Touchscreens and visual impairment

Several years ago, accessibility discussions were full of talk about Braille displays, those clever little devices with pins rising and falling beneath your fingertips, turning the digital world into something you could actually touch.

Then the touchscreen arrived and conquered everything. Suddenly our phones, tablets and music players became smooth slabs of glass. No buttons. No tactile landmarks. Nothing to tell your fingers where the hell they were. From an accessibility point of view, this seemed like progress in much the same way that removing all the stairs from a building and replacing them with climbing ropes might be considered architectural innovation.

I assumed devices like the iPhone would be a disaster for visually impaired users. Turns out I was wrong.

Apple built accessibility features such as VoiceOver into the iPhone, allowing the interface to describe what is beneath your finger rather than forcing you to see it. Add Siri and Dictation, and that featureless sheet of glass starts looking considerably less hostile.

There’s an interesting piece in The Atlantic, How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone, about how blind users adapted to the device and developed ways of using it that sighted users might never have imagined. The video below shows a blind man using Instagram on an iPhone:

Yes, Instagram. A service built almost entirely around photographs. There’s something wonderful about that. The touchscreen looked like it might shut visually impaired people out. Instead, with the right software behind the glass, it opened doors that the old collection of tiny plastic buttons never could. Sometimes technology manages to surprise you in a positive way.