[Colorado-Talk] FW: [Tech-VI] What Is the Apple Vision Pro? A Lifesaver for Disabled Users

[Dan Burke]

Thanks for passing this along, Tim. Interesting article and fun to see
Jordan Castor make an appearance in it!

On Mon, Jun 17, 2024 at 5:23 PM Tim Keenan via Colorado-Talk <
colorado-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Definitely makes you think what it could do for people with all ranges of
> visual impairments.
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> *From:* tech-vi at groups.io <tech-vi at groups.io> *On Behalf Of *David
> Goldfield via groups.io
> *Sent:* Monday, June 17, 2024 3:53 PM
> *To:* List <tech-vi at groups.io>
> *Subject:* [Tech-VI] What Is the Apple Vision Pro? A Lifesaver for
> Disabled Users
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> https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/apple-vision-pro-disabled-users.html
> I Know What the Apple Vision Pro Is ForThe headset is already changing
> disabled users’ lives.
>
> Andrew Leland, a writer based in Massachusetts  June 13, 2024
>
> [image: Image removed by sender. An illustration by Ari Liloan of the
> Venus de Milo wearing an Apple Vision Pro, looking at her digitally
> restored arms and an apple floating above her hand. When the statue was
> discovered in the Greek island of Melos, in 1820, a hand holding an apple
> was found nearby.]
>
> Illustration: Ari Liloan
>
> In her childhood bedroom, Maxine Collard had a PC connected to a
> cathode-ray tube monitor so massive it bowed her desk into a smile that
> grew deeper every year. Collard has oculocutaneous albinism, which means
> that her hair is naturally bleach white, her complexion maximally fair, and
> she has uncorrectably low visual acuity with limited depth perception. In
> order to see the screen, she had to crane her neck until her face was two
> inches from the monitor.
>
> When Collard was in middle school, her mother bought an iMac for the
> family. Collard spent hours messing around on the new machine, her nose
> pressed almost to the glass. One day, deep in the computer’s accessibility
> settings, she discovered that if she held down the control key while
> spinning the mouse’s scroll wheel, she could instantaneously zoom the
> entire screen to whatever magnification level she wanted. There was a
> rudimentary magnifier app on her Windows computer, but she found the
> interface difficult to use, and the low-res image on the zoomed-in PC
> screen, she said, was pixelated, hard to read, “disgusting.” Her experience
> on the iMac, which allowed her to magnify the entire screen into a much
> clearer image, came as a revelation.
>
> Earlier this year, Collard had a similar aha moment when she tried the Apple
> Vision Pro
> <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/david-pogue-reviews-apple-vision-pro.html>
> for the first time. Some critics of the AVP were skeptical of a device that
> pressed two high-resolution micro-OLED screens within millimeters of one’s
> eyes for hours at a time. But to Collard, the ability to (as she put it)
> “strap an iPad to my face” was instantly appealing.
>
> Collard is now in her sixth year of a combined Ph.D.-M.D. neuroscience
> degree at UC San Francisco. When I visited her at her lab in late May, she
> showed me her workspace: a standing cubicle in a small hive of carrels she
> shared with her colleagues, a pair of 27-inch monitors on her desk. Zooming
> her entire screen has its liabilities in a social setting like this: One
> day she was reading her DMs on Slack, magnified so much that the words were
> two inches tall. A co-worker sent her a spicy message, something she would
> have preferred to keep private, or at least in 11-point type, but instead
> it was broadcast for all her colleagues to see.
>
> After she got an AVP, she had unprecedented control over her visual
> environment. She took her lab’s Slack channels and enlarged them to the
> size of a refrigerator, and set them off to her right. Then she opened her
> code editor and set it in front of her — inches from her eyes, like usual,
> but five times the size of her external monitors, and her posture was
> ramrod straight — no more craning. Finally, she opened a browser window,
> stretched it to the size of a door frame, and loaded the documentation for
> a tricky data-analysis function she could never remember, and set it off to
> her left.
