 Calimera. Do you know what that means? Good morning. So how is everybody? Am I getting too close? Okay. I'm just getting used to things. Okay. I'm just trying to figure out what I want to do here. Okay. I guess you can tell my talk is going to be on low vision and really me and how I use it to help me teach people WordPress. So let's get started. I guess I can do that. Yeah. I'm going to stand back here. I'm just trying to figure out what's the best place for me to see all this stuff. And it's going to be right over here. So that's me. My name is Bud Krause. I live in New Jersey, United States. And as you can see, I do a few things with WordPress. These days I do a lot of WordPress content creation for WordPress businesses. I'm also an instructor and a reluctant website developer. So only if I have to will I get involved in that. And let's get something out of the way real quick. And that is today's talk is not going to be about these things. Okay. This is not like a technical talk on accessibility. It's not that I don't know about these things. I'm not an expert. I do know about these things. But let other people talk about those things. So if you're wondering how come I'm not talking about these things, now you know. All right. We're going to start off with doing an interactive... Can everybody hear me okay? Because I sound kind of strange up here. Anyway, we're going to do an interactive survey. I call it the IQ survey. And there are four questions. And you should have gotten or you can get access to the webpage on your cell phone because I have a QR code that should be circulating. And I hope you'll take it. So it's only four questions. It's not difficult. Well, it's not very long anyway. And if you don't have the QR code, then you can just go to joyofwp.com. Now, I'm going to take off my coat because it is hot up here. And we're good on my voice. We can hear. Okay. Thank you. All right. So I'll give you a second or two to take the survey. And it's funny to do a talk without a podium. I'm not used to that. I'm looking around. Where's the podium? Okay. So I'm going to ask my wife, where's my wife? There she is, Arlene. She's going to read the results of the survey. And because it's hard for me sometimes to read these things, being a person with low vision. And have people, have they responded, Arlene? No. You want to refresh the browser maybe? A few. Okay. We'll give you another minute or two. You know, they asked me to do something interactive. I'm thinking like, what can you do that's interactive for my kind of talk? And I thought, well, let's just do a survey. So we have a survey and we'll wait two more. We get some more results. And then, okay. So question number one. Now, by the way, this is my wife. This is her first word camp ever. Okay. And you can only, you can only go downhill from here, right? I mean, when you're a Mount Olympus, the rest is, you know, it doesn't get any bigger than this. So Arlene, I don't know. Somebody will help you turn it on, I guess. Here we go. And she's going to read the results. And I'll give you a little color commentary. Some of the questions were a little tricky. And I had a hard time figuring out exactly how to work this without making them like ridiculously tricky because the only thing to do for a person with low vision is to make text larger. Now it's working. Okay. So the results, and this is, I will tell you, 26 of you responded. 4% said true and 96% said false. Yeah. The answer is false. Now the trick of the question was only. Okay. So of course there are other things to do besides make text larger, but the really sort of nuanced approach to this is take my case, and I'll talk a little bit more about my situation in a minute, but making text larger does not necessarily make it easier for me to see. In fact, in some instances it makes it harder for me to see. So it's counterintuitive. You know, you think, well, we'll make the text larger, but we'll be able to see it not necessarily. All right. Number two. Which of the following present difficulties for people with low vision? Stairways, 67%. Recognizing faces, 90%. Bumping into objects, 80%. Bright sunlight, 63%. And the answer is really all of these things can be. Now when you talk about vision loss, it's very idiosyncratic and even within specific types of conditions, glaucoma, macular degeneration, cataracts, it's all over the map. But those are some of the very big things that almost, you know, generally people like me are going to have difficulties with. Number three. Eyeglasses are used to correct vision to 2020. 23% true, 77% false. You guys had said true, you didn't get it right. So in my case, I'm wearing glasses, obviously, but they cannot correct my eyes to 2020. So it's just not possible. It makes things easier for me to see long distance, but I'm legally blind with or without my glasses. So it's just not going to... It would be nice if all we had to do is prescribe glasses and we could correct everybody to 2020, but that's just not the case. Number four. If you lose vision, does your sense of smell get better? 