Monica

My employer got bought (again) about a year ago, so we're being moved onto a new benefits setup as of January 1. This means new health insurance (with new prices, sigh...). We were told we'd get our ID cards in December. I have an appointment in early January that would be a pain to reschedule, so I've been watching for these.

Today I received physical mail, but instead of cards, it contained a piece of paper telling me my plan ID # and a URL where I can request cards or print my own.

They sent me paper to tell me how to request paper, instead of just sending the actual paper I needed.

After creating an account (another set of hoops, elided) I saved PDF copies, but I also asked for physical cards because paper probably won't stay in good shape in a wallet for a year. But this was unnecessarily complicated. I also hit a stupid limit: you can make one request per day, but both my medical and dental insurance are now with this carrier, that's two cards, and there was no way to request all cards. I requested the first, which was apparently successful, and when I requested the second I was told I couldn't.

The letter I got suggested I could use "digital cards", meaning download an image on my phone and skip the paper entirely, to "save space in my wallet" (not a concern, since I'm replacing this year's cards!). But my healthcare providers always want to hold the cards, sometimes keeping them for a while so they can do data entry at their convenience during my visit, and I'm not handing over my phone for that. My phone stays with me or, at worst, within my sight and otherwise locked. So paper it is.

I don't know if I'm abnormal or the insurance provider didn't think through their security model (maybe both). They sure didn't think through their model of what's convenient for users or lower-waste for the planet. By the time this is done they will, it appears, have sent me three separate pieces of physical mail.

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.

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.

When driving to work I pass a couple of those digital highway signs that tend to say things like "est. travel time to downtown: N miles, M minutes" or "stadium parking use exit X" or "accident slow traffic ahead". When they have nothing better to say, they dispense pithy advice.

This morning's message was "click it or ticket". Setting aside the cries of linguistic outrage from unbalanced conjunctive operands, I found myself thinking about why, these days, anybody doesn't use a seat belt. I've lived through the progression from "not always present" to lap belts to those two-part (front-seat) belts where you clicked a lap belt and the shoulder piece slid into place when you turned the car on to today's norm of a single belt with two parts (lap and harness). The current ones are easy to use. I always use a seat belt and expect drivers to wait for me to fasten it when I'm a passenger. And yet, there's a problem.

An article in Consumer Reports not long ago noted that while people say they don't wear them because they're uncomfortable, their testers were able to find comfortable positions "so long as you're not a short woman with a large bust".

Um, yeah.

So how do you address that? I always fasten my seat belt, and a part of me wonders, were I to get into an accident that wouldn't have been fatal, if my seat belt is going to snap my neck or something. The height of the anchor point for that upper part is adjustable -- and there is no setting that gets it low enough to sit on my shoulder rather than alongside my neck. I don't have this problem when I'm a passenger; the seat is usually pushed back farther. (Which you would think would make it worse because the belt goes up, but it's hard to inspect while using it.) But when I'm driving I've got to be able to reach the pedals, so the seat is fairly far forward.

Is there some safe way I can hack this aspect of my car? I wondered about sitting higher (I don't think I can raise the seat, but maybe a cushion?), but if my legs are higher the seat needs to be even farther forward, and we're also trying to not be right on top of the airbag.

The last time I did this (a couple years ago, I think), I went to the USPS web site, chose my stamps, and supplied a credit card and shipping address. It took about three minutes.

Last night I went through the following process:

1. I dug through product pages; the generic "forever" stamps that almost everybody wants are no longer the first thing you see.

2. I also wanted some pretty stamps for some invitations, so I browsed those. Clicking on the link for a specific product to get a closer look and then going back to the previous page reset the page values I had set (specifically: show all, instead of in batches of twelve). So after the first time I launched new tabs to view products.

3. Some of these invitations are going to Canada so I had to look up the postage rate. This involved approximately the following, all in form-like interfaces: choose type of package, choose shape of envelope (kind of a stumper; is my card a "letter" or a "square envelope"? no sizes were given), choose weight, and finally get a price. I'd been hoping for a simple rate table or at least for the most-common question ("how much to send a letter?") to be answered up front.

4. Now that I had everything in my shopping cart I thought I was within a minute or so of being done. That "crash-tinkle" sound you heard was my hopes being shattered. My options at this point were to log in or create an account.