>
> Collard has strabismus — her eyes don’t align the way typical eyes do —
> which would confuse most eye-tracking algorithms, but in the AVP’s
> accessibility menu, she turned on “single-eye tracking,” so the device
> wouldn’t get confused by eyes that point in different directions. The
> device can lessen the effects of her nystagmus — involuntary eye “wiggles”
> that have confounded eye-tracking devices she’s used in the past.
>
> The AVP has a range of accessibility features for other disabilities as
> well: Blind users can use VoiceOver, a screen reader that will speak text,
> using a custom set of hand gestures to navigate through apps. People with
> mobility disabilities can make selections through a variety of alternative
> methods: with their voice, or using a switch or joystick (easier for some
> users with motor disabilities), or with a feature called Dwell Control,
> which allows a user to make a selection simply by “dwelling” their gaze on
> an item*. *With sound actions, a user can make a selection with a custom
> noise (like a *cluck* or a *pop*). In lieu of eye gaze, the pointer can
> be controlled with one’s head, wrist, or finger, and most of the
> accessibility features users are familiar with from other Apple
> <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/tags/apple/> products — reduced motion,
> color filters for color-blindness, and hearing-device support — are
> included.
>
> Because of her reliance on large monitors, Collard could never comfortably
> join her colleagues to debug code in a coffee shop or in the shared kitchen
> one level down from their sixth-floor lab. That’s all changed with the AVP.
> “As a disabled person,” she wrote in a blog post, “the ability to finally
> sit back with my feet up on a bench out in the sun while working on my
> laptop — or more accurately, while working on a 30-foot-wide 4K screen
> floating in exactly the perfect ergonomic position, one that I can
> reposition anywhere I want it to be in any moment — is the answer to
> decades of prayers to the accessibility gods.”
>
> Mission Bay was warm and breezy in late May, and Collard led me down to
> Koret Quad, where she now loved to sit and work. Inside her headset, a code
> editor the size of a garden shed floated above the grass. As she worked,
> she saw the window begin to shimmer and a shadowy figure troubled the lines
> of code. Then a man, smiling and looking right at her, strode through the
> window of her workspace and stopped. This sort of thing happens to Collard
> whenever she takes her AVP out in public — she has caught numerous people
> taking surreptitious selfies with her in the frame.
>
> “Hi there,” she said preemptively to the smiling man, who was clearly
> drawn by the novelty of seeing an Apple Vision Pro *en plein air.* He
> looked at Collard and said, in a lightly mocking tone, “How’s *that*
> working out for you?”
>
> Collard has struggled with her identity as a disabled person, resisting
> alien-seeming assistive tools like the monocular lenses that low-vision
> specialists tried to get her to use in school. But she sees the AVP as a
> liberatory device, and no arch tech skeptic on the quad could dampen that
> feeling. She fixed his gaze with her digital SeeThrough avatar eyes and
> answered him with emphatic cheer: “*Really great,* in fact!”
>
> [image: Image removed by sender. Maxine Collard at her home in San
> Francisco, pictured wearing an Apple Vision Pro and seated at a keyboard.]
>
> Maxine Collard at her home in San Francisco. Photo: Courtesy of Maxine
> Collard
>
> The initial response to the Apple Vision Pro has been mixed. There are
> widespread complaints about the headset’s weight and battery life and its
> price — $3,500 for the lowest-end model. Sales have reportedly been
> sluggish. Kevin Roose
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/technology/apple-vision-pro-needs.html>,
> a technology columnist for the New York *Times*, recently wrote that he
> “couldn’t really figure out what it was for.” For many disabled users,
> however, the answer is clear: The Vision Pro is made for them.
>
> About ten years ago, Steve Coulson, a creative director in New York, began
> losing his hearing, and today he has profound hearing loss. This made his
> work — constant in-person meetings, often in noisy environments —
> increasingly difficult. Like many people with disabilities, Coulson found
> the pandemic isolating, but he embraced certain elements of remote access:
> He had more control over the audio in virtual meetings, not to mention
> real-time captions and auto-generated transcripts.
