Shades of Accessibility

Posted by Andrew Leibs Dec 2, 2008

I remember opening my large-print Scrabble set and staring blankly at a white board, its scoring squares marked in small black letters.

The board on the box showed the familiar color pattern of the scoring squares, the bold blues and reds, robin’s eggs and pastel pinks—crucial shapers of each game’s strategy and mood.

I was looking forward to the set. Recent games using the Chiclet-sized tiles of a friend’s travel version put me at a disadvantage. But the thought of using this board, purchased from a supplier of products for the blind, was deflating. I spun it on its lazy susan and thought, “Scrabble as seen by dogs.”

The design made sense: high-contrast representations can be more discernable to persons with low vision. I liked the white tiles’ large black letters.

But this attempt at accessibility left me cold, and actually made playing more difficult. Identifying colors is far easier for me than leaning in to read small letters, and far more motivating.

The challenge of perceiving the extent of low vision is the imagination’s tendency to remove aspects from normal vision, e.g. a TV news story that blurs the camera to portray vision loss.

Color is another component easily removed. Color blindness is often presumed. On a cross-country bike trek, one participant told another, “Andrew’s riding with us because he can’t distinguish streetlights.” It reminded me of the eye specialist’s shock when I quickly traced the numbers camouflaged on the pages of a color-blindness test.

Most irksome are extrapolations tossed off as fact, as this note in Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses: “Because albinos lack a dark layer of cells behind the retina, more light travels around inside their eyes and colors often seem to them quieter and more diluted.”

Than what? Normal vision? And how is it quantified?

It’s not. It’s simply supposed. And it’s suppositions such as this that mislead well-meaning manufacturers into needless product adaptations, like that sterile grid of a Scrabble board, used once.