Sublime Forum

Screen reader accessibility

#22

OK, I’m not entirely convinced you are helping with either side of the debate to be honest, as you know nothing about how Sublime Text is developed, nor anything about accessibility, and seem to completely lack any empathy.

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#23

Thanks for the reply. I should have replied to this post and ignored the other ones tbh.

A text editor built specifically for the visually impaired would be great, but is also far more than I think anyone is really expecting. Just basically want it to read the text in the editor - anything else would be a bonus, but it just doesn’t read anything at all. I can’t select text and have it read out, I can’t get VoiceOver to say anything. Honestly it never even occurred to me to have different pitches etc for syntax highlighting, and I’m not sure how usefult hat would be anyway.

I think lack of expertise is a strange argument because no software developers have any expertise until they do. As a developer myself, I am very often thrown into things I know nothing about, and it’s just part of the job to figure it out. It would be boring if I only worked on things I had specific expertise in.

Also the argument that you don’t have this user base is also strange. Maybe there isn’t a big market for it, I don’t know, but I would think implementing features with the intent of attracting new users is something you would do all the time.

But I do get the point that it might be too difficult given that the architecture of the UI. But it sounds like no one has the will to do anything about it and no one actually has any idea what would be involved.

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#24

You aren’t helping either. You are only complaining, while being completely bad faith and dishonest. As seen in here:

Not only are you falsely accusing a company of discrimination. You also have the audacity to imply they are doing some kind of false advertisement. You are completely wrong on both accounts.

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#25

I think lack of expertise is a strange argument because no software developers have any expertise until they do.

I’m not talking about expertise from the platform API side; I’m talking about knowing how to be accessible in the first place. Sublime Text has a fair number of features in relation to text editing and without direct knowledge of doing programming without vision I don’t see how we could possibly do a good job supporting those.

Also the argument that you don’t have this user base is also strange. Maybe there isn’t a big market for it, I don’t know, but I would think implementing features with the intent of attracting new users is something you would do all the time.

People generally don’t switch tools often, so the existing visually impaired pool of developers would not be attracted to using Sublime Text without us doing a better job than what they’re already using. At best you might get people new to programming, but that’s an even smaller niche.

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#26

That is assuming that people start off visually impaired. I have a degenerative eye condition so am used to working with a variety of tools as a sighted person. It’s only now that I am finding that a lot of open doors are now closing my my face unexpededly.

I don’t have any experience in desktop development, but I used to be a web developer in a very small team (often just me) but accessibility was still a moral (and potentially legal) requirements. I am surprised that things like the Disability Discrimination Act don’t apply to software. It’s maybe something I need to look into.

My intention isn’t to give anyone a hard time over this. I’m sure you can understand my own personal depth of feeling on this matter, but so far I’ve not really heard anyone properly respond, other than speculate that it’s probably too hard and probably not worth bothering with, and a lot of presumptions being made.

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#27

So you’re saying it takes millions of dollars to implement accessibility in an application, but small businesses have enough resources to build a custom GUI kit? It really doesn’t make sense. I’m a blind software developer, and I use the Python language to create my applications. I use the Wx Python GUI kit, which is completely free, and provides a fully accessible GUI. Implementing accessibility in an application is much less expensive than creating a custom GUI kit, and if a company is capable of it, they are also capable of creating an accessible product. Digital accessibility is a right for people with disabilities, not a benefit or bonus. As much as there are other text editors that the blind can use, let’s imagine the situation of someone who is sighted, and is totally used to a certain text editor, and possibly even paid for the product. So that person, for some reason, becomes blind. She may have to start using an entirely different app, as well as stop using the product she paid for. You said that the blind have other options and thus don’t need accessibility in Sublime Text. But sighted people also have other options! So if there are other options, why was Sublime Text created? The same that applies to the blind must also apply to everyone. The person, even being blind, may need a feature that is only available in Sublime Text. So if the product isn’t adapted to screen readers, how would she do it? Accessibility is not a feature so difficult to implement that it would bankrupt a company. In fact, it’s often the smallest details that end up hampering an application’s accessibility. You consider, in your arguments, only the number of people with disabilities, as if the number was decisive for these people to have the right to use a product. Accessibility is not just an extra feature that blind people need, it’s a necessity. Also, you generalize in such a way that it makes it seem like all small businesses, including Sublime Text, don’t care about accessibility, and that justifies the lack of accessibility of the product, but that’s a completely invalid justification. You talk as if all companies do this, and Sublime Text is no different, which is not true. Many small companies at least try to apply the culture of accessibility to their products, and make some effort, rather than simply arguing that there are too few people and that it’s unnecessary. An app, to be accessible, doesn’t have to be developed specifically for the blind, as you say. Even though the app’s focus is not accessibility, blind people don’t just use apps for the blind. And even if it wasn’t mandatory to implement accessibility in a software, all companies should do it. A company building an app without knowing it’s inaccessible is something else entirely, but knowing the problem and not making the effort to fix it is really despicable.

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#28

It means your necessity is too much for a small company with 2 employees to handle. This pretty much the case for everything else in real life. It is the government that usually builds ramps in the street for disabled people. Likewise really big companies like Google, Apple are the ones with finances to hire people that can dedicate to study and build stuff for people with disabilities. I’m sorry, you are asking too much and have unrealistic expectation. No small company is going to dedicate resources to serve a small minority of users.

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#29

Aside from MS/Google projects, whats the best example of an editor/IDE that has made enough of an effort in the OPs opinion?

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#30

The biggest example of an accessible code editor that was not developed by Google or Microsoft, and not created specifically for the blind, is Notepad++. Its interface is, for the most part, very accessible, like the edit field for writing code, the preferences dialog, the system menu and other parts of the interface. I believe that, yes, this editor also has gaps in accessibility, which also occurs in editors developed by big companies, which is normal. No app is bug-free, both in its features and accessibility. I believe that the size of a company does not determine how accessible its product will be. The real problem occurs when an application is completely inaccessible.

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