>
> Still, he missed the easy, dynamic exchanges of his pre-pandemic
> brainstorms, and his hearing loss made it difficult to reproduce that
> feeling in person, even with hearing aids. Now, meeting with his business
> partner in Spatial FaceTime on Vision Pro, he says, the feeling he’d lost
> has been restored. “It feels like I’m in a room again,” he said. “We can
> just sit together in a meeting, and I can *hear.*” This technology,
> Coulson said, “is life-changing in a way that a hearing person might not
> understand.”
>
> Michael Doise, who works as an accessibility specialist and app developer
> in Austin, has optic-nerve hypoplasia — his optic nerves didn’t fully
> develop when he was born. When he’s with his family, he rarely sees their
> facial expressions, since it would be awkward to hold a portable magnifier
> up to their faces while they hang out. Even on his computer, he has trouble
> magnifying their images efficiently. But on a group video call, wearing his
> AVP, “I could actually see their facial expressions,” he said. “It’s a
> remarkable feat of engineering for someone who’s blind. Are they happy?
> Smiling? Knowing what all that looks like is huge for me.”
>
> Neurodiverse users have also found value in the AVP. “I generally feel a
> lot better after having worn it for a while,” a user with autism and ADHD
> told me. “It’s like a reset for the brain.” When I chatted with them,
> they’d just drained their AVP’s battery by spacing out in the immersive
> lunar environment. “My brain just is hyperfocused on whatever stimulus
> comes in, so whatever I can do to manually cut those stimuli off helps me
> tremendously,” they said. “The Vision Pro is noise-canceling headphones for
> my eyes.”
>
> Ryan Hudson-Peralta, who was born with no hands and short legs he’s unable
> to walk on, remembers his first computer, in middle school. He would go
> from class to class with a bulky ’90s-era Windows laptop on his wheelchair,
> typing notes and using rudimentary dictation software to complete his
> assignments. But he had to contort himself just to log in: “I was literally
> putting my lip on the control button, using my nose or arm to tap the other
> button,” he said. Then someone showed him an Apple computer, which had a
> function called Sticky Keys, allowing him to temporarily lock multiple keys
> on the keyboard, freeing him from gymnastic approaches to chorded commands.
>
> Today, Hudson-Peralta drives his adaptive SUV to his job in downtown
> Detroit, putting in long hours as a principal designer at Rocket Mortgage,
> where he designs the company’s apps and websites using a traditional mouse
> and keyboard and his Mac’s accessibility features. One morning this spring,
> though, his back flared with pain. “I was having trouble getting around
> that day,” he said, so he took the day off and did work for his consulting
> agency, Equal Accessibility, from bed, wearing the Vision Pro, surrounded
> by screens he controlled with his eyes and a series of custom mouth-sounds
> that triggered selections. “As I get older, and this happens more often for
> me,” he said, “I envision myself working virtually with the AVP even more.”
>
> For now, though, he mainly uses the AVP for entertainment, watching
> immersive videos on the headset, where he takes the perspective of a player
> running across a soccer field, or standing in a recording booth next to
> Alicia Keys. “Having a disability, I never ran in my life,” Hudson-Peralta
> told me. “I was sitting on the floor when I watched the Alicia Keys video,
> and I really felt like I was standing.” He knew it was an illusion, but the
> immersive tech gave the illusion a visceral veracity.
>
> I asked him what he thought of the disabled critique of *Avatar,* which
> seemed to suggest that its paralyzed protagonist’s life was only worth
> living when he was liberated from his wheelchair. He had no patience for
> this argument. “The other characters who could walk, they were jumping into
> avatar suits, too,” he said. The impulse toward escapism is universal.
>
> The same week I visited Maxine Collard at her lab at UCSF, I went to
> Cupertino to meet some of the disabled software engineers who’d helped
> build the accessibility features on the Apple Vision Pro. I was ushered
> inside Apple Park by a Deaf member of the company’s accessibility PR team
> who spoke to me through an ASL interpreter. Seeing my white cane, he
> explained that he was speaking ASL and that the voice I heard wasn’t his.
