Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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I'm a user-experience designer interested in making websites more intuitive and more interesting for blind people through touch (self.Blind)
submitted by Chaosbuggy
My entire career revolves around making digital interfaces that are intuitive to use. I'm interested in bringing the same kind of experience to the blind, but I don't know if it's actually something that would be wanted. I was hoping you guys could give me some insight or feedback on the idea.
There is a glove on the market that uses vibration to teach people to read and write braille. What if when you moved your fingers over your phone screen, the glove vibrated your finger to appropriately reflect what you're hovering over? The text would send as braille vibrations. Now, what if you moved your fingers to the top of the screen and felt a consistently vibrating line that creates the outline of a box, and within this box you have more text. This is your site navigation.
Humans naturally group items together based on size, shape, color, and location. This natural tendency is how we make web pages visually easy to navigate. The idea is that if we can bring those groupings to your fingertips, you could navigate digital interfaces faster and easier.
I know very little about the technology of these gloves, I don't know how I would make this work, and I don't know if blind people want to browse the web this way at all. Please let me know your thoughts, or advice!
The idea is to make using the web literally feel just like it looks.
There is a glove on the market that uses vibration to teach people to read and write braille. What if when you moved your fingers over your phone screen, the glove vibrated your finger to appropriately reflect what you're hovering over? The text would send as braille vibrations. Now, what if you moved your fingers to the top of the screen and felt a consistently vibrating line that creates the outline of a box, and within this box you have more text. This is your site navigation.
Humans naturally group items together based on size, shape, color, and location. This natural tendency is how we make web pages visually easy to navigate. The idea is that if we can bring those groupings to your fingertips, you could navigate digital interfaces faster and easier.
I know very little about the technology of these gloves, I don't know how I would make this work, and I don't know if blind people want to browse the web this way at all. Please let me know your thoughts, or advice!
The idea is to make using the web literally feel just like it looks.
Marconius 3 points 6y ago
Having just finished my certificate for web accessibility, I really don't feel that this is the way to go as it is completely counterintuitive to how screen readers have been developed to read websites and how blind and visually impaired people train to expect and interact with websites. The whole point of accessibility is breaking away from The visual design styles that seek to break apart the flow of information; screen readers and websites are presented to us in a very linear fashion which is the most efficient way of presenting information. We navigate the web through series of finger gestures that move the cursor through the tap order of the information on the page, or jump through various landmarks, headings, formed Controls, and other web elements. Hovering around and waiting for vibration to search the visual aspects of a website would slow us down, and it definitely wouldn't interest me in the slightest as it's just one more obstacle we've been trying to break away from between us and the conveyed website information.
I strongly urge you to research screen readers and study how they work and how we use them to surf the web. Haptic feedback would be an interesting feature for new accessible games, but I definitely see it as a hindrance when it comes to navigating around a browser especially if you are attempting to add another wearable device to the mix. It ultimately just sounds like one more peripheral that has a slightly novel use but no actual use for functionality or productivity whatsoever.
I strongly urge you to research screen readers and study how they work and how we use them to surf the web. Haptic feedback would be an interesting feature for new accessible games, but I definitely see it as a hindrance when it comes to navigating around a browser especially if you are attempting to add another wearable device to the mix. It ultimately just sounds like one more peripheral that has a slightly novel use but no actual use for functionality or productivity whatsoever.
Chaosbuggy [OP] 1 points 6y ago
Thanks for the insight, I'll look into screen readers more in-depth. I suppose this idea came to me because I have ADHD, and I really struggle with retaining spoken information. I also read much faster than someone can speak, and quickly grow impatient at listening to descriptions when I could just read them myself.
Of course the problem with that is not everyone has those issues, and I'm not blind, so my version of a perfect visual-free web experience is incredibly skewered. Thanks!
Of course the problem with that is not everyone has those issues, and I'm not blind, so my version of a perfect visual-free web experience is incredibly skewered. Thanks!
