Exposing my socks to the world

Back when I was in the fifth grade (way back in the stone ages of 1990 or so) my class was visited my one of the families in my neighborhood to demonstrate how they used their computer. That doesn’t seem too unusual, even for 1990, but these folks were blind. They showed us how they set up passwords, wrote documents, and several other things (no Internet access at the time, so that was right out). I thought it was kind of interesting, but I admit that I never really gave it much of a thought after that. I don’t really want that to sound insensitive, I know people personally who need some kind of accessibility to do anything with their computer, but I tend to have an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ issue and don’t really give it much consideration.

However, that changed for me a bit a few months ago, when the place I work for hired a blind intern. Most workplaces are required to make reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities, and one of the first things that I did was to connect this person’s laptop to our wireless network, by putting in our top-secret password. When I sat down at his laptop to do that, I wasn’t expecting to hear his screen reader reading every bit of text on the screen at a dizzying pace, including the text that I was putting into the password box (see here). I was briefly intrigued by it, since I had never had direct experience with a screen reader before. The intern turned out to be pretty self-sufficient, so I didn’t really have much to do with his computer after that, and, again, I kind of put the experience to the back of my head.

Until I started using a text-based browser more to help me tear through my newsfeeds more quickly. I then started remembering back on those experiences, and how computers and the Internet are wonderful tools, if you’re in possession of the full compliment of senses. Heck, even if you’re missing one or more senses, you can pretty easily get a lot of utility out of the Internet and the absolutely enormous wealth of information out there. Unless, one of those senses you’re missing is sight. The World Wide Web is made better by contributions from everyone, even people I don’t agree with (maybe even especially from people I don’t agree with), but it has evolved into a highly visual medium. For a number of people, that means that there’s a lot of content on the Internet (which is becoming a dominant form of information interchange) that is tough or impossible for them to get to.

This is kind of a problem, because we’re cramming so much functionality into your web browser that web apps and web pages are kind of replacing traditional desktop programs for a lot of things (for better or worse). And that means that if you’re one of the six million or so people in the US with some kind of visual impairment, you may have a tough time getting to the content.

This presents kind of a problem for web designers. Several of the web designers I know like to use the latest technologies to make their pages visually striking, or dynamic in some way, which is fine. Great, even. They want to show off their artistic and designer chops, and that’s something that I can appreciate. However, when you get down to the crux of the matter, web pages are all about the content. Content that attracts clicks and drives that ad-revenue. So, why would you ever want to put your content in a place where someone couldn’t get at it? There are a couple of reasons that I see mentioned. Mostly that designing websites for accessibility is hard, and that designers can’t design new whiz-bang sites using new technologies if they’re being held back by having to use a text-based browser to check for screen reader support.

Those are valid concerns, but I have two suggestions for anyone who really wants to make their content available to the widest possible audience:

1. If you really want to know what your web page looks like to a screen reader, download, install, and try to use an actual screen reader instead of trying to fake it by doing a spot-check in Lynx or something similar
2. Check out the W3’s page on graceful degradation, and embrace it. This may come as a shock, but sometimes computers don’t work like we want them to. Links fail, elements don’t load, and your content is stranded, hiding behind some bit of javascript to load that may or may not be coming. Heck, some people even turn off fancy stuff like scripting and cookies for all kinds of reasons, and if your page doesn’t load properly, they may never come back

Now, if you stuck around this long, you might be asking yourself, “what does this have to do with video games?”. A lot, actually. Even though visually-impaired people don’t really play video games. Oh, wait, they totally do.

Most video games have a huge visual component, there’s no arguing about that. So, a lot of video game “news” sites will fill up their firehose of content with pictures, videos, and the like (besides, a ‘news story’ about a screen shot, is not news). Those can’t really be conveyed in a text-browser or a screen reader, so we’ll discount the posts that are just a screen shot or a video clip or a couple of lame reaction gif images. But the other posts. The ones with the letters and numbers. The thing that most of us are interested in: the text. Those are the ones that I’m mostly interested in. That’s what, if nothing else on the page loads, I should still be able to see. If your page can’t manage that, then I may not come back, and if I do, I probably won’t disable my ad-blocker.

Really, instead of focusing on the fact that you’re building a feature (accessibility) into your site that only a few people have a need for, instead, I would like to see more sites make their content available to anyone who wants to consume it, whether it’s people who have an accessibility issue, or if it’s just a whack job like me who decided to browse with everything but text turned off. Because, hey, we’re all in this thing together.

Some time ago (last month, in fact) I mentioned about checking out an old technology that doesn’t see much use these days: Gopher. That was a fun history lesson, and I like that there is still content regularly being put into Gopherspace daily (although, clearly not in any kind of volume compared to its heyday). While I was researching how I could access Gopherspace, I came across one of the browsers that I used to use regularly, Lynx, still has Gopher support.

Using Lynx to browse the Crummysocks blog mirror via the Obsolete Cartridge Technology Gopher Hole

This was a pleasant surprise. I know a lot of people use Lynx or another text browser as little more than a curiosity. They fire it up and look at the odd page or two, or maybe they only use it when they’ve screwed up their video driver and need to download a fresh copy. I admit, those are the main two uses I’ve had for Lynx since I got broadband Internet.

Prior to that, and, indeed, prior to even the blazing speed of 56K modems, my first experiences on the Internet were with something much slower. Slow enough that browsing to practically any page on the Internet took several minutes at best. You had to really want to see that content. But, my Internet access account came with something that very few of my Internet access accounts since have had: a shell account.

