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Re: visually impaired front end developer

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From: Maurice Peret
Date: Sep 25, 2017 6:20AM


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Office: 410.737.2673 Mobile: 804.928.4015
<EMAIL REMOVED>
https://www.bism.org/career
-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2017 12:36 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] visually impaired front end developer

Brian,

An excellent post and fully agree with what you have said. I would even take it to the next level that tools haven't been design yet to permit someone with a vision impairedment to achieve their full protentual in front end development. I recall VB6 where the scripts with Jaws would give you pixcel positioning that assisted you in laying out a form (dialog). This same concept can be applied. With the introduction of AI and some smart computer design, I feel this is possible if someone had the time, resource and money.

Just wish I had the forma, money as I would like to research this to see if it possible.


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of JP Jamous
Sent: Wednesday, 20 September 2017 8:30 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] visually impaired front end developer

Right on Bryan. It has taken me 10 years myself to get to where I am at and I had the same mentality such as you about visual design. Now, I have shifted to functional design and that opened up many other doors for me.

Surely, there are opportunities in the a11y area that some that is blind can take advantage of, which are related to front-end design. I do know that going this route is always a challenge. If someone is up to that, then all he has to do is roll up his sleves.

Back-end comes with its challenges as well. They tend to be lesser than that of front-end and some folks choose to go that way too.

I state the above to attest that there is no right or wrong. How far someone wants to take his or her career is up to that person. Just know there are alternatives out there and opportunities are always present.

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Bryan Garaventa
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2017 4:16 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] visually impaired front end developer

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

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Roel Van Gils
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2017 3:29 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] visually impaired front end developer

Hi Bryan,

If they're just sending images over of what the final result should look like, I presume they expect you to 'slice' that design. Slicing is a term that's (unfortunately) still being used by many web agencies when referring to the process of turning (high-fidelity) visual designs into (hopefully) cross-browser, responsive, semantic, accessible and fast-loading to HTML and CSS.

>From the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slicing_(interface_design):

"In fields employing interface design skills, slicing is the process of dividing a single 2D user interface composition layout (comp) into multiple image files (digital assets) of the graphical user interface (GUI) for one or more electronic pages. It is typically part of the client side development process of creating a web page and/or web site, but is also used in the user interface design process of software development and game development."

'Slicing' is only one aspect of modern front-end development, but I'm afraid it's an aspect that's very hard to do for someone who is blind. I've did it myself, for many years, being a completely colourblind front-end developer (I have achromatopsia). I could get around my limitations, by sampling colours from the design and use their corresponding values in my CSS (and double check a lot), but when you're blind, I'm afraid there's no way you can turn visual designs into code (especially CSS) without the help of someone else.

You'll need to adjust your workflow. You could, for example, be responsible for coding standards based, semantic HTML based on a textual representation of a page's contend and provide all the necessary CSS hooks, and then have a sighted developer write out the CSS.

Needless to say, perhaps, but apart from 'slicing', front-end development has many other aspect to it in which you can really excel as a blind developer (accessibility testing, performance optimisation, security, ...).

Roel


--
Roel Van Gils
Inclusive Design & Accessibility Consultant

Tel.: +32 473 88 18 06
Skype: roelvangils
Twitter: twitter.com/roelvangils
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/roelvangils


> On 14 Sep 2017, at 06:29, karthik k < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> thanks for your valuable comments, I've learned front end development
> very recently from a w3c recognized institution, however, i am not
> able to do the assignments given by them. say if the assignment is
> about html tags or forms, the trainer is just sending images, i don't
> even know what's there in the image. how can i proceed in this case?
> and, do visually impaired who work as front end developer face similar
> challenges? how to overcome this challenge?
> can we use any other application to read the image? i think the image
> contains a design which is expected to code. Am i correct?On 9/13/17,
> Bryan
>
>
> On 9/14/17, karthik k < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> thanks for your valuable comments, I've learned front end development
>> very recently from a w3c recognized institution, however, i am not
>> able to do the assignments given by them. say if the assignment is
>> about html tags or forms, the trainer is just sending these kind of
>> images, i don't even know what's there in the image. how can i
>> proceed in this case? and, visually impaired who are working as front
>> end developer, face similar challenges? how to overcome this challenge?
>> can we use any other application to read this image? On 9/13/17,
>> Bryan Garaventa < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> Yes it is possible, though it's important for employers not to
>>> expect a blind front end engineer to be able to accomplish all of
>>> the same levels of visual design that a sighted person can such as
>>> visual styling entails.
>>> Unfortunately as a result, many in the field don't think this means
>>> that a blind front end engineer can do the same level of work as a
>>> sighted one, so they are often overlooked in the job market. This is
>>> ironic however, because speaking personally I have skills as a blind
>>> front end engineer that only the smallest percentage of the total
>>> pool of front end engineers globally have, which is that I know how
>>> to make front end components that are guaranteed to be accessible
>>> for the simple reason that they have to be in order for me to use
>>> them, and I don't see the point of building anything that I can't
>>> use myself. So blind front end engineers specialize in the field of
>>> functional accessibility where focus management, keyboard
>>> functionality, and intuitive user interaction is the most important
>>> aspects to concentrate on, whereas in contrast the majority of
>>> sighted front engineers focus on sighted and mouse related
>>> functionality and are often surprisingly lacking in basic knowledge
>>> regarding these skills, which is the primary reason why most of the
>>> most popular frameworks and libraries are still inaccessible to this
>>> day even though all of these concepts have existed for many years.
>>>
>>> Here are some tools that I use daily for these tasks.
>>> http://dlee.org/bx/bx.htm#intro
>>> I use this for DOM rendering analysis when applying CSS, markup
>>> examination, and MSAA/UIA accessibility tree examination when
>>> applying ARIA and the like.
>>>
>>> This is a code editor built specifically for blind programmers. I've
>>> been using it to write all that I have in the last ten years.
>>> https://github.com/jamalmazrui/EdSharp
>>>
>>> I guess I'm somewhat of a minimalist. Others here can provide
>>> additional tools to help.
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>> Bryan
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Bryan Garaventa
>>> Accessibility Fellow
>>> Level Access, Inc.
>>> <EMAIL REMOVED>
>>> 415.624.2709 (o)
>>> www.LevelAccess.com
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On
>>> Behalf Of karthik k
>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2017 9:04 PM
>>> To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>>> Subject: [WebAIM] visually impaired front end developer
>>>
>>> Hi experts,
>>>
>>> can a totally blind person work as front end developer? is there any
>>> front end developer here? if yes, could you please explain some of
>>> the challenges that you face? other experts can also explain it in
>>> general
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> thanks and regards,
>>> Karthik K
>>> Phone, +919060989650
>>> >>> >>> archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
>>> >>> >>> >>> archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
>>> >>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> thanks and regards,
>> Karthik K
>> Phone, +919060989650
>>
>
>
> --
>
> thanks and regards,
> Karthik K
> Phone, +919060989650
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> ---
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