> (Though I’m legally blind, I have enough residual vision that I’d clocked
> the interpreter myself; still, I appreciated the gesture.)
>
> Strolling along the curved-glass perimeter of Apple’s massive ring-shaped
> corporate headquarters felt like walking on a treadmill. We ambled along
> for several minutes, the curved-glass wall unchanging on our left, the
> trees rolling languidly past on our right. I was there the week of Global
> Accessibility Awareness Day, which Apple was observing, in part, by holding
> a series of internal-facing events to raise awareness among its 150,000
> employees about their work in the field.
>
> It wasn’t inevitable that Apple would evolve to be so inclusive. Gregg
> Vanderheiden, an early accessibility consultant at the company, recalled a
> conversation he had with an engineer in the mid-’80s. The engineer
> confessed to Vanderheiden that he was worried he’d be fired for working on
> Sticky Keys. Vanderheiden asked why. “Because Sticky Keys is priority
> seven,” he replied, “and we’re under strict orders to focus on priorities
> one through three.”
>
> Today, the company seems truly committed to accessibility and not just for
> the goodwill it might generate. After all, one in four Americans have a
> disability — a market any corporation would be foolish to ignore. It
> required no great leap for Apple to serve this population: All technology,
> in the most basic sense, is prosthetic.
>
> We reached the conference center, where someone handed me an Apple
> Accessibility Passport, a single folded page with six colorful icons
> printed in a raised, textured material so they were tactilely discernible
> (and labeled in braille), representing the five main categories of Apple’s
> accessibility offerings: vision, mobility, speech, hearing, and “cognitive”
> — plus, perhaps a bit hopefully, a category devoted exclusively to Apple
> Vision Pro, which was represented on the passport by a raised-line
> silhouette of the goggles.
>
> The room was set up like a science fair with stations representing each
> category. After visiting each of the six stations, employees received a
> tactile bump-dot sticker to place on their passports. One of my minders,
> another member of the accessibility PR team, cheerfully insisted on
> applying my tactile bump-sticker every time I visited a booth.
>
> I smiled and nodded through our first stop at the Vision station as an
> Apple employee dutifully showed me how to use the magnifier app that I’d
> used at the airport that morning to read what was for me the illegibly
> distant menu at an airport café. Another worker showed me an iPad set to
> Assistive Access mode for users with cognitive disabilities. The normally
> dense screen of apps was reduced to five huge buttons, and each of these
> apps had its complex functions hidden or renamed. I saw a demonstration of
> how, using Apple Home and a smart bulb, d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing users can
> have their lamp change color when the doorbell rings or alert them visually
> or haptically to the sound of a baby crying or a fire alarm.
>
> Making my way around the stations, it struck me how many of these features
> were also available as specialty assistive devices. But these devices tend
> to be overpriced and undersupported, and their producers go out of business
> or stop supporting products with alarming frequency. It would cost me about
> as much as an iPhone to buy a portable video magnifier with all the
> features of Apple’s built-in magnifier app, and whatever advantages I’d
> find in a device built explicitly for a person with low vision I’d lose in
> my need to carry an extra gadget around. A speciality device would also
> inevitably have inferior construction, not to mention the weirdness of
> pulling out an unfamiliar device in public, as opposed to the same little
> brick everyone else at the airport is waving around.
>
> The AVP isn’t as familiar as the iPhone, but, as I experienced with
> Collard, in public people are more likely to ask for a review than an
> explanation. Under the hood, however, it’s as specialized as any bespoke
> piece of disability tech. At the AVP booth, I met Dan Golden, a software
> engineer with low vision who works on accessibility at Apple across
> platforms. Golden told me that during the development process, he had
> trouble using eye-tracking. One of his fellow engineers was working on
> pointer control — a way of turning off eye-tracking on AVP and making
> selections by pointing one’s head. They shared this incomplete feature with
> Golden, who immediately began using it in his own testing of the device, in
> turn giving his colleague feedback to refine it.
