Monica

Well that's disappointing

2023-08-29T02:42:04Z

Me: Opens help chat with Netflix (there is no email option).
Chatbot: Title?
Me: Accessibility options for choosing shows

Chatbot: Sends links to irrelevant articles I already had to click past to get to the contact link.
Me: Clicks "chat with an agent".

(Opening handshake.)

Agent: Can you elaborate the issue that you are facing?

Me: When browsing shows, either on my TV or on your web site, you only show graphics for the shows. I don't see very well and the art is often hard to see, particularly if the show uses small or fancy fonts. Is there a way to see a text list? You used to have that for the web site (but not the TV) but that's been gone for a while. I do not want to have to hover over or navigate into each thing when browsing -- too many to do that. I'm looking for a way to scan a list of titles I can actually see.

Agent: The list is not available anymore

Me: Is there some accessibility setting I can change? It's really frustrating to not be able to navigate your offerings.

Agent: I understand, but there is no setting

Me: Thank you. I understand. How can I escalate my concern? I know that you cannot fix it but somebody at Netflix should be concerned about ADA/accessibility. How do I reach that person?

Agent: There is no one that can resolve it. I can pass on the suggestion and the feedback to our team. And they will look into it.

I suspect I know how that will go. I have the impression that all the streaming services are anti-accessible like this, though I've only done cursory browsing. They probably all think it's ok because everybody else does it. Netflix has had this problem for a while; I don't often use the service because of that, and every time I go to watch something I am reminded of how hostile it is. (In case you're wondering, my Netflix subscription comes bundled with something else; otherwise I probably would have dropped it by now because of this.)

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Windows: accessibility obstacles

2019-09-03T02:00:21Z

I got a new laptop at work last week, so naturally it came with Windows 10. Some of the software my group uses requires Windows; I'm currently still on Win 7 on my old machine. (And haven't gotten updates since last November. Eventually IT would have noticed. But even aside from that, the machine is five years old and starting to become unreliable.) The migration has been...challenging, with some accessibility regressions I don't know how to fix.

On Win 7 I defined a custom theme which had the following important properties:

Window background is not bright white but a light tan: bright white backgrounds hurt my eyes a lot, especially over a sustained period. This is set at the OS level, so all applications get it by default.
Font size for menus, window titles, and assorted other UI elements is increased so I can actually read them.
Colors for the title bars of active and inactive windows are very different so I can easily spot which window is currently active.

On Windows 10 I can do none of those. In their themes I can set a "color" and an "accent color". The color is used as the background color for the start bar (well, whatever they call that now) and, if you check a box, all window title bars (active and inactive). I think the accent color is used for highlighting. Alternatively, I can apply a "tint" to everything, but (a) that would mess up graphics somewhat and (b) I can only choose one of a few baked-in colors, none of which is a good choice for me. If I'm going to go the "tint" route, I should attack it via monitor settings.

There is a "high contrast" option, but high contrast is exactly what I don't want so I gave it only a passing glance at first. (The choices there are white or bright yellow on black or the reverse of those. Ow.) Then a helpful Microsoftian who saw my plaintive tweet (thanks!) pointed out that in high-contrast mode you can change foreground and background colors (not at all obvious in the UI!), so I tried that as a way to change the background color. Unfortunately, high-contrast mode changes some other things that make it harder for me to see things (regardless of what colors you use). For example, it removes color from all the icons that sit on the task bar. I'm used to identifying some of those by "small blob of green", "blue squarish thing", and so on. It made other changes I found difficult too; don't remember what exactly.

Somebody else, either on Twitter or Super User, told me that the color setting for the window background is actually in the registry so I could brute-force it that way. Aha! So I did that, and... some applications honor it and some do not. Windows the OS seems to not. But hey, progress! While I was in there I couldn't help noticing that there were also registry entries for things like active-window color, menu font size, and more, so I exported all my settings from Win 7, loaded them into the registry on Win 10, and...saw no change, even after rebooting. Those registry settings are there, but apparently most of them are ignored? Or overridden somewhere else?

On the font-size front, there seems to be no help for me. All application menus and the Outlook navigation pane use a font that is too small for me to see without leaning in. Note that I have a pretty high-end monitor and prescription computer glasses that work just fine for me on Win 7. I got them to fix the ergonomics problem of having to lean in too close to the monitor. But I can't increase that font size on Win 10.

