How working with a blind client revealed invisible accessibility gaps

It is revealing how people with disabilities are treated, just to walk on sidewalk as a deaf person. Most cyclicts assume they have a priority on sidewalks, and will ring bell to enforce it. If you do not jump out of their way in 2 seconds, you get rammed.

Cyclists know I can not hear them (I am wearing big noise cancelling headphones). Yet they still insist on their imaginary priority on sidewalks. I was forced to remove my noise cancelling headphones, just to hear their slurs!

Cyclists on bike have no priority, they are not allowed to cycle on sidewalks! They should be using roads! I am allowed to wear my noise cancelling headphones on sidewalk! I looked it up!

> Where I had control, I made changes. Unnecessary labels removed. Accurate alt text added — not filed-in-for-compliance alt text, actually descriptive alt text. The heading structure was cleaned up where I could reach it. For this project's SharePoint tracking page, I rerouted entirely: instead of asking users to fight through the noise, the system now sends an email update at every stage of the approval.

seems to be the only bit of text that actually details anything that was done. I would liked to have read about the actual changes and steps taken to improve accessibility instead of some kind of low key rant about MS

> revealed invisible

Interesting that the language of sight is so prevalent that it appears in this very title twice.

Echoing other comments, this would be a stronger article if it went into more specifics, but the AI voice precludes that meaningfully.

While the content was interesting, the AI-slop-stench was repelling.

Talking about AI (sorry!), perhaps an AI assisted screen reader could remove repetitive elements (it appends "(read only)" to every. single. field.) in a smart fashion? Does this already exist?

We're seeing AI being used to improve a11y in quite a few places: (Live) transcripts for video conferences, image to text (VQA, visual question answering) etc.

> It took 18 hours of work.

So a couple of days plus a few hours. Seems reasonable.