tiny that I'd love to fix is to split vote() in half and move the UI update logic into an Image.onload handler, so that the UI only changes if the upvote absolutely committed. I'm OCD about this because I actually use voting as bookmarking, and recently realized that some unknown percentage of my upvotes/bookmarks have sadly been lost because the auth= value had expired (eg in the case of a weeks-old tab) or because I was on bad 4G on my phone, but the UI state has no bearing on the network response. Something else that I'd be very happy to put effort into, after being told how to approach the problem :), would be to make the site screen-reader-accessible: ▶ this video (size-XL volume warning - unfortunately the speaker volume is like 5% of the screen reader volume). A longer-term project that I also think would also be very useful would be to implement OAuth2, so that users would be able to safely attach external logins to their accounts without needing to supply their actual user passwords (which thankfully none of the alternate UIs have tried to do AFAIK). This could support fine-grained scopes like "can see own comment votes", "can vote", "can post replies", etc. IMHO the best way to do this would be to have a central pool of manually-approved app registrations; this is definitely the most complicated approach :/, but it means the entire system would depend on a human who could go "...that OAuth2 app in particular is behaving weird. [pause]" which would be very tricky to achieve with an autonomous system (where everyone independently creates their own tokens that have no semantic value). This sort of thing utterly fails at large scale (see also: Google, YouTube, etc), but I think it would be perfect for HN. While implementing this it would also make sense to support 2FA using TOTP. A while back I read that one of the reasons the site was closed was to keep the voting logic private. The chances are there are probably a bunch of other things (like maybe the spam detection/handling systems, and maybe the moderation tools) would be similarly classified as (for want of a better word) "sensitive". Well... it could be very, very interesting to split the codebase in half, with all the sensitive stuff in one corner, and the remainder of the codebase capable of running locally without it. Maybe you've already considered this, and consider it nonviable :( (NB. The reason for the Rube Goldberg OAuth2 architecture I suggested was precisely to make it that much harder for people to register throwaway/bot accounts etc, keeping in mind the voting logic thing. Couldn't figure out how to reword the above two paragraphs to resolve the info dependency :) so put this here instead. lol) IIUC, there are a very small pool of enthusiasts around the K programming language (link) that privately study the source code to Kdb, and I understand that Arthur Whitney et al. are actually open to newcomers taking an interest in the project. (I'm sure I saw a comment mentioning as such a while back, possibly by geocar, but don't seem to be able to find it. I might've read as such elsewhere.) At some point I hope to go down that rabbithole, which looks genuinely interesting, but learning that it *was* actually accessible left a bit of an impression given that (link): > Whitney demonstrated his “research K interpreter” at the Iverson College meeting[5] in Cambridge in 2011. We had visitors from Mi

There's an amazing 10min !!Con 2016 talk by Sina Bahram, How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! I use a computer very differently than most people, because I’m blind. When I’m surfing the web, tweeting, checking email, reading the news, and writing code, I’m doing so because a program called a screen reader is reading me what’s on the screen. I happen to listen to it read me this text at a thousand words per minute! Join me in listening to how I experience some common user interfaces. Yes, I’ll slow it down for you. I also have a challenge for everyone in the audience. Can you get through a day only using the keyboard? What about not looking at your screen? Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include high-tech startups, fortune 1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums. ▶ this video

Hopefully this will be helpful: I found Sina Bahram's talk at !!Con 2016 How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! inspiring and incredible. He's blind and has his computer read everything out ridiculously quickly, and apparently gets input that way much faster than sighted people can read! Amazing. I use a computer very differently than most people, because I’m blind. When I’m surfing the web, tweeting, checking email, reading the news, and writing code, I’m doing so because a program called a screen reader is reading me what’s on the screen. I happen to listen to it read me this text at a thousand words per minute! Join me in listening to how I experience some common user interfaces. Yes, I’ll slow it down for you. I also have a challenge for everyone in the audience. Can you get through a day only using the keyboard? What about not looking at your screen? Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include high-tech startups, fortune 1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums. Talk: ▶ this video Text copied from this page: link