The answer from Microsoft's help and forums seems to be: increase the "text size" setting at the OS level. I currently have it at 125%, same as I did on Win 7. Oh, if only it were just text size! When I bumped it to 150% I discovered that that setting does a lot more; it's effectively zoom for the whole desktop. So, for example, I would have to make browser windows proportionally even more humongous to avoid the ill effects of "responsive design" that assumes wide windows and perfect vision. I'd have to make Emacs and shells that much wider to support 80-character lines. I'd have to make the file browser that much wider to still see the details view on listings. And so on. It's the equivalent of lowering the resolution on my monitor. I'm not sure the documentation IDE I use (Madcap Flare) will even fit on the screen at that zoom level; it certainly wouldn't let me see at least a little rendered output or the contents of a shell at the same time. No. That Does Not Work.

(Get a bigger monitor? I'm kind of at the limits of my vision now. If I have to move my head back and forth to read a line of text in an application, on a web page, or in an editor, that's going to be both inefficient and terrible ergonomics.)

This has all been terribly frustrating. From my perspective Microsoft removed accessibility controls that I relied on. (From their perspective they redesigned everything to take advantage of the benefits of Metro, I imagine.) It feels very "one size fits most, and the few don't matter", an attitude I previously only experienced with Apple. (Yeah, I can't control these things on my Mac either, but on my Mac, at home, I mainly use Emacs and browsers, and I can customize those directly.) In principle I could switch over to Linux and run some stuff in a Windows VM, but in practice I would be on my own for making that work and the last person in my group who tried that found the performance of Flare in a VM to be unsatisfactory. And if I'm going to have to manage everything myself with no help from IT (for not being the standard image), I might as well install a rogue Win 7 and carry on. But I'd probably get in trouble for that.

I realize that my problems are specialized and finicky, but if anyone reading this has input on any part of it, please share.

Update: I found System Font Size Changer, which let me set font sizes independently if needed for menus, title bars, message boxes, and a few other things. And it worked! Outlook uses one of them (not sure which) for the navigation pane, so I can even see the names of my folders and stuff now! Alas, the color-changer application by the same person didn't have much of an effect. At the end of Wednesday I installed f.lux to see if that can help me, after discovering just how much Madcap Flare does not honor settings in Win 10. I can't work with that tool without some fix for my color problems. It hurts too much.

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TIL: ophthalmology edition

2019-08-23T02:56:48Z

I started getting noticeable floaters something like 8-9 years ago. (I see I failed to record it at the time, so I'm estimating now.) Floaters are bits of stuff in the vitreous in your eye that, as the name implies, float around and sometimes get in your way. They don't go away. They were quite annoying at first, but over time they became less invasive -- presumably my brain was learning to ignore them for the most part. I'd still see hem but they didn't get in the way as much.

A few weeks ago I noticed/realized that I've been having more trouble reading lately, whether sitting at a computer or reading a book. It wasn't a sudden change -- not the sudden onslaught that sends one for a same-day appointment to check for retinal detachment. I think it's been building for a while and finally crossed some critical threshold. I couldn't quite tell if the problem was obstruction (what floaters do) or acuity, but I'm not generally having acuity problems.

I had a checkup scheduled for earlier this week anyway, so I asked my ophthalmologist to take a look. She said yup, sure are a lot of floaters and stuff in there. I asked if she could compare what she's seeing now to the last photo she took of the inside of my eye, but that photo didn't help much. She sent me to a retina specialist just to be safe.

I saw that specialist this morning and learned some new things. When he looked in my eyes he said he saw obstructed areas and some haziness (we'll get back to that). So I guess the reason I couldn't tell what the problem was is because it was both? Anyway, today I learned about asteroid hyalosis, which is not actually an astronomical thing but a buildup of stuff in the vitreous. But it's not at all like floaters -- they're a different color and they reflect light, which by the way makes it harder to do eye exams with basic tools. Um, ok. Also, floaters can be, but need not be, caused by torn or detached retinas, while they don't really know what causes asteroid hyalosis. Nor can they do anything about it, unless it gets bad enough to consider extreme remedies. Also, if the hyalosis bits (can I call them asteroids? asteroids in my eye sounds cool) congregate in close proximity they can cause tiny pockets of haziness.

