RE: Dynamic active content
- From: "Chris Meredith" <tallin32@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 May 2008 00:18:29 -0700
SIX PER CENT!?!??!?
... Is that an average? What data points were used to come to this
conclusion? How many blind programmers fell above or below that 6% margin,
and how far in either direction (well, OK, I guess there's really not much
"down" left to go)? What was your sample size? I'm actually keen to run
the same tests against my team and see if I'm actually at 6% productivity
when compared to them. Were factors taken into account such as, say, the
confidence of the individual programmers? "Feel good reasons" aside, I've
seen an individual's attitude be far more of a blocking issue than an
individual's eyesight. Were usage patterns graphed over time? For
instance, I was hideously slow at managing our internal "Career Model"
portal until I figured out the layout.
How about individual user frustration levels? In calculating the average
time that a blind user, say, takes to purchase an item on Amazon or throw
together a unit test in Visual C#, should you not adjust for user
frustration (after all, that's not the blind as a whole, but a single
instance)? Do you re-check every line of code you write on a Braille
display or have key echo turned on? I don't. If you do, then there's
another variable one should adjust for. Do you have All Punctuation turned
on when you're skimming code? How about speech rate? Was an average taken
for that?
One should adjust for different integrated development environments as well.
I can use Visual Studio with what would appear to be a fairly high level of
ease, but drop me into, say, Delphi or C++ Builder and I'm ... you'll pardon
the analogy ... flying blind. I would be curious to see the data from this
research grouped by IDE, and possibly also by task.
Was a standard assessment of skill for the participants in this research
taken? Were they taking a sampling of blind people at what in my workplace
would be termed a certain "stock level" or range of "stock levels" and
comparing them against sighted people at that same level, or did they simply
take some blind programmers and have them run the gauntlet against some
sighted programmers? I've seen some shoddy research done in trying to
understand the "challenges of blindness" (I was thrown a questionnaire once
by a university disability resource center that may have been the Anxiety
Scale for the Blind or something along those lines and found myself
frequently looking for a "not applicable").
I hate to sound as though I am attacking what I'm absolutely certain was a
well-thought-out statement, in which far more statistical research was
performed than I would have either the time or the inclination to do, but
looking at that six per cent productivity figure, it would seem that
companies that hire blind programmers only keep them on because they perhaps
don't know better initially and, once they find out what a disappointment
they are, can't fire them because the only reason they can come up with is
that "it's something to do with blindness", which no company wants on their
record. Now, I haven't had *MY* first annual performance review as yet, but
it would certainly seem that such a delta in productivity between myself and
others on my team would have been spotted by now. Of course, to sign off on
that as a blanket statement that "blind programmers are as productive as
their sighted counterparts in all instances" is logic just as flawed as to
say that for all blind programmers in all instances, productivity will be at
or near 6% of what it would be for a sighted person taken from the same
level of skill--or, as would seem to be implied by your rather touching
scenario involving the description of a scene from a window, that "any
sighted person knows more about the world in general than any blind person".
My sighted wife, for instance, could not find Union Station in Chicago (a
city which we had never been to), which I was able to find in five minutes
with a 1.0 version of one of the GPS packages out there for the blind.
Again, one should watch statements meant to imply that X is true for all Y,
because it is frequently easy to find an instance of Y for which X is false.
Edited to add before sending: Because testing things is what I do, I decided
to run the same test that you had mentioned earlier with web navigation,
that being ordering something on amazon.com. Now, because a few variables
were missing (what was being ordered for one, and how long it would take you
vs. your wife to navigate the site for another (you provided half of that
information)), I had to improvise. The test parameters I used were:
* Find a book, specifically "Confessor" by Terry Goodkind, solely on the
basis that it was the first thing that came to mind.
* Add it to cart.
* Confirm shipping.
* For GOD'S sake don't charge my card, because if I wanted that book I could
download it from BookShare.
Starting at 11:55 PM local time, I was able to find the book, add it to my
cart, log in, take a second to confirm my shipping address (I couldn't
remember if I'd ordered something since my most recent move), and get to the
part of the adventure where I select my card for billing. Checking the time
at that point, it was 12:00. Now, of course, I have NO idea of the validity
of this test as far as comparing my poor, disadvantaged, blind self to your
fully non-disadvantaged sighted wife's navigational skills, because I have
no clue what it was you wanted to get her to buy for you, but surely this
raises an interesting point, does it not? Again, I'm not looking for a
confrontation here by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm eager to see
how the outlook can concurrently be as bleak as you say for all X and not be
as bleak as you say for at least two instances of X that I've seen so far.