33% yes, 67% no. Yeah, and I think this is another one of these, well, it depends who you talk to. In my case, smell, I don't think so, but what did get better over time was my sense of touch. Touch got exquisitely better so that... I started noticing when I wanted to see something, what I really wanted is you to put something in my hand so I could feel it and with tactile ability, I could sort of get the sense of what it looked like. So thank you, Arlene. Let's have a round of applause for the great Arlene and good luck at your next word camp, my dear. So all right, so let's go on and... Let me go back here so I can see this a little better. All right, so I have age-related macular degeneration and I'm gonna give you a little warning before you see this because this is not pretty. How come this isn't... Here we go. So here's what I, or people generally speaking, how they see with macular degeneration and it's a loss of central vision as you can see the center of the face or the head is gone. Now it's not necessarily exactly like this for me and others but it's gonna give you a little bit of an idea of how we see and this blind spot in the middle is called the scatoma. So it is in the center. You can see the peripheral area is pretty big. It's not necessarily that well defined as you see it. It can be little not as, you know, sharply defined and maybe not as dark either as what you just saw. It can be though. All right, how do you... How is age-related macular degeneration detected or diagnosed? So they use something called the Amseller grid. This has been around forever and if you don't have the problem, you'll see a perfectly, you know, perfect lines. No waviness. Everything in nice square boxes. You're doing good. And especially that center point. If you don't see that center point, you really have some problems and if you do have macular degeneration, the first look will be something like that. So you'll see that one of the quadrants in one eye is, well, the lines are really wavy. That's not a good sign and it's not necessarily that pronounced. It can be just maybe a couple of those boxes instead of how big you see it there. And then as things get a little worse, maybe it might look like something like this. Now, a little, a few factoids about AMD, you know, age-related macular degeneration and it can tell it's a little hard for me to see some of this stuff, so I have to do a little memory here. But anyway, there are two types. There's the wet type and the dry type. The dry type is more common. About 90% of all people who have this have the dry. And it's slower progressing. There's no internal bleeding inside of the macula in the back of your eye where your retina is. 10% have the really dreaded wet type, which is, of course, my type. I have to have the wet type. And what happens is that blood vessels grow and leak into the macula, which is really part of the retina or back of the retina. And then what happens is you lose vision very rapidly. So, again, the dry is slower. The wet is a little more dangerous and more difficult and you get wavy lines. And really, the hallmark really is rapid loss of vision. Some people who have dry don't even know that they have it. If you have the wet form, you're going to know real quick. In any event, it's irreversible. It's not curable, it's irreversible. There's been a lot of advancement over my lifetime that there are now treatments for it that didn't exist years ago that either slowed down the progression of the disease or... But they don't cure the problem. They manage the condition a lot better. And, yeah, the prevalence, 20 million in the United States have the condition 200 million around the world and by 2040, 288 million. It is the leading cause of blindness. I know it's worldwide, but I don't know if that's true. But in the United States, for sure, it's the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. And as you might have, you might probably know somebody who has the condition. You really don't know that they even have this until you realize they can't see me, they can't read, they can't drive. But other than that, they look like a normal person. And the other thing here, risk factors, age, obviously, is one. In age-related macular degeneration, it tends to happen more often in women, carcassian, and obesity and smoking, and then genetics, thanks mom. I inherited it from her, and she had it from her father, too. But that was 60, 70 years ago now, and they didn't even know really what the name was of this. Okay, let me go back over here, sorry. And so I do see things in a different way. Literally and figuratively. And here are some of the big issues that I face, and I'll just go over some of this real quickly. I do have a real problem with depth of field, and if you see me, you'll notice when I walk down stairs, I'm holding onto a railing, because I can't tell where the step ends, and I just might just totally fall off. So I have to be really careful with that. So everything's sort of flat to me. And color blindness, definitely