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!
(Not all cyclists do this. But the rude ones are common enough that "cyclists" have gotten this reputation.)
Accomodations are for people who need them not a shield for hyper-selfishness.
I cycle and I either don't wear any headphones or I use the open ones where I can still hear my surroundings. I assume every driver is eitehr an oblivious idiot or is out to kill me. I assume it's every pedestrian's first day on Earth because that's how it seems. The level of entitlement I see on a daily basis is insane. Runners who refuse to get out of dedicated bike lanes, people who park in dedicated bike lanes, people who get annoyed that I go onto the road when I'm allowed to, people that get annoyed that I go onto the sidewalk or road because I have to (often because the bike path is blocked), people who walk 5 abreast on a shared pedestrian bike path, etc etc etc.
But what really gets me is people who have elevated their own hyper-selfishness into some kind of virtue. "I'm going to block out all noise in a public space because that's what deaf people have to deal with" is a new one for me.
Oh and as an aside, people who are deaf often aren't completely deaf. Deafness (and blindness) is a spectrum.
GP simply pointed out cyclists are apparently super unfriendly to deaf people, inferred from the experience where GP made himself temporarily deaf.
It doesn't matter whether GP takes responsibility or not. The issue is the social phenomenon where cyclists create danger for themselves and deaf pedestrians.
> I cycle
I know it's bad to stereotype people but you're not helping it.
People act as people do regardless of their method of conveyance. A polite way of encountering a group walking where they should (and another should not ride) is to dismount the bicycle, say "excuse me" and walk through, then to remount and continue on the bike. In the case you mentioned, calling out in advance "excuse me, coming through" should just do it. If not, step up to bell ringing.
You should see what cyclists from Austin do on the Texas backroads, with their stopping in the middle of the lane at the top of a hill, doing the same on a tight curve, riding abreast... But again, people are people; they don't seem to realize road signs have a setback for a very good reason.
You're not to blame at all when a cyclist runs you down on the pavement (that they shouldn't be on). Yes, you might have heard the bell without the headphones, but they're the one acting recklessly, and they're the one responsible for ensuring that they don't harm people acting normally.
There are all sorts of situations that it's possible to anticipate, but there's no moral fault ascribed for not acting defensively against every possible form of attack.
Only motorbikes is tough because people dont like them going past them in traffic jams :/ the last bastion of decency in our traffic xD... (lets forget about people who own racing bikes they dont count)
Listening to music on a walk is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. It’s very slightly less safe for them, but they aren’t risking other people so that’s fine.
You have an affirmative responsibility to act in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risks for yourself and others.
[1]: https://naqvilaw.com/las-vegas-impaired-driving-attorney/lou...
Cyclists do stupid and dangerous things too. Believe me I am aware. I have to anticipate those too.
But, in my experience, nobody acts with more carelessness and selfishness than pedestrians. And I say that as one of them too.
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
If you decide on a GUI framework which doesn't communicate semantics to the underlying APIs properly, you have no good options. Either you rewrite your entire project in a different framework just to deliver one feature, dive deep into framework guts to fix the issue (which may be written in an entirely different language and outside your area of expertise), or do some ugly hack on top to sort-of make it work.
A lot of accessibility issues, especially historically, essentially boiled down to "developer chose the wrong approach and didn't know how to get themselves out of the situation later."
It's better now because we went from desktop frameworks drawing their own pixels on screen to web frameworks creating div soup, and div soup is much easier to fix than having pixels instead of native OS controls, but it still happens occasionally. The most recent one I personally ran into was WindScribe, who made a desktop GUI framework of their own for no good reason, and now they can't fix accessibility without a whole lot of work.
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.
Well, it appears once in "invisible", and once in "blind"... but I don't see why "blind" is a surprise when talking about someone blind.
There is no reference to sight in "reveal".
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.
So a couple of days plus a few hours. Seems reasonable.