Marconius 1 points 6y ago
You were approaching this idea assuming that blind people also have the context ability to group items by shape, color, design, etc. which they are unable to do since we can't physically see how things are represented on the web. Clear conveyance of information is what's important, not trying to expose how things look visually and how they are visually arranged in the context of the screen. This also would not work in conjunction with the screen reader considering that CSS will pull information out of order visually, and the screen reader would still be able to read everything in a linear fashion, even when text is off screen, thus making the haptic engine fight with what the screen reader is presenting making the whole experience very confusing.
Chaosbuggy [OP] 1 points 6y ago
I apologize if my original post was unclear; I was assuming blind people were able to group items based on their physical location and proximity to one another. Web design is nothing more than visually grouping content in some way to make it easier to navigate the screen, so that we dont have to read or navigate by reading every word first. The idea is to give the web a physical space that can be navigated by touch, instead of relying on sound. You know where your shoe laces are because you know they obviously exist on your shoes, which are down on your feet. You use sense of touch to feel when you are on your laces, but you dont have to touch every part of your body to find them, because you have already have context of where they physically exist. This is the base of the idea. If every Web page has a box at the top of the screen with words inside them to navigate between pages of a site, then you learn to go to the top of your screen and read the words located within the box first located there first. This idea would not utilize current CSS on a page, and would require pages to be built and designed specifically in a way that makes them work with the software and hardware. I was imagining that if this were used with a screen reader, it would read only what you're hovering over. I'm probably doing an awful job of explaining this, but I hope that makes sense.
Blindmouseottawa 1 points 6y ago
The blind is missing the visual aspect information gathering. As such they lack some of the advantages of visual cues. Audio information is linear process on which people can only go foward and backwards. This takes time. Tactile such as braille solves this although it's limited to one cell at a time, although it is not linear.
The vision I see for this type tool could be assist with spatial speration of items with haptic feedback and options. It could be navigation. Although phones already have this by doing it on the phone.
The hearing impaired my like something similar like a vibration for notifications.
The vision I see for this type tool could be assist with spatial speration of items with haptic feedback and options. It could be navigation. Although phones already have this by doing it on the phone.
The hearing impaired my like something similar like a vibration for notifications.
jogajaja 1 points 6y ago
I understand what you're saying, and I think it's great thinking. The caveat, though, is that most blind users don't conceptualize the web the way that you and I do. Size, shape, and color aren't really necessary ways for them to group things unless it's for an assignment; and the more complex a website is designed, oftentimes the harder it can be for their screenreading software to manage it. As someone who often has to teach and facilitate these skills to beginning braille readers, I would love it if there were better screenreading programs, or some sort of middleman program that could magically make every website visual impairment friendly- as it sits now, for a person who is blind to navigate a single page, it often involves tabbing through every single word on the page from top to bottom, left to right to find what you need; it's very tedious.
I also think it would be cool if the gloves themselves could be the braille typewriter, somehow. Just ideas I've thought about...
I also think it would be cool if the gloves themselves could be the braille typewriter, somehow. Just ideas I've thought about...
Chaosbuggy [OP] 1 points 6y ago
My thinking was that since grouping things based on similarities is human nature (this would be utilizing location, proximity and shape grouping), that introducing a way to group content on a webpage without relying on sight or sound could be beneficial. This way the whole tabbing and listening system is no longer needed, just a sense of where things are located on the screen.
I wasn't clear with this in my first post, but this would require pages to be specially designed and coded for this type of accessibility, so the complex webpage thing shouldn't be an issue as it is with the speech recognition. Of course, it would be even worse in terms of wide-spread accessibility than what's currently available, which makes the solution problematic.
Of course, if users like the way things are currently being done then it may be better to work on improving that technology instead of creating new technology. Thanks for the feedback!
I wasn't clear with this in my first post, but this would require pages to be specially designed and coded for this type of accessibility, so the complex webpage thing shouldn't be an issue as it is with the speech recognition. Of course, it would be even worse in terms of wide-spread accessibility than what's currently available, which makes the solution problematic.
Of course, if users like the way things are currently being done then it may be better to work on improving that technology instead of creating new technology. Thanks for the feedback!
jogajaja 1 points 6y ago
I think users would love improvements on current technology, and they always appreciate people who take the time to learn about how they experience the internet and technology in general. Thanks for taking the time to think about all of this!
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