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Re: visually impaired front end developer

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Sep 19, 2017 3:15PM

Indeed, as with all people and skills there are strengths and weaknesses, and the optimal balance is to work on honing the areas that are strongest so they can be applied to the greatest affect rather than concentrate all personal resources attempting to accomplish the impossible. In my case this was visual design, which I left to those who know this and have the requisite skills. Years ago I studied CSS in attempt to understand it, and there are tricks that I learned to examine spatial positioning ratios and identifying layers within rendered markup to see how and where things are applied, but this is basic mathematics and doesn't really apply within advanced visual design.

There is still great value in blind front end engineering, for the simple reason that all assistive technologies interface with the front end and 99% of all accessibility issues occur at this level, so understanding how and why these things occur is a fundamental aspect of diagnosing and building accessible software. This being said, it is unreasonable to expect a blind person to ever be an award winning visual designer, because it won't happen, nor will they be a race car driver, or a fighter jet pilot, or any of a number of other impossible career choices.

However, in the case of front end engineering, there is a whole category of necessary skills associated with this that are possible for a blind person to excel at, but it is extremely hard and the learning curve is extremely steep. It has taken me a long time to learn all that I have so far for example, and I continue to learn new things all the time. When I started, ARIA had not even been invented yet, so I had to learn all of these things when and as they became available. There were no university courses to learn these things.

One of the things that I discovered while doing this, is that it is impossible for fully sighted front end engineers to ever become totally and unerringly proficient in the category of functional accessibility as we know it today, requiring the precise usage of focus management and accessibility attribute usage such as with ARIA, because they will never have the same level of assistive technology familiarization as a person who literally has no choice but to use such technologies every day and cannot stop using them. Both have value, but they approach it from different angles.

In this last case, functional accessibility is a vital category of front end engineering that is often overlooked, and this is precisely where the vast majority of accessibility issues occur. Granted this is entirely separate from visual design, which is ideally done by those who know best in this regard. Typically however, those who know best about totally visual design have very little knowledge in the way of functional accessibility though, which perpetuates the issue.

So, as with all things, achieving balance is a critical aspect to achieve both visual design and functional accessibility, where those who excel at one work with those who excel at the other, and thus both goals are reached. This is what I set out to prove when I requested help from a visual designer in the remaking of WhatSock, to see if this could be done as easily as I believed it could be, and yes, it is. One of the biggest problems though, is that there is not a balance of those who know purely visual design in comparison with the population of those who excel at blind front end engineering, nor are those who excel at purely visual front end engineering even aware that this whole other aspect even exists, and many don't see there is any value in it anyway.

In regard to blind front end engineering, I'm not going to discourage anybody from learning, but I won't lie and say this is an easy path. When I started, I was subscribed to a blind programming listserv back in the early 2000's where I asked about doing this, and I was told that this was impossible and that I was crazy for even attempting it and that I would never succeed. I persisted though, and I did succeed in many regards that have led to all of the tools and development resources that I have built since then, but it has taken me eighteen years to do this without the aid of a formal education in any of these topics because they didn't even exist when I started learning how to do them. So for those wishing to go down this path, it is extremely hard, but there is great value to the industry for those who achieve it.

Regarding the front end engineering field as a whole though, if accessible development is ever to become a mainstream process for education and practice around the world, people are going to have to start thinking differently about the topic of design. Design is not just what something looks like, but what it does and how it does it at the same time. If both of these don't work together, nothing is accessible. Those who have the required skills to achieve one or the other are going to have to start working together to make this happen, and this is going to have to become a basic concept that is taught in front end engineering courses so that it can propagate naturally instead of this always being a retroactive consideration when it's often too late to do anything about it.


Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility Fellow
Level Access, Inc.
<EMAIL REMOVED>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com