[pxc]

I'm potentially interested in formally studying HCI, but I'm a little worried that my classes will all be filled with visual design people I can't relate to, and that my classes will contain general recommendations that don't apply to users like me, or even make software more difficult to use for me.

[tsunamifury]

First, I would suggest your mentality is a bit... funny as you're saying you want to learn but NOT LIKE THAT.

But as someone who did HCI at Berkeley/Stanford and teach it currently, it is a LOT more technical and heuristic driven than just 'designerlyness"

So you know, do it, but like also... try to branch out and learn too.

[pxc]

I do expect for my tastes to change if I study HCI, and to begin to notice things that I didn't notice before. And I'm interested in good heuristics for designing user interfaces for general audiences.

But I've been visually impaired my entire life, I'm colorblind, my colorblindness is progressive, and I'm going blind (timeline unknown). So my worries that HCI might not be "for me" come from a few places:

1. (This is the element you've perhaps picked up on.) Vision is generally the least compelling aesthetic dimension to me. I love music and poetry, but visual art virtually never moves me. Visual experiences generally lack spiritual depth for me, to the point that I sometimes find the way some people talk about visual art ridiculous or irritating. This is what I mean about not fitting in with people who are passionate about visual design.

2. Because of my vision, a lot of common assumptions about user interface design, especially about what is easy, natural, difficult, or awkward probably don't apply to me on a physical level. For instance:

  - I often have to use full screen magnification, which violates the assumption that an entire application is visible to me at once
  - gaze detection data can't even be collected for people with eyes like mine because our acuity problems are *worse* in the central visual field to the point that in advanced cases people have to read text exclusively using their peripheral vision
  - sometimes it seems I have visual processing difficulties to the point of being unable to tell what a picture is even an image of, like if there are any objects in the image and what they are
  - visually recognizing things takes me a lot of time and effort relative to other people, even when I can reliably do it
  - although I am significantly and untreatably visually impaired, I do not yet use a screen reader in any capacity and I don't know Braille at all

I'm interested in HCI broadly— both for users like me and users unlike me. But I don't want to put a ton of energy into things that feel inordinately difficult or basically meaningless to me, either.

[davidivadavid]

You can't be unaware of the existence of the field of accessibility in design? It's literally one of the trendiest things in design, probably trendy enough for you to specialize in it entirely if you wanted to.

[pxc]

The proposition for me is whether to take a class or two on this in the course of pursuing a graduate degree in CS. I'm not considering a career in HCI research.

> It's literally one of the trendiest things in design

Ask a person with low vision about how the rollout of "accessible buses" in Chicago affected their transit experience. I'll give you a hint: it made things worse and more difficult. My sister, who is blind, complains about it all the time. When a friend of hers, who is also blind, called in to say that she couldn't read the stops on the displays in the new "accessible buses", the response (after months of silence) was "we asked Chicago Lighthouse how to design the display, and they said standards called for a bold font and contrasting colors, so we're compliant". In fact the display has a much smaller font than the old LED displays. The colors are bright yellow and bright blue, which are "contrasting colors" but have very little luminance contrast, and they're overall harder to distinguish despite the bold font. Why were these colors actually chosen? It has nothing to do with contrast or accessibility— it's because they're the brand colors of the Chicago Transit Authority. And when actual blind people call them to tell them this doesn't in fact work for them, their answer is that they don't give a shit and that they're not interested in changing anything. (Changes would be physically trivial; the new displays are big-ass LCD TVs.)

This is the norm for accessibility initiatives in the real world, because disabled people are rarely directly involved in the design of anything.

If you've lived your whole life in a world in which accessibility concerns are purely theoretical and/or external to you, I suppose it's easy to have faith in "trends". But nobody who has actually navigated the world with disabilities does. Frankly, the only circumstances in which I'd be confident that an HCI class would not be primarily grounded in the primacy of the visual and the assumption of normal vision is (a) if I've reviewed the curriculum of a specific course and the curriculum indicates otherwise or (b) the course is taught by a blind person. Even so, I'm on the fence— maybe I still want to take such a course.

I'm in the early stages of planning to go back to school here, thinking out loud about whether HCI is a corner of computer science worth visiting for me and sharing that question as part of a perspective on "design" and how I relate to it. I don't need help remembering that accessibility research exists, thank you so very much.