>
> As Golden spoke, I was struck by his resemblance to Collard. His story
> echoed hers in many ways, down to the epiphanic childhood discovery of the
> iMac’s full-screen zoom shortcut, which a teacher showed him when he
> couldn’t follow the flying letters on a learn-to-type program. After that,
> he begged his parents for a Mac, and has been “an Apple person” ever since.
>
> There is an adage in disability-rights circles, “Nothing about us without
> us,” which suggests that the only way equity and inclusivity for disabled
> people — which is another way of saying *real accessibility* — will be
> realized is if people with disabilities are a part of the design process.
> Here, I felt with sudden force, was a stark instance of this ethos in
> action: a low-vision software engineer with strabismus who had helped to
> design and test the Apple Vision Pro, and on the other end of that equation
> was Maxine Collard, with a similar suite of disabilities, who could barely
> contain her enthusiasm at this tool that allowed her to do her work with a
> freedom and ease she’d never imagined for herself.
>
> This epiphany had, of course, been orchestrated for me by Apple, with its
> accessibility PR team guiding me through the experience room, stamping my
> passport, then introducing me to Golden, the visually impaired engineer.
> But both things could be true: This was well-orchestrated PR, but it was
> also a real part of Apple’s corporate culture. Nearly every blind person I
> knew had an iPhone because it provided unparalleled ease of access to
> information compared with any other option on the market. Online, disabled
> users still grumbled constantly — updates frequently break beloved features
> and often take too long to fix. Many blind people have wondered with
> annoyance why, for instance, a $3 trillion company can’t get the
> screen-reader on its desktop and laptop computers working half as well as
> it does on its phones. But these are largely the gripes of devoted
> consumers.
>
> The AVP is still a first-generation product, and there are bugs. Usman
> Haque, a Phoenix-based data-science manager at a large insurance company,
> also goes by @TwoFZeroT on social media — a.k.a. Two Fingers, Zero Toes.
> He’s a below-elbow, below-knee bilateral congenital amputee. Haque bought
> an AVP eager to test-drive its accessibility features. As soon as he turned
> it on, he said, “I was floored. I just spent $3,500, and I’m not giving it
> back. This is amazing.” That first impression, however, soon soured.
>
> The AVP calibration process requires its users to hold up their hands so
> it can recognize and begin tracking them for the pinching gestures that
> allow one to select items. But the AVP didn’t recognize Haque’s atypical
> hands, so he had his daughter stand behind him and pinch at the appropriate
> times to let him turn on Dwell Control. This worked well for a while, but
> often when Haque would wake the device after a break, Dwell Control would
> be deactivated and he’d have to go through a frustrating series of
> troubleshooting moves to turn it back on, sometimes needing assistance from
> his family.
>
> “I apologize for using this term,” he said, “but it felt *crippling*.”
> The device had offered Haque a thrilling sense of freedom, where he could
> control a vast, dazzling digital ecosystem with just his eyes — but then
> that freedom was suddenly yanked away. This was enough to douse his
> feelings of amazement. “It’s not ready for me yet,” he said. “I gave it
> back.”
>
> For Ryan Hudson-Peralta, the designer at Rocket Mortgage, his problems
> started with unboxing the AVP: he found that he couldn’t independently
> press the digital crown, which is required to set up the device. To
> generate his “Persona” — the uncanny digital avatar that the AVP shows to
> FaceTime callers when a user is wearing it — you hold it out in front of
> you, at arms’ length, so it can capture your likeness. But because
> Hudson-Peralta needed his son to hold it up for him, the angle was off, and
> as a result his Persona looks even stranger than most users’ — it erased
> his neck.
>
> Others are waiting for upgrades. Collard submitted a feature request to
> open up the AVP’s zoom feature to the pass-through cameras — at the moment,
> users can only magnify digital objects generated by the AVP and not their
> surroundings — like the departures monitor at an airport, for instance, or
> the text on a prescription-medication label. So far, Apple hasn’t changed
> the feature.
>
> At Apple Park, I walked with Dan Golden, the low-vision software engineer,
> into a conference room where Jordyn Castor was waiting for us on a FaceTime
> call from Colorado. Like Golden, Castor works on vision accessibility,
> doing quality-assurance testing. Unlike Golden, she’s completely blind and
> uses VoiceOver, the screen-reader that’s built into all of Apple’s
> operating systems, including on her Vision Pro headset.
