Boing Boing » blind http://boingboing.net Brain candy for Happy Mutants Fri, 24 May 2013 05:28:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 How DRM screws people with visual disabilities: a report from the front lines http://boingboing.net/2012/09/22/how-drm-screws-people-with-vis.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/22/how-drm-screws-people-with-vis.html#comments Sun, 23 Sep 2012 03:38:27 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=182709 ZDNet's Rupert Goodwins is going blind. Most of us will lose a substantial fraction of our visual acuity, should we live long enough. As a service to his readers, Goodwins is documenting the way that technology can be adapted for people with visual disabilities. It's a fascinating story: as he says, "there's never been a better time to go blind: we are busy converting the world to digital, and digital is supremely easy to convert."

But that's only true as long as there's no DRM in the mix. Once DRM gets into your information stream, your ability to adapt what's happening on your screen to work with your disability is severely curtailed. As Goodwins discovered, the world of ebooks is especially hard on people with visual disabilities.

...[I]t turned out I needed Adobe Digital Editions to 'manage my content'. Some fun later — you have to download it from a particularly brain-dead web page with teeny-tiny dialog boxes that were broken in Chrome and invisible in Firefox — and I had a large blob of code to install on my Windows box.

It tried, of course, to force me to give Adobe my email and other details for the 'Adobe ID' that it assured me I needed to get full functionality. I demurred... and was confronted by a user interface that was tiny white text on a black background. Unreadable. Options to change this? If they exist, I couldn't find them.

Getting this far had taken me half an hour fighting my way through a nest of misery and frustration with broken eyes and a sinking heart. Along the way, I'd been bombarded by marketing messages telling me to "enjoy the experience" and "enjoy your book".

Reader, I wept. Marketing departments, here's a top tip: if your customer is reduced to actual, hot, stinging tears, you may wish to fine-tune your messaging.

This is the reward you get for being disabled and wanting to do the right thing. This is how the world's most splendid machine for freeing our minds from our physical shackles is itself being shackled. This is what will happen to all of you reading this as you get old. I know this, I've done the research: most of you will start to go blind before you die.

Going blind? DRM will dim your world ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/22/how-drm-screws-people-with-vis.html/feed 12 Blind person uses ATM for first time http://boingboing.net/2011/09/13/blind-person-uses-atm-for-first-time.html http://boingboing.net/2011/09/13/blind-person-uses-atm-for-first-time.html#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:44:05 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=117350

This video shows the process that a blind man goes through in using a particular ATM for the first time; the machine he selects is one that has a ton of assistive features that are aimed at making use easier for visually impaired people, but it's apparent that this guy -- blind film critic Tommy Edison -- has to go through a heroic effort to get through a technological ritual that most of us take for granted. I also felt for Edison in light of the advice to shield your PIN from potential hidden cameras, a task that seems to add transcendent difficulty to an already tricky task.

Blind Man vs. The ATM - Tommy Edison (via Consumerist) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/09/13/blind-person-uses-atm-for-first-time.html/feed 34