To be safe, though, the retina specialist suggested that they take a detailed scan of my retinas, to which I said sure! He went to talk to the person who would do the scan, and I overheard him say something like "hey, show her the results when you're done; I think she'll be interested in that". (Um, yes, I asked intelligent questions during the exam and used technical terms correctly. I am an active, engaged patient.) The scan was in fact very neat -- it was an optical coherence tomography machine, which spent several minutes per eye taking scans one "layer" at a time using infrared and red light. (Sometimes I saw the light, sometimes I didn't. I'm assuming it wasn't all IR but I didn't ask.) The machine has software that assembles a 3D model based on those pieces, and you can move around inside and look at the retina from different angles. ("What's that dip?" "Your optic nerve." "Oh, now I know how we're oriented!") My maculas look fine too, by the way, which is good. (Of all the vision problems one could have, I think macular degeneration scares me the most -- it's loss of the center of the field.)

One of my assorted eye problems is that (I am told) I was born with crossed eyes (strabismus) and it didn't go away, so I had surgery for it. Probably as a result of that, my eyes have never quite tracked together; sometimes they do, but sometimes my weaker eye goes off to do its own thing, muscularly speaking. (Did that contribute to it being a weaker eye? Unknown.) This especially manifests when I need to use my right eye only to do something, like read an eye chart -- it'll start out fine, but after a couple minutes my eye will start jumping around and I'll have to take a break. I sometimes actually hold my eye in place with my finger (through the lid!) during that part of the exam. Anyway, I mention this to say that staring at the focal point during the OCT scan also caused some ocular rebellion; during the scan I heard the person doing it say to someone else (I think a trainee who was observing him) "we'll have to drop the tracker". The tracker, apparently, is a marker in each scan layer that helps the software knit the layers together properly, I imagine much like the marks that were used in per-color films for color printing back in the day. But the software can still make a decent stab at it even without the tracker working everywhere, based on what I saw.

Having an additional source of occasional random crap in my visual field isn't great, especially since they don't know what causes it or how to keep it at bay, but it's not a sign of something worse and it's an annoyance not a major problem. And I saw some really cool tech in action.

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words that exclude

2019-05-27T03:08:37Z

At work, one of my teams uses a web page, a "dashboard", to coordinate activities for each release. When we start to work on a new release, a (specific) member of the group creates a new dashboard for that release. This dashboard is mostly populated by tables of features, bugs, and other tasks. Each table has several relevant columns, like title, priority, who it's assigned to, and status.

We've been doing this for a while and the dashboards keep growing, so before doing the current one we had a conversation about what we do and don't want. We identified some sections we could get rid of, and I also brought up that the two-column format we were using does not play well with font zoom (which is also obvious in meetings) and could we make it one column? No one objected to that, and the dashboard person published the new one.

A week later he quietly switched it to two columns. Not only that, but the tables were wider and in both columns now so it even more did not fit for me. I said words to the effect of "hey, what happened to the single column we had?", and he said he didn't agree to that and he prefers two columns. When I reminded him that this is an accessibility issue and not a mere preference for me, he said something that's far too common: "oh, you can just..." -- in this case, "oh, you can just make your own copy with one column". He dismissed my need with a "solution" that let him keep his preference without having to make any changes himself.

Yeah. That is not a solution.

I responded that the team resource needs to be accessible to everybody and I was not going to maintain my own copy (and have to track changes to the other one). I also explained to him that as someone with a visual disability I already have to either work around or give up using quite a few resources that are designed for people with perfect vision, that's really tiring, and I should not have to face such stumbling blocks at work from my team. He made a second copy "for people who want this version". A more enlightened approach would have been to fix the "standard" version and then, if he wanted, "just" make his own, but I wasn't going to push that.

That happens a lot, and I don't just mean to me. When someone who isn't part of the default majority finally gets any sort of accommodation, we count is as a victory and don't push for the correct, inclusive change, the one that says "you are equal to me" instead of "I will accommodate you". We know that if we push for what's truly right, we run the risk of being marginalized even more, of being labeled as "whiny" or "needy", of not having the support of our peers and superiors. (And sometimes people do cast preferences as needs and get whiny, muddying those waters for the rest of us.) Thoughtful, informed allies matter, and we don't always have them -- not that people have ill intention but rather that this, too, is a thing that has to be learned.

