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[Music]
welcome everybody life talks with bits
Boer we're starting with AJ Hamilton who
is presenting visual perspective um
visually impaired perspective on
technology sorry welcome AJ
[Applause]
Hamilton and that's a micophone
okay hi really excited to be here first
lightning talk of CCC uh my name is AJ
my pronounce are they them uh my email
is on the screen AJ martin.net and yes
here's my talk a visually impaired
perspective on
technology so I would like to start by
saying I cannot answer any questions
about things like CSS or HTML because I
do not have any design experience making
accessibility features apologies but
it's the
truth okay so yes I'm a visually
impaired person my condition is a rare
genetic one that causes my site to sort
of slowly get blurrier throughout my
life um and currently it's at a level
where I basically use uh like zooming
and stuff like that just to do anything
with technology and I don't use screen
readers so you may be familiar with
screen readers may not be but basically
they read out the screen for visually
impaired people so here I've got what my
vision looks like this is through a
handy app uh which I can explain if
anyone wants me to it's got a B bit of a
complicated setup but it can simulate
different Vision levels for a few
conditions so we've got this here this
is me making this PowerPoint I've just
realized I don't think you the you can
see that that well anyway but basically
it's not very
good uh then you got here we've got a
bit of Terraria um and you can't really
tell what is going on on the screen you
can't see what where the inventory is
what's selected anything like that so
some specific problems that I've
highlighted um as sort of day-to-day
problems that uh as visually impaired
technology users have um first one uh I
meant to hide that
slide uh fixed font sizes so a lot of
apps and some websites but it is mostly
apps for this problem do not have
adjustable font sizes and especially
some of them don't adjust to your system
preferences which is quite annoying
because you know you you do all this
work to set up your preferences and then
it's just ignored um and even the Apple
notes app which apple is normally very
good but the notes app uh has no way of
changing the font
size and then even when you do have
adjustable font sizes you can often get
it to break like this so we have uh here
we have three screenshots one of Spotify
where you got some menu items clipping
into each other um song names not being
fully shown you've got a a laundry app
in the middle uh which is almost
completely unreadable and then you got a
SRE email there on the end which has
text just completely squashed into each
other it is really not very
good um old text that that has come out
interestingly um uh yeah so alt text um
if there's anyone who doesn't know what
alt text is it is a alternative
description of an image um for like
blind uh visually impaired people people
uh so this was a tweet by uh Spencer
Kelly a uh tech journalist with the BBC
uh now the Tweet says my my dear friends
came to visit today and their extremely
gifted son provided this service free of
charge and it took him less than a
minute now this image did not come there
was an image that came with this and it
did not come with any old text uh so my
granddad uh who sent this to me uh he he
really he did not know what was going on
um and now eventually he managed to
figure it out it was this a Rubik's
Cube now yes it's it is very important
to have Altex and especially Altex
generated by humans because when an AI
uh was used to attempt to generate alext
for this image it it generated a person
wearing a red shirt and standing in
front of a blue
background AI is not good enough for
this you need
humans and okay as a summary um I've put
together Four Points um for S of General
really basic things that can just make
our lives a lot easier as visually
impaired technology users we've got
number one make your font sizes
adjustable and test them to make sure
that they work at all levels uh number
two always add alt text please please
please it helps so many people and it
saves a lot of time number three test
all of your accessibility features and
combine them so for example if you've
got a color blind mode and a dark mode
put them together and see if you get a
disco and final One Number Four Keep
Your Design simple and consistent a
simple design can be amazing because you
don't have to go around looking at 20
different buttons trying to figure out
what all of them do and consistency
means that we can actually work by
memorizing what the buttons do because a
lot of the time we can't actually see
what we're clicking on we're just
memorizing positions so when you're UI
changes it is a massive problem yeah so
try and keep UI changes to a minimal or
just better make it accessible in the
first
place all right and thank you for coming
yeah my name is AJ pronounce they them
email on the board and I will be around
uh to answer any questions talk about
accessibility uh if you have any
software you want me to look at anything
like that thank you for
[Applause]
listening
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