A lot of them are not actual products that will go into production, but actually university design projects. One of the steps for those projects is gathering potential customer data, so they can show the steps.

Don’t forget the knights irl. Uber drivers keep trying to buckle my seatbelt for me, people want to guide my instead of trusting me and my guide dog, people asking me if I’m lost while I’m sitting on the metro... it’s a long list

I do notice that, yeah. As a totally blind person, it’s interesting. I try to be polite about it, you learn such skills in media and public relations. I feel bad for not responding to everyone, but it feels like I am giving similar answers. It’s like refer to said answer. I answered it before.

I am a journalist, and it’s like me going up to the director of an organization and asking so what is your organization and tell me what is the basics that you do? Duh! Did you read our website. Would be a correct response. If it’s inaccessible that would be a problem, but if it’s accessible, it would be a problem that the journalist had. Research is important. Asking question is great, but as a journalist, which in many other disciplines sad to say is not taught as well as in journalism, but is always to do some basic research first. If you ask google a question, usually you’ll get a basic, if you have further questions that need extensive analysis then ask. I just answered a question and as a journalist, I think some basic research with these questions may have helped:

1. What is a cane?
2. What does it do?
3. How well does it work for blind people?
If you put those in to google, I am sure you’ll find many stories.

I am fairly new here but I have also noticed a surprising number of students seeking blind or partially sighted people for study. They are well meaning undergrads for the most part who have not done sufficient research before forming questions. I have to say I feel it is intrusive at times.

Those who speak about developing physical devices or software without any understanding or previous research annoy me more. If you have not done enough work on your own to know a little about your target audience it feels like it is highly unlikely your product will ever be a reality.

I felt precisely that way about one of these posts and wrote a comment on it. On second thought it seemed quite impolite and I deleted it immediately. But There's indeed a tendency to use blind people as some sort of target group for design exercises and so on, which, ok, fine, but there's a lot of previous work done on this and it often attempts to solve the wrong problems, and so on. Oh well.

I can speak only from the perspective of a blind scientist, and I know what you mean. It really takes brilliance to innovate, which is why I think a lot of scientists/engineers etc are essentially trying to repeat what's already been done. Unfortunately a lot of it is about doing something better, aka cheaper. As for consulting blind people, some do, some don't. But any scientist worth their salt can spot a garbage paper relatively easily.

Have faith, though - I know first hand there are many, many amazing people working on amazing projects to make our lives easier as blind people all over the world. Technology is like photography - the more photos you take; that is, the more things you invent, the more likely one of them will turn out amazing :)

This is precisely why I asked what the community struggled with. It's why I didn't make a 'special blind version' of the site, why I made sure everything just ran in a hierarchy that made sense and why I make my hidden comments as short as possible but yet logical.

I think as a seeing person, we don't understand the challenges and we are looking for things to fix, but really we over think the problem and should probably just design a good flow that works from the top down logically.

> I just wish there was a polite way of saying, "please discuss with us before trying to solve our already solved issues."

I think the polite way of saying that is "please discuss with us before trying to solve our already solved issues."

:)

Blind folks, the annoyance with over-eager individuals is valid and I'm not going to say I don't experience it either. However, try to rembmer the historical context of where people's perceptions of disability used to be. Encountering a little annoyance from some over eager individuals is much better than being completely ignored and barred from most of society. Apreciate the interest and curiosity of others, and use those awkward opportunities to connect with someone new, maybe even pass on a little education. I don't want to here any of the "it is not my responsibility to educate" nonsense because it absolutely is. It is the only way we get further in this world of the sighted.