The Struggles with Accessibility (IndieWeb Carnival July 2023)

This is my submission to this month IndieWeb Carnival. If you are interested in this month topic, Moments of Joy, then I encourage you to participate as well.

If you work in the IT, that you are probably aware of how people want to use you for the IT support, right? So today I want to talk about one of these moments.

The problem was described in this way: "The tablet does not work, and it tries to talk to me." Which, it is not exactly descriptive enough to be able to figure out from just this. So I asked, if they could bring me the tablet and show me what was wrong with it.

It took a couple of seconds to figure out how to even power up the tablet. Once this was done, it was the dreadful login screen. Why do I say dreadful? Because figuring out how to log in was magic itself.

One would normally log in by swiping the screen in some direction, usually up or down. Then whatever login mechanism was set, it would show on the screen.

Except the swiping did not work at all. Instead, every time some button would be clicked, there was a green border around it.

And as reported, there was a voice talking after every action. Which I ignored for now, as we tried to log in. Don't ask me how we managed to get to the password screen, since I have no idea how we managed. But we somehow did.

So, the main screen. Swiping still did not work, and the voice become a constant chatter. I increased the sound, so I could figure out what is running in the background...

And it was a voice telling me, what each button that I tapped was. And that I needed to tap twice in order to activate it.

Which made me realise, that all these annoying and for me user unfriendly features were because somebody managed to activate at least some accessibility functions.

Alright, so no swiping, and need to tap twice to move. I was sure I could handle the tablet with this. All I needed was find the accessibility settings and turn it off. This will be easy.

Except there were notifications in the settings, so the accessibility button was below the fold. I have no idea how one was supposed to click on that button without swiping. How to then get to this settings? There did not seems to be an easy way to dismiss the settings, pushing the rest of the buttons higher - which would allow me to reach it.

But somehow I ended up finding a search for settings. But for some reason, every time I wanted to remove the activated accessibility, it threw me back to the search. So I then found the Accessibility App and just disable and forcefully stopped it.

And then the tablet worked. Swiping movement worked. No more double clicks for the buttons. The tablet was quicker. I could relax and took a deep breath.

I turned to the person, whose tablet I was working on. So I asked them the following question (translated): "How did you change your tablet to be a tablet for the blind?"

There was some confusion, but eventually we all laughed at this.

It was an interesting experience, but it showed that easy usage for some can be a really pain the but for another user. How accessibility is about some trade-offs. And how frustrating has to be to be forced to use the tech not made for you, and with no ability to modify it to your needs.

I was really uninspired by this month topic - because both timing and personality-wise, it is a really bad fit. After throwing out some ideas, my best idea was a post on why this is not a good topic for everyone. But this this happened today, and I decided to write this instead.