>
> Castor told me that accessibility is a core value at Apple, a human
> right.  She described the exhilaration she felt using VoiceOver on the
> Vision Pro to demo a game that allowed her to play a virtual hand pan drum.
> She had the same wonder in her voice that sighted users express when the
> butterfly lands on their fingers in the device’s flagship demo, Encounter
> Dinosaurs. “I was playing the drums with my hands like I’m playing the
> drums on the table in front of me!” Castor said. “It was unlike anything
> I’ve experienced in the accessibility realm.”
>
> It’s easy to look at accessibility as a binary — a device either has
> screen-reader functionality or it doesn’t; captions are either available or
> they’re not. But digital accessibility exists on a spectrum, and what works
> for some users won’t work for others. Castor is the only blind person I’ve
> been able to find who uses the Vision Pro’s screen reader reliably. Most
> low-vision users — including myself — who use VoiceOver on our phones or
> computers find it too chaotic and unwieldy on the Vision Pro. Watching
> Collard use her AVP, I was struck by her expertise — she drew on decades of
> IT troubleshooting and a bone-deep familiarity with the Apple ecosystem
> that she leveraged to surmount numerous small obstacles that arose as she
> demoed her workflow for me.
>
> The first time I wore an AVP, I was astonished by how intuitive it was to
> use — within a minute or two, I was opening and closing and resizing
> windows, dialing down my surroundings and turning up a Joshua Tree
> landscape. A college student I met on InSpaze, a spatial chatroom where AVP
> users hang out, told me that the first time he let his older brother, who
> has Down syndrome, use his AVP, his brother independently played video
> games on it for two hours. But this native intuitiveness can fall away the
> further a disabled person might stray from the typical, mainstream user. I
> don’t doubt that Castor is able to fluidly use her AVP entirely with
> audible feedback, but she’s also a lifelong screen-reader user with a B.S.
> in computer science, not to mention a full-time engineer at Apple. Users
> with less expertise can struggle to figure it out. It’s also worth noting
> that within the chronically underemployed and impoverished disabled
> population, these users represent a rarefied subset who can drop a few
> thousand dollars — often with professional interest — on this class of
> first-gen tech toy.
>
> Still, my brief experience with the AVP allowed me to imagine a future
> version where, for instance, the price comes down, Apple opens up the
> front-facing cameras to developers, and what is already a powerful
> low-vision device could become the ultimate tool for blind and low-vision
> people. When I play the complicated tabletop games my son adores, and press
> a game’s card to my nose to read it, I often find myself wishing I could
> tap on the blocks of indecipherable text the way I can with a paragraph of
> text on my iPhone and hear it read aloud. It’s easy to imagine a
> non-distant future where I could wear a fourth-gen AVP, leveraging whatever
> comes after GPT4o, and tap one of the game cards with my finger, and hear a
> readout of the text printed there, along with a description of whatever
> illustration is on the card, too. If I preferred to use my residual vision,
> I might casually use two fingers to zoom in on the card (or my son’s face)
> the way you’d enlarge a photo on your iPhone.
>
> Accessibility operates, to use the language of computing, in a stack. In
> the example above, the game is only accessible if the AI app that’s
> describing my video feed can be used by a blind person. And as a blind
> user, I can only access that app if the operating system it’s running on is
> built with a disabled user in mind. If any of these links in the chain
> fail, then the whole system crashes.
>
> In May, when Sonos, the smart-speaker company, updated its app, its
> screen-reader accessibility regressed significantly, making the app — which
> one needs to control the company’s speakers — unusable for its blind users,
> threatening to turn thousands of dollars’ worth of high-end audio gear into
> expensive, silent sculptures. Everyone relies on fallible technologies, but
> disabled users are in an especially precarious position, and this
> experience of a smoothly functioning stack suddenly imploding with a
> developer’s capricious update happens constantly, including from companies
> that have demonstrated a commitment to accessibility in the past. (Sonos
> has since pledged to make accessibility improvements by mid-June.) In
> April, an analyst with sources from inside Apple’s supply chain reported
> that Apple had slashed AVP shipment projections for 2024 after “demand in
> the U.S. market [had] fallen sharply beyond expectations.” If it doesn’t
> find a market, and Apple discontinues the AVP, then many disabled users
> will see their accessibility stacks implode.