5. I tried the username and password that I would have used had I created an account last time and got told "no such user". (Bruce Schneier is cringing, I'm sure, but at least they saved me the trouble of trying different passwords.) There is still no option to just pay already. Ok, I'll create an account. (By the way, Firefox offered to remember that password I typed. This will be relevant later.)

6. The password-entry form includes an assessment of the strength of my password. Nice. It thus came as a total surprise to me that my strong password was also not a valid password. They said special characters were fine, but I guess they didn't mean all of them. I simplified to a less-strong password.

7. The personal-information page requires a phone number. I typed it with hyphens and it accepted that. It thus came as a surprise to me when, on a later page, I couldn't put spaces in my credit-card number. In neither case was there any direction about formatting.

8. I had failed to notice that giving my credit card a "nickname" (what? I'm only giving you one!) was a required step. Clearing all form fields and telling me to try again was unnecessarily rude.

9. I finally had an account and now had to log in. I wondered whether my shopping cart would still be intact after all this, but it was. Yay. 20+ minutes after I'd started, I was finally able to submit my order.

10. After signing out, I decided to sign back in and let Firefox remember some data this time, since I'd had to violate my password patterns and might not remember. The login dialogue wasn't the form that I'd previously encountered but, rather, some pop-up (Flash?) thing that was very sensitive (had to try a few times to get it). Firefox couldn't detect this as a login dialogue. So I guess when I come back in a couple years I'll be finding out what the "forgot password" link does. This won't be helped by the fact that I had to provide answers to security questions including the word "favorite". Pfft.

I liked it better when the minimalist approach worked. Yeah, sure, now they'll remember my address and credit-card number, but it takes me 30 seconds to type those and anyway the credit-card info will probably be stale by the next time I need stamps. I'd have to make an awful lot of transactions before last night's time sink would pay for itself.

Followup June 15: This is how they shipped my stamps to me. Those pieces of cardboard are pretty thick. I think they could have done better.

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It's 2007. Not only have enough people to matter abandoned IE, but Firefox has been significant for years. Why is Firefox special? Because its extensions allow people to customize their browsing experience to their hearts' content. That, and tabs.

What does this mean for you? Simply that you cannot make assumptions about the browser any more. We've been blocking pop-ups for close to a decade and selectively blocking Javascript (via NoScript) for at least a couple years. We use GreaseMonkey scripts to add content to your pages (we don't care if you like it), AdBlock to remove some of the annoyances, and Stylish to rewrite your CSS. Get used to it.

If you want to win, then -- short of being a monopoly, and good luck with that on the web -- you'll have to learn to cope with this. The users -- your potential customers -- are not going to switch browsers, disable security settings, or even just turn off things we like, just to use your site, unless you're really, really important to us. Do you really want to place that bet?

No, it's not fair; my problem in using your site could well be in one of my extensions. But you know what? That doesn't matter; if it only affects your site, to me that will not seem to be my problem. If I like you a lot I'll try to debug it; if I don't I'll move on. Your only recourse is to bullet-proof your web site. Use fewer bells and whistles, and make them optional. Stop with the gratuitious Javascript (and Flash, for good measure). Do at least some testing of your site with the common Firefox extensions. Heck, write your own monitoring extension (that tracks and reports problems with your site) and offer it to your customers; we might help you out.

You do not need to use every new-fangled browser-thwarting doodad that comes along. Every time you do, your site breaks for a few more users. Designing resilient sites is not rocket science.

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HTML has been in common use for more than a decade. The field of UI design has been around for several more. Surely, somewhere in there, most people got the clue that when displaying text, you specify both or neither of text color and background color (with strong arguments for "neither" to give the user some control).

I was a little surprised to find that Sun does not have this clue, until I switched my environment to a reverse-video scheme and then looked at some Javadoc. Tan text on white background -- goody! -- because the HTML sets BGCOLOR=white and is silent on text color. But wait, it gets better -- they also do it for table cells and rows! Now I have to maintain a local style sheet with these three changes, and re-copy it into the output directory every time I geenrate Javadoc, because Sun decided to set half of this pair while fetching the other half from the OS.

There's no excuse for anyone to be making this egregious error in 2006.