The shell account was pretty great. I could connect to my service provider with my modem, which was slow when downloading graphics, sounds, and movie clips, but more than speedy enough to download (you guessed it) plain text faster than I could read it. My ISP also had installed on their server Pine that I could use to check my email and Lynx that I could use to connect to the World Wide Web. And, since this server was connected to my service provider’s internet connection, I could download web pages and get to the important stuff, the content, faster than ever.

Sure, I didn’t have those fancy graphics and such, but that was a small price to pay to be able to consume information much more quickly than I could before. But, technology marched on, and connections eventually got faster. Fast enough that visiting a page that maybe took three or four minutes to load now maybe only took one or two. And then less than one minute. Then less than 30 seconds. Then so quickly that they were done downloading and rendering practically before I was done pressing the button telling my browser to go there.

This was great, since I could download and read things faster than ever. But that also meant that feature creep started showing up. Big time. Since practically everyone on the Internet had faster access speeds, it is only natural that we don’t have to design pages to work for dial-up speeds any more. And that means that we can put lots of pictures and sounds and things on sites.

But why stop there? We can design our own unique interface, we can change how the browser looks and behaves, we can have actual artists design pages so that they don’t look like some weirdo with an HTML primer just slapped a few elements together and called it a webpage. We can make pages interactive, dynamic, semantec, other things, probably. And, we don’t have to be constrained by image size or color depth, we can generate rich multimedia experiences for each and every one of our viewers. It’s exciting!

And all of those things are exciting, and can be useful. But, as the kids say, at the end of the day, most of the time, what I’m looking for on the Internet is text. Text to read, process, and understand so that I can learn something, and a lot of times those extra things are either get in the way or are just distracting me from my main goal: to read, process, and understand content so that I can learn something.

When I rediscovered Lynx and found that it not only had Gopher support, but that it was still actively maintained and developed, I thought that it might be fun to try and make Lynx my main browser. Or, at least, a browser that I use more often than ‘almost never’. To do that, I faced a couple of challenges.

Challenge 1: My RSS Reader

Up until very recently, I never did much with RSS readers. I figured if I wanted to see what a site was doing, I would just, you know, go to that site occasionally. But, when Google Reader shut down, several of my friends lamented its passing, and that got me thinking I should maybe give this RSS thing a try. So, I downloaded a copy of Tiny Tiny RSS, which appears to be a good product with a jackass for a project manager. So, I’ve been meaning to move away from TTRSS as a newsreader. I figured, if Lynx, a text-based web browser, is still under active development, surely there are other command line utilities out there that might be able to do something as simple as reading a newsfeed right?

Right.

The thing I chose was something called Newsbeuter. Newsbeuter is a reader that is stupidly easy to set up and configure, has lots of options, can automatically refresh feeds at whatever interval I want, and it looks like this:

Using Newsbeuter to check out some Steam sale or other

Now, isn’t that beautiful?

I have all of the relevant information that I need in an easily digestible form. There are lots of keyboard shortcuts (too many to go into here), so if I want to open the article, I can hit ‘o’ and it opens in my current web browser (Lynx, natch), if I want to go to my next unread article, I just hit ‘n’, if I want to mail the article to someone, I can just… er… hm.

Challenge 2: My email client

For a while, I’ve been using Gmail hosting for most of my email needs, it’s good, but if you try to do much with your email from a text-based browser, it may not work well, especially if you have two-factor authentication turned on (and I hope that you do). Also, Pine was discontinued quite some time ago, so that’s not really an option, either.

Enter Mutt.

Mutt is a capable email client that has so many features that I’d have a hard time listing them all here (so I won’t). And, with a little fiddling, can even be made to talk to gmail.

How lovely.

Putting it all together.

So now I have a text-based web browser, a text-based email reader, and a text-based RSS reader. All I needed to do was to install OpenSSH on my server, configure a couple of ports on my router, download a program to connect with. It works great, but starting and stopping programs is kind of a pain, especially if I want to pop over to read some email and then pop right back to my RSS reader, or if I want to open up a website that’s not in one of my RSS feeds to look something up.

That’s where GNU Screen comes in. GNU Screen lets me have multiple ‘windows’ open at once, lets me switch between them with a keystroke, and lets me detach my session so I can reconnect back to it later. It’s perfect for this kind of application.

I’ve been using this set up for about two weeks, and it’s working well for me. I’ve hit a few snags, mostly having to do with accessibility, which we’ll go over next time, but, over all, this setup works better for me. I can quickly tear through my newsreader to find things that are relevant to my interests. I can drill down to the meat of the articles I want to read and get out without getting distracted by all of the window dressing (sorry web designers). I don’t get pulled into any terrible and pointless comment battles unless I really want to (I have to be interested enough in the story to open it in a web browser that supports Javascript, I can’t just keep scrolling until I accidentally end up in Commentland(tm)). And, perhaps best of all, I don’t have to worry about installing an ad-blocker and being called a thief because I won’t see the ads anyway (unless they’re text-based, sorry advertisers), and most of the tracking pixels aren’t even fetched, so it’s harder to track what I’m doing on the Internet.

Really, the biggest downside is that a lot of websites aren’t built with accessibility in mind, which turns out to be kind of an annoyance to me, but turns into a larger problem when you consider people who have conditions or circumstances that require accessible websites, and not just nutjobs like me who do things in weird ways. This is a problem that we’ll delve into next time.