Cheers,
C
-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Matthew2007
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 10:57 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Dynamic active content
All things being equal--in regards to computer knowledge, we're still at a
great disadvantage to sighted people when it comes to computing--basic or
advanced. I'm a very proficient computer user in respects to my sighted
family members and friends, but when I had my technician brother in law over
a few weeks ago to install my new sound card, there is absolutely no
comparison, none at all, he stunned me at the speed he was installing and
configuring the software. In fact, I purchased a small app that allows me to
record directly into my computer using a microphone. He had never used this
little known application, and he was able to read all the information the
application had to offer simply by looking at the start up screen just once.
He told me my microphone wasn't being recognized, he told me the balance was
off, he said my equalizer was off balance, and he told me that I had 3 files
open. I had no idea any of these things were happening or even conveyed on
the screen even though I'd been using the application for a couple of
months. This is because all this information was conveyed visually at first
viewing of the screen. I, needing a screen reader, would have had to tab
around or use my mouse cursor to try to determine what was open or closed
and what the settings were--if in fact my screen reader could even see the
various settings on the application. This of course means that the
information might have been accessible, but it would have taken me some 10
minutes to put all the information together and make the same conclusions he
determined in a split second viewing of the screen. He was clicking away
with the mouse so fast that I told him to stop while I turned jaws off
because I didn't want jaws' slow response to crash the computer. Remember,
Andreus found in his research that the productivity of blind programmers is
only some 6% of sighted programmers. We can argue the facts all we want and
come up with feel good excuses as to why we're slower, but the facts are the
facts. Take a listen to the first few minutes of the link posted by ken and
see for yourself.
Matthew
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jared Wright" <wright.jaredm@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 10:21 PM
Subject: Re: Dynamic active content
>I think what you're forgetting is that I'd say on a scale of 1 to 10 the
>entire world is probably at about a 4 when it comes to the ability to
>quickly and efficiently acquire information from the internet. I have no
>real statistical numbers, it just seems a little strange the disadvantage
>you seem to think we are in. I'm not saying there isn't work to be done,
>but there're lots of things on the internet (buying items on Amazon being
>one of them, actually) that I know I can do not at the equivalent speed as
>a sighted user, but faster in many instances. A lot of times people try to
>transfer techniques for browsing pages from the sighted world to the blind
>one, I feel. If more blind people were to be taught, or just stopped to
>think, how powerful a feature it is it is for your screen reader to run a
>search on a web page and place the cursor where the search hits in its
>respective browse buffer for example.. I think you'd see more more blind
>web users be even more successful on a number of sites. Your Amazon
>experiences are very strange to me, as that is one of the sites that I feel
>with familiarity I can browse faster than sighted peers. I would agree that
>first time visits to a website might be more inefficient for us, but I
>think we can more greatly optimize our experience with a given website with
>increased familiarity to its content. These are just the pros and cons
>associated with getting the same information through two distinctly
>different mediums.
>
> Jared
>
> Matthew2007 wrote:
>> Ken,
>>
>> Thanks for the information. More confirming information that blind people
>> are truly at a great disadvantage when it comes to interacting with the
>> many different types of WebPages on the internet. Had the presenter not
>> specified many of these interface problems I would have never considered
>> just how slow computing is for blind individuals. So far, it appears that
>> from a scale of 1 to 10, the average blind web user is probably lingering
>> in at about a 3 when it comes to quickly accessing information on the
>> web. Just this past week I asked my wife to help me make a purchase on
>> Amazon.com. I was in a hurry and didn't want to have to read through a
>> mess of information. She found and purchased the item I was looking for
>> within some 10 minutes. It would have easily taken me over an hour due to
>> the size of the pages on the web site as well as the amount of extraneous
>> information the blind user must wade through as we have to read from top
>> to bottom or search around for various keywords to get at desired
>> information. I've been buying from Amazon and other similar sites on the
>> web for years, so its not me as much as how I must interact with a
>> website even using the most current screen reader.
>>
>> Matthew
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken Perry" <whistler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 6:03 PM
>> Subject: Dynamic active content
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> We have been talking about menus and other dynamic content so I thought
>>> it
>>> would be important to post the new Web anywhere screen reader that will
>>> work
>>> on any device that has a web browser and can play music. This is just
>>> one
>>> video and it should be release this month if it hasn't already been
>>> released.
>>>
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpmB2DLrkTE
>>>
>>> Ken
>>>
>>>
>>>
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