Life without sight

!http://threshold-zero.tmanime.com/images/6.jpg (Green Eye)!:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2438897
“Ask me about Blindness”:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2438897

For about 4 hours or so today, I sat at my computer, enraptured, reading the most amazing thing. I just couldn’t stop reading, no matter what.

Follow the link above, and you’ll find a “Question and Answer” session by a fellow who’s blind. He’s been blind since birth, and has never known the sense of sight… because of this, he has some of the most unique perspectives on life, meeting other people, _et cetera_ that you’ll probably ever hear.

You don’t have to read every post in the (14-page-long) forum thread — just search through it for posts by him (his name’s _Caffeinated Sloth_). He quotes the questions put to him before he answers them, so you won’t be missing anything.

There. Done? If you’re not, go back — it’s really cool. The guy seems like the most laid back individual in the world — he’s asked several times about what he’d do to have sight, and he answers (basically), “To tell you honestly, I’m not too concerned about it.” Remember — he’s been his whole life without sight; he’s never experienced it or knows what it’s like.

Think about it this way. Someone comes up to you and says, “You’re missing a sense called ‘Ingtoc.’ I have this sense and you don’t. With this sense, I can tell that this object here [points at phone] has the quality of ‘furl.’”

Would you be that concerned that you didn’t have this magical sixth sense called “Ingtoc?” (It’s a bullshit word — don’t bother looking it up.) No, you wouldn’t be — you have no frame of reference for what this sense does, and furthermore, you’ve gone your whole life without it and probably feel like you get along just fine that way.

The guy also posts a quick MP3 he makes of his screen reader program working away (he’s a blind person that doesn’t use braille all that much — prefers screen readers) — either he’s messing around (I don’t think so), or he can actually listen to spoken text at an incredibly fast rate… he explains it later on, and debunks some of the amazing-ness. Says it took him years to reach that speed, and it only works with that one program he uses (an accessibility program called “JAWS”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_%28screen_reader%29).

It’s made me think more about my web design, for one thing. He says he can’t stand images without proper “alt” parameters (his screen reader just skips over them) — this is directly in line with the official Document Model Specifications provided by the “W3C Internet Consortium”:http://w3.org, of course. He prefers the use of “h” tags as well (h1, h2, etc.) — they make it easy for screen readers such as his to quickly “jump” across sections (what I think they were originally intended to be for). Makes me feel bad for neglecting them all these years, it does.

“CAPTCHA’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha (like the one I use on this site) are also a pain in the ass for him, as you might imagine — there is no computer system known to man (at least publicly) that can figure out a well-made captcha, and that’s pretty much the point… An alternative would be the question-based authentication at a site like “Ajaxian.com”:http://ajaxian.com — this type of spam-proofing asks a simple question before you comment (What is two plus two?) instead of giving you an image to decode. It’s enough to fool an automatic spam robot, but a screen reader like “JAWS”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_%28screen_reader%29 should read the question just fine.

It’s made me think a lot more about coding standards when it comes to markup such as HTML, for one thing, and just why such things are important to individuals such as him. (Are you listening, Microsoft? I’m sure there’s some upper-level execs in your organization that are sight-impaired in some way.)