It's a thing I've had to learn in areas that don't directly affect me. I assume we're all still learning. I cringe some when thinking about an SCA event I ran about 30 years ago and how the site wasn't completely wheelchair-accessible but there were "only" three steps at the front door and we could "just help so-and-so into the hall", right? Yeah, I cluelessly said that, not realizing how many barriers so-and-so faced every day, how this one more thing was one more obstacle. I hope I've gotten a little less clueless around the mobility-impaired, and I'm sure I'm still missing some important clues (there and elsewhere).

I mentioned that I already have to work around or abandon a lot of things because of vision. Let me give you two examples. First, web sites -- there are lots of bad patterns there (I think the UX people call them "dark patterns"). Font zoom is usually the first thing I reach for, but often it's more complicated -- poor contrast (whoever thought light gray text on white backgrounds was a good idea?), layouts that don't work after you zoom a couple notches, that sort of thing. Each time I encounter this I have to ask myself: is this web site really necessary? If it is, I have to invest in writing custom styling and sometimes go begging people to write userscripts to fix these problems, and often those styles and scripts are fragile. ("But can't you just learn web programming/JavaScript/jQuery?" That's not a small thing.)

I've got a ton of these kinds of modifications for Stack Exchange; the site is important enough to me that I don't want to walk away, but good heavens, accessibility is not their strong suit, and they have sometimes been pretty uncaring about that. I had to basically throw a fit to get a fix for something that prevented me from moderating, and then it was a fellow moderator, not an SE employee, who helped me out with a script. (They might be getting better about stuff like this; jury's still out. They did fix another moderation barrier; I had an actual meeting with the product manager about it.)

Here's an example from the physical world. Back before I kept kosher, I went to fast-food places fairly often. These are the kinds of places that post the menu behind the counter. Paper copies of the menu? Why would we need that? Any time I went to such a place, I had to decide whether to ask somebody to read me parts of the menu -- was I willing to both inconvenience someone and embarrass myself? -- or just order blind ("they have cheeseburgers here, right?") and possibly miss out on something I would have liked more but didn't know about. My friends probably thought I ordered the same thing almost every time because I particularly liked it or was in a rut; no, it was because I had learned from past visits something that each restaurant had, so I just went with that most of the time. Nowadays I have fewer choices in restaurants but there are still menu-behind-the-counter places sometimes. Do you know how liberating smartphones are? Now I can take a picture of the menu and use that to order -- not an option that was available in my student days!

People "self-accommodate" by opting out, like I used to with fast food, all the time. The wheelchair user might decide it's too hard to visit that store, city park, or friend's house. The hearing-challenged person learns to fake the less-important conversations to conserve the "could you repeat that?"s for things that matter more. The person who can't afford that restaurant but who doesn't want to be ostracized orders a side salad and a glass of water and tells people "I'm not very hungry". The person whose gender doesn't match outward appearances learns to hold it instead of using restrooms in certain places. The religious-minority student has to decide what to do about the mandatory Christmas pageant. And all the while, people are saying "but can't you just..." -- mouth the words, use the "right" (for the speaker) restroom, commute on a bike to save the cost of the bus pass so you can go to restaurants, learn to read lips, shop online.

I do think it's incumbent on those of us with limitations to do our share of the work. The world doesn't owe me paper menus at the counter if I can take a picture. Web sites don't owe me bigger fonts if I can zoom without breaking the site. But when we've done what we reasonably can do and we still face barriers, we need to be able to get our needs met without a fuss. And those of us in the default majority (as most of us are about something) need that to be second nature, not an "oh sigh, I guess, if you insist, but next time we go with my preference..." sort of thing. I don't know how we learn to do that, but one ingredient in the solution is awareness.

A couple weeks later we used that dashboard in a meeting (distributed team), and the person driving the display pulled up the two-column one. As usual I asked for some zoom, which broke the view, and then I said "let's use the one-column one" (which I had proactively linked to from the agenda page). The same person who had edited the dashboard said "can't you just pull it up on your end?". As a matter of fact, I couldn't. But it shouldn't have even been a question.

