Tech for the visually impaired will bring tears to your eyes

There was a time over the summer when it looked very likely that I'd lose the ability to read altogether.

I'd already lost all central vision in my right eye earlier in the year and was relying on my (congenitally weak) left; at the end of May, that too started to go down the same path. (If you're interested in what happened, look up AION, then ODD-AION).

Once you've spotted it starting, the progress of the degradation goes on over three weeks or so. Which raises an interesting question: what do you do as you drift towards your own personal black hole?

READ THIS: Going blind in a digital world: The road to reclaiming my web sight 

I decided not to settle down with a favourite book or catch up on politics, nor even to buy in a couple of crates of fine Islay malt, but to try and get things set up at home with whatever tech aids would let me carry on as best as possible on the other side of the Schwarzchild radius.

(That's a logical step, but one that's incredibly hard to take. It means accepting things that you are otherwise trying to keep outside your psyche for reasons of sanity and hope.)

Assistive technology

So, I asked people. I explored online. How can I carry on using the internet if I can't read? There's a whole field called assistive technology that sets out to turn text to speech and speech to text, navigate the visual through the audible and tactile, and add layers of access onto systems designed in other ways. Like the pre-AION me, you probably know something of this and imagine that it's like a switch you throw.

It all looked intensely frustrating and piecemeal, and with a huge amount of learning required — and with no particular continuity of progress after that

Oh boy, is it not. I won't go into details, but what I found was nearly enough to get me back on the whisky survival plan. What there is, is hit and miss — and mostly miss.

The big names in the field are very expensive and very restrictive. It's easy to imagine that they were designed primarily to work with a subset of enterprise IT in a certain way, and are priced as if they're a monopoly product. Almost as if they're designed to tick boxes for companies with legal obligations to their visually impaired employees, rather than providing as good an access to as many systems for as many people as possible. It's probably a great business plan, but not one I would elect to support.

Then there is a whole swathe of other products, which work better or worse at various tasks. If you want to write and read pure text, you're probably in luck: if you want to navigate the modern web and have any chance of doing what you need to do, you're probably out of it. It all looked intensely frustrating and piecemeal, and with a huge amount of learning required — and with no particular continuity of progress after that. I was staring lock-in in the face, and not in a particularly nice place.

Gmail fail

One of the things I tried particularly hard to do was get audio access to my Gmail. Google has its own accessibility projects within Chrome — Chromevox to speak online content, ChromeVis to set colours — and as I largely live my productive life within Chrome and Google, and both have a history of genuine openness, that seemed like a good investment of time that surely qualified as precious.

I have to report failure. I found ChromeVox developers online, forums of experts and the relevant documentation, but I never managed to get to the point where I could go to my Gmail inbox with my eyes shut and find and read the messages. The documentation was incomplete and contradictory (typically because it was out of date and/or platform specific), and there was the usual cycle of "Try this, it works"; "No, it doesn't"; "Oh, no, it doesn't does it? I wonder why...".

I also looked at Windows, iOS and Android audio support for online reading and interaction. My overriding impression is that it's 10 years behind the times in all respects. Forget cross-platform, forget keeping up with innovation, you have to find a niche that just about works for you and devote yourself to learning how to live in it. To say this is not good enough is a sentence several curse words too short.

Shirking responsibilities

The industry as a whole is shirking its responsibilities shamefully; there are individual points of light, but no critical mass. I don't wish to put down the many campaigners and hard-working developers who see the problem clearly and work hard to make things better, but it isn't working. More — much more — needs to be done.

The world of the blind needs vision.

Then I got lucky. By the time I'd been through such discoveries, it was becoming apparent that the visual degradation wasn't going to take all my reading away. (It managed quite a lot but stopped just short of breaking it completely.)

Even limping along, visual reading is so much quicker and easier than having things read to me — and there's no particular reason to think it'll get any worse any time soon — so, gratefully, I left the world of the web screen reader. (It is a bad world, and needs some severely angry campaigning, so I may return once the dust has settled, with some severely angry words.)

With things settling down and some intense boredom setting in (people so overlook the workplace as a place of entertainment), it was time to get the editorial Doc Martens back under the editorial desk and work out what to do next. And that is the story for next time — I'll warn you now, it's not going to be pretty.

NEXT: Doom and zoom.