ADA Compliency
Curry Kenworthy
curry at pair.com
Fri May 29 07:38:07 EDT 2020
Assistive tech is a wonderful thing, and yet even when that "compliancy"
is achieved, the effort is doomed to fall short of real-world needs for
many people.
That's because the "compliancy" designers tend to think in
all-or-nothing ideals - and the subset of opinions and studies popular
in their social/professional cliques - not addressing the reality of
actual ability ranges in the population. Meanwhile standard UI designers
tend to throw out some really good ideas. Sometimes people are involved
in great works, yet still CLUELESS about things that would help a lot of
real people.
For example I have a neurological/muscular disease that impairs fine
movement and deforms the hand shape and ability a bit. My hands now look
like ghost of Christmas past or grim reaper hands. In the past they
looked almost normal but the movement was already impaired. You don't
want these hands. I drop things a lot.
Both the nerves and muscles are damaged. That affects using the mouse -
not a huge effect, but I click a few pixels off-target sometimes.
Especially since I also have to keep the mouse on a fairly responsive
movement setting to avoid tiring my arm throughout the day. I'm very
comfortable using the mouse if set up correctly.
So the old Mac OS had the window Close box on the OPPOSITE side as the
resize and minimize. That reduced by a large percentage the number of
misclicks that I had with any important consequences. That was a good
feature based on actual research and/or logical thinking. It helped me
achieve more and mess up less.
But Mac OS X threw that and other good things right out the window, in
favor of "lickable" colored circles side by side. Just like Windows, but
crammed together into a smaller area that was even more prone to
misclicks. So Mac was no longer a better interface for me. I switched to
Windows for my main work, and that helped save energy and improve
accuracy. That's just one example of many.
And when it came to mobile, Apple made a giant list of HIGs to enforce
on all software - except for their own software, of course. They broke
their own rules when they felt like it, and their mobile UI is harder
for me to use as a result.
Their rules are arbitrary with selective enforcement. And their rules
(both mobile and desktop) actually sometimes IMPEDE rather than promote
making UI designs to help people with handicaps and the elderly. Plus
the rules change based on touchy-feely trends, like the hat fashions of
yore.
I'm talking about Apple because they are the movers and shakers that
directed where we are now. Others (MS, Google) largely followed or went
in a similar direction.
The herd (including the elite producer herd) mostly thinks binary about
abilities - either you can use a mouse or you can't. But it's not true.
I can use a mouse pretty darn well, but I have to be careful about
misclicks. (And sometimes accidental double-clicks that were intended as
single.)
Thank goodness we do have some comfort adjustments such as mouse
sensitivity and double-click time, etc. That's smart. But when it comes
to "accessibility" the old binary thinking kicks in and the options and
design are often pretty retarded, and only realistic for a smaller
subset of the portion of our population that has some type of impairment.
Thankfully they may be focusing on the most heavily impaired, so that's
good to at least help some people, but even then, I've had some
experience with those and when I see "compliancy" I tend to shake my
head. (And worry about the future as my own impairments grow.) Ideals
and cliques/trends vs reality....
What we often need is some SMART, to use that word as a noun the way
Andy Griffith did. UI needs to be smart. Standards can be good, but when
a group starts making standards or guidelines, they often design it
partly dumb/bad, and inflict as much harm as good. It could be so much
better. Desktop and mobile.
It's the same with physical products. I can't open Amazon's
"frustration-free" packaging even with pliers. Whoever designed and
approved that one was seriously out of touch with reality - a total
farce. I can open a regular taped box easily with a cutter. Similar
results happen sometimes in software, when good efforts go bad. If only
more of these efforts could be compliant AND smart!
Society needs to mature enough to reality that there is a pretty wide
range of ability. I can do things on a computer (with a mouse) that
would amaze many people, yet I have those misclicks and double-clicks to
watch out for.
I can (or could) do a wide range of voices/accents, which most people
can't do, yet I've had several periods in life (including right now
after COVID for many weeks and ongoing) when I can only say a few words
without getting out of breath. I've had to cancel meetings, and am
getting set up to make instructional videos WITHOUT talking.
I can hear and see quite well and I catch many proofreading errors that
others miss and can spot mistakes in code instantly sometimes (one
client calls it my superpower!) yet my eyes can't tolerate the UI "dark
mode" that's trending. I am a great listener (another superpower) yet
can't make out the words quite as well when listening as most people do,
especially for song lyrics or speeches/TV shows. For those I like to
turn on CC just in case.
Ability ranges....
Best wishes,
Curry K.
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