Julia Ferraioli says if you’re already dealing with blurry vision, making something blurry bigger, isn’t necessarily going to help that much.
Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode.
Transcript
Nic
Hi, I’m Nic Steenhout. And you’re listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where people with disabilities explain their impairments, and what barriers they encounter on the web. Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provides accessibility as a service. They offer testing, training, and tooling to help fix accessibility, fast. Today, I’m speaking with Julia Ferraioli. Hi, Julia, how are you?
Julia
I’m doing okay. How are you? I’m doing good.
Nic
Thanks for joining us.
Julia
Thanks for having me.
Nic
I’d like to start by asking you what is your disability or impairment?
Julia
Hmm, that is a complicated question. Because we don’t really know specifically, I do have a gap in my spine called a syrinx, which they seem to think accounts for some of my symptoms. But I also have difficulties with my vision. My eyes themselves are fine. So we think that the issue is primarily neurological. And basically I get this, I get some interesting artifacts like I will get blurry, intermittently, blurry or double vision. And then sometimes it’ll almost be like a curtain falls over my vision and everything becomes a bit darker, a bit muted. So that’s the one that probably affects my day to day at work the most.
Yeah, I’ve been searching for one for, you know, going on 10 years how it seems. Wow. Um, but because all of the the symptoms seem so unrelated. And the fact that they can’t actually tell what’s going on with my eyes through testing. It’s, it’s kind of throws doctors for a loop. To be honest. Yeah.
Nic
Wow. All right, well, what’s your biggest barrier on the web at the moment?
Julia
So I use a couple different types of assistive technology with with my work on the web. The first is plain old man magnification, right? Whether I’m on a Mac or a PC, or, or whatever, I use the system built in magnification. And, the other one that I use occasionally is text to speech, when my vision is getting really bad.
So but a couple of things make some of this difficult. The first is the fact that people don’t use high enough contrast on their websites. Hmm. Good, like light to dark gray is really in vogue right now. I’m not really sure why. But even with magnification that becomes difficult to read, because it tends to look all severely pixelated.
And if you’re already dealing with blurry vision, making something blurry bigger, isn’t necessarily going to help that much.
Um, the other issue is with not dynamic websites, but websites that have a lot of animation. Or like the the one that that really bugs me these days is when you scroll, and the website content changes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when I’m trying to really focus where my eyes are paying attention to, and what content having something on the side of my screen moving or animating in some way, shape or form makes it incredibly difficult. I miss just pure static sites, right. Yeah.
Nic
If you had one word of advice to give to designers and developers, what would that be?
Julia
I would say that go back to the basics, design simply because these these elements that people pepper in to spark engagement or interactivity don’t actually serve their purposes in the way that that they think they might see like a handy new set of animations. And they automatically go to pepper that in without really considering what it does to focus and attention.
Nic
Thank you. That that’s, I think, is a really good insight. And I look forward to, to see the reaction from from people to that because I think it’s, it’s one of these things that we have said on and off the contrast around the contrast is really important and, and moving animations and parallax and all that stuff is also so important for so many of us. So hopefully the message will get through.
Julia
Yes, parallax. That is the word that I was searching for.
Nic
Julia, thank you for participating on this soundbite and we’ll see you around on the web.
Julia
Sounds good. Thanks for having me.
Nic
And that’s it for now. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this accessibility soundbite Please support the show on https://patreon.com/steenhout