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vision problems and computers

2019-01-07T04:07:50Z

A friend is having some vision problems that currently impede her computer use. She knows that I have vision problems and use computers heavily, so she asked me for advice. So I don't lose track of it, and for the possible benefit of others, I'm going to mostly cut and paste the email I sent.

My normal focal distance for reading is about 8-10 inches using bifocals, which makes laptops pretty unworkable and even regular monitors awkward if they're larger (because not everything can be in range at the same time at that distance). I solved this part of the problem by getting a pair of computer glasses, which are focused at a reasonable monitor distance instead of infinity. That is, the part that would normally be distance vision is instead monitor-distance vision, and I also still have the bifocal (my ophthalmologist's suggestion -- "do you ever have to read notes or something too?"). Once you know that your prescription isn't going to be changing a lot, that's something to consider -- but it does mean paying for another pair of glasses. (If you do get computer glasses, get the anti-glare treatment on them even if you're using monitors that are nominally glare-resistant.) Ask your ophthalmologist if this makes sense for you. I did find that I had to bump up font sizes across the board, because monitor-tuned distance vision is different from reading-tuned bifocal. I don't understand all the optics; apparently I can't get a pair of glasses that's just like reading through my bifocal but at twice the distance.

On the software side, here are several things I did. My vision problems are different from yours so I don't know which of these will help.

If you're using Windows, you can set text magnification system-wide to 100, 125, or 150%. I use 125%. This is in the control panel under either "display" or "personalization".

For Outlook, consider forcing all your email to plain text by default. You can then set the font size for that text. [My friend had complained that zoom levels didn't stick; she has to zoom each message. This works around that.] If you need to see formatting or embedded images, you can, for an individual message, choose "show as HTML" from a control just above the message text. Plain-text email is sometimes ugly because of the formatting you're not seeing, but I find it better than letting the sender choose fonts, font sizes, color, and, heaven help us, stationery. The "show as plain text" option is hidden in a very counter-intuitive place (thanks Microsoft!), at least in Outlook 2013 -- go to "trust center" and it's in there somewhere. Yes plain text is a way to avoid malicious Javascript, but I think of it more as an accessibility setting or something that should at least be mentioned under "email settings". We got new domain accounts recently and it took forever for me to find that again.

I have found no way to adjust the size of the header fields (including subject line) on individual messages -- very frustrating. You can change the size of the text shown in a folder (like the inbox) under "view settings". You have to do it for every folder you care about (like you do to dismiss the reading pane) because Microsoft hates us.

I don't know if this will help you, but consider switching your color theme. Black text on a white, backlit background is actually pretty hard on the eyes. You can try one of the reverse-video themes but (a) they can be hard to get used to and (b) most of your web browsing won't use dark/reverse themes and will seem even harsher by comparison (more about browsing in a bit). What I did instead was to personalize the desktop theme to make the default white background a gentler light tan instead. This is all under display -> personalization in the control panel. That's for Windows; on a Mac you're SOL, unfortunately, because Apple knows what's right for everybody.

If that makes a difference for you, then take a look at your monitor's color settings. (I don't know if laptops have this, but external monitors will.) A different color temperature might help you. Also, look at your contrast and brightness settings; I personally find high contrast and lower brightness to be most comfortable, though I've heard others say the opposite works better for them. Leave one of them alone while you experiment with the other. If the lighting near you is under your control, that's another knob you can turn. (I can say about lighting upon request.)

About browsing... lots of sites out there are designed by people with perfect vision who never thought about the rest of us, and some of the results are horrid. (What is with this trendy "light gray text on white background" meme?) Very frustrating. You can set a minimum font size in your browser and you can zoom individual sites with ctrl+/ctrl- (ctrl0 to reset to 100%). Firefox and Chrome remember these settings for a site; I don't know offhand if IE and Edge do. Some sites don't play as well with zoom as others -- maybe it makes the page too wide for your browser window and you now have horizontal scrolling, or maybe it uses a "responsive" design and moves things around on you. There are addons that let you force your own CSS on a site (Stylus) or apply your own Javascript to a site (Tampermonkey), but be warned that you will find yourself tinkering with settings often to respond to that shiny new thing your favorite site's designer came up with. I can pontificate at more length about browsers if you want.

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