This is a personal story I hope will give web designers and user interface experts some food for thought: my experience with reading digital screens with eyesight degraded by cataract. There may be more users with suboptimal vision than usually thought.

I always preferred the light theme and never figured what's the fuss with the dark theme. Until cataract came.

A 16 color palette for dichromats and trichromats

Ametameric is as a system palette that provides the standard CGA/ANSI colors accomodating various forms of human color blindness/color vision deficiencies. 16 colors (including white, black and two grays) that all provide sufficient contrast for all common types of color vision. When working as intended, TUIs made to work well with the system colors (rather than 256/true color) should become accesible for color vision deficient users without further tweaks needed.

Commercial projects are often more accessible, and relying people get trapped.

Eyeroll is a WebExtension for Firefox that let's you scroll webpages by blinking your eyes. Close your right eye to scroll down, and your left eye to scroll up. It's great for scrolling chords without leaving your instrument, or reading the news while you're brushing your teeth! Eyeroll works 100% on your device and works on Firefox for Android too.

A beautiful life in a remote cabin in a forest is a luxury, not available to everyone. We can't just return to the past.

Wheelchairs are beautiful, a marvel of technology. They are mech suits, cybernetic enhancements, they are machines that we join with in a nourishing symbiotic relationship. They are not prisons; wheelchairs are liberation. They are freedom, they are a walk in the park, they are the sunlight on my face after years in dark tunnels.

A short text zine.

В лифте написано УП вместо ВВЕРХ.

Edbrowse, a text based editor browser.

A tool that brings attention and understanding to how color contrast can affect people with different visual impairments.

Command Line Programs for the Blind

Karl Dahlke on blind a11y. Note that Karl is the creator of edbrowse.

Numen is Free Software voice control that gives people with strain or limited
use of their hands full control of their Linux machine. The philosophy is
to keep it simple with phrases that work universally.

From a discussion of how the newest version of the first wiki sucks. The version does suck, by the way.

I am blind. I do rely on accessibility to interact with a computer. Yes, you could accuse me of deliberately avoiding the modern web, but I have my reasons. Primary reason is performance. Even though I feel like you are talking down to me from a pretty high horse, I still don't wish for you to ever experience how sluggish it feels trying to use the "modern web" with a screen reader on something like Windows. Don't even make me start about the hellhole that is Linux GUI accessibility. It was a nice ride once, before GNOME 3 and the elimination of CORBA killed most of the good work done by good people. Fact is, I am too used to a system which reacts promptly when I press a key to be able to switch to a modern browser by default. That would kill all my productivity. Yes, its a trade, but for now, having no JS engine by default is still way better then the alternatives.

Have a nice day, and enjoy your eye-sight.