>
> Maxine Collard’s bedroom in San Francisco is dominated by the double-bass
> she played in orchestras growing up. “It’s an albino,” she said with a
> grin, pointing out the unusual blond-wood design, “just like me.” In high
> school, she tried a tragicomically long list of adaptations to read her
> music while simultaneously maintaining the proper posture the double-bass
> requires — she couldn’t lean her face into the music stand the way she
> could with her computer screen. In the end, she just memorized an
> astonishing amount of Brahms. Now, wearing her AVP, she can stretch her
> sheet music to the size of the wall and years of orchestral struggle are
> erased with a flick of her wrist.
>
> I asked about a glowing piece of tech sitting on a table next to the bass.
> Perched next to a record player, it looked like a device from a 1950s
> electronics lab but with contemporary manufacturing. “Oh, that’s a big tube
> amp,” she told me. “With turntables, the whole argument that somehow they
> sound better is, like, *quantitatively* not true,” she said. “Vinyl’s not
> going to do a better job of reproducing audio than digital is. There’s good
> math that proves it.” She gazed at the amp through the black-mirrored
> surface of her AVP. “What *is* true,” she said, “is that the particular
> *way* in which it is worse — it’s *better.* The distortions this amp
> gives to the sound, they’re actually just way more pleasant-sounding, if
> you’re a human.”
>
> This idea illuminates an important aspect of accessibility: There is a
> quantitative way of looking at disability, where without hands, or working
> eyes, you’re mathematically lower on the human number line (priority seven,
> rather than two or three, in the logic of software development). It seems
> like common sense that using a keyboard with Sticky Keys, or reading email
> with a screen reader, or browsing the web with a joystick, should be a
> second-class experience. But when the tools work, and the signal comes
> through clearly, whatever minor distortions exist can feel as warm and
> invisible as surface noise on a vinyl record.
>
> At the end of my visit to Apple Park, I sat in the ring building’s central
> garden with Sarah Herrlinger, who’s advocated for people with disabilities
> within the company for more than 20 years. When she told me that Apple aims
> to re-create “surprise and delight” for all its users, including those with
> disabilities, I brushed the comment aside as more Jobsian marketing copy.
> But the next day, in Collard’s apartment, watching her demonstrate how she
> used to play video games (knees pressed against her TV console, nose almost
> to the 60-inch screen) and how she does now (lying on her bed playing *Metroid
> Prime* on a screen the size of her ceiling), I saw her point. The Vision
> Pro wasn’t giving Collard superpowers, or correcting her vision, or erasing
> her disability. It just gave her access to the same experience — of
> efficiency, competence, and pleasure — that most mainstream users accept as
> a given.
>
> *Correction: This story has been updated to more accurately describe Dan
> Golden. *
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> David Goldfield,
>
> Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist
>
>
>
> If you need help using your assistive technology learn about my training
> services by visiting
>
> WWW.ScreenReaderTraining.com <http://www.screenreadertraining.com/>
>
>
>
> Am Yisrael Chai
>
> The Nation of Israel Lives!
>
>
>
> JAWS Certified, 2022
> <https://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/Certification/>
>
> NVDA Certified Expert <https://certification.nvaccess.org/>
>
>
>
> Subscribe to the Tech-VI announcement list to receive news, events and
> information regarding the blindness assistive technology field.
>
> Email: tech-vi+subscribe at groups.io
>
> www.DavidGoldfield.com <http://www.davidgoldfield.com/>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Dan Burke

National Federation of the Blind of Colorado Legislative Co-chair

"Blindness is not what holds you back.  You can live the life you want!"

My Cell:  406.546.8546
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