Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by escapologybb 1853 days ago
edited to add: over the past few weeks Apple and their accessibility approach has come up a few times on HN, and when I responded there have been so many questions that I really really wanted to answer. However, not had the energy to be able to respond in a timely manner and certainly not quickly enough and set the article is still on the front page of HN. Basically because quadriplegia.

So I know that there are are a lot of questions about use my computer, and that's largely because The people on HN are genuinely and wonderfully curious.

The question that seems to fascinate able-bodied engineers goes something like this: "imagine coming home and finding somebody had removed every switch, button and lever from every device in your environment; What would you do?" That's the question I had to answer before I could get to where I don't get a job and have to start my own company as a result!

So my question is how best do people think I should share this information? Blog post, Twitter thread (eww) or messenger pigeon?

4 comments

I would imagine a series of blog posts that you then turn into a book? I love your question about ā€œ...what would you do?ā€ It reads like a writing prompt.

A podcast I listen to (maybe CodingBlocks.Net or ATP?) talked about a dev who uses a camera to track a shiny bit of tape over the bridge of their glasses as a mouse and speech (with their own phonetic alphabet variation) for typing and is able to create software at the same pace as an able bodied person - I’d love to hear all of those stories.

Could design a website that was the equivalent of "imagine coming home and finding somebody had removed every switch, button and lever from every device in your environment; What would you do?"

i.e. where "able-bodied" visitors would have to figure out how to interact with the site without all their usual means.

If you designed it right and maybe even gamified it (in a good way that doesn't trivialize, that challenges you to learn), it might entice young and old to explore what it means to have to interact with the world without the benefit of X.

A series of blog posts could serve as in invaluable resource for us caring but ultimately able-bodied code monkeys to refer to. If you go ahead with those, post them here. :)
If you could find a CHI researcher to work with it would make an amazing case-study for a research paper, and that would give it some longitivtiy as well as be a good basis for a more compact blog post.