an issue. I don't drive anymore, but when I used to drive, I couldn't tell red and green lights. I can only tell the positions of red and green where they were. Contrast is a very, very important matter to me. I'll get into this in a second when I do a little demo. And what I call the prism effect. So I have two eyes that don't function together, and what that results in is sort of a split of my vision. In normal vision, the two eyes function as if you just have one eye. If you have a condition like I do, you have two separate visions going on. Now also, well, how do I do all this? How do I do what I do? And there are really three different things that I do. I use zoom, I use audio, and then touch. These are all three very important factors in my life. And touch I also mean, well, what do you mean when you use a screen? How do you use touch? It's really more like when I use a mouse, I know how far I can move something. It's distance, and so I call that touch. And that's an important... So when somebody changes the UI of a system that I've been using for years, I say, oh, you know, I have to now rearrange how everything works in my head. Now, I do have this little demonstration. So let me see if this will work. I don't know how this will work. Help! That is, I have a movie here, a video presentation, and I don't know what button to press. I should have asked that. So, can anybody help me from WordCamp? Or is it starting? Yeah. I have audio here. Hello. And I'm going to take you through some of the highlights and the key settings that I use for my computer. Now keep in mind, everybody with some kind of impairment or disability will be using different settings. This is very idiosyncratic just for me. And that's the key is that there are plenty of choices that are built into the operating system for a user to have at their disposal. And here are mine. Welcome to my world of settings and preference changes. Now, I use Ventura on a Mac OS. It's the most recent version of Mac. And I'm going to take you through some of the highlights and the key settings that I use for my computer. Now keep in mind, everybody with some kind of impairment or disability will be using different settings. This is very idiosyncratic just for me. And that's the key is that there are plenty of choices that are built into the operating system for a user to have at their disposal. And here are mine. So, the first thing I'm going to show you is display right over here. And this is the display driver. I use a pretty low resolution 1280 pixels by 720 pixels. And if I wanted to change the display, I would just click on that. You can see the Mac OS has quite a few different display drivers, which is good. Now, bad thing is, I believe it's with this operating system, they no longer make it easy for you to change the brightness of your screen. If I go over here, you'll see the display brightness. You can't do it through the operating system anymore. You have to do it through the monitor itself. I don't like it. Now, if I was using a Mac monitor, no problem. But what Apple is saying is we no longer give you the ability to change the brightness because there are so many different monitors out there. Do it through your monitor settings, which I'm not going to show you, but that's exactly what I did. Now also, we have accessibility settings. I think some of these settings are so important. They shouldn't even put it into accessibility. They just put it into all these other options over here. That's just my editorial comment. And I don't use everything. So, for example, I don't use voiceover or a way of listening to actions and functions taking place on the computer. No, I don't use that. I certainly use Zoom. And so the way I have this set is when I press the command key and I scroll like this with my mouse, I can see this much better. I can really zoom in. And sometimes I go crazy and zoom all the way in. And you get this effect of going back and forth a lot, but at least I get the job done. Also, there is a display area in accessibility. And this is different than the display driver for the monitor. And let's just take a look over here. I'm going to actually zoom in and show you how I do this. If I wanted to invert the colors. Now, a lot of people like this. It's what I call the ultimate in dark mode. But I don't. But many people, as I've said, who have vision impairments would definitely use this reverse mode. Let's skip down a little bit over here and look at increased contrast. Well, I definitely want high contrast because it just makes things easier. If I were to turn this off, yeah, you can see. It makes it hard for me to see. So I'm going with that. Reduce transfer. Let's go down to over here. And I have display contrast. Well, very important. Again, contrast is a big deal. You can see it gets really washed out, at least for me. I pushed it way up over here. Now it's funny. They call this normal, huh? So if I went all the way out to here, let's see what we have. Well, that's a little bit too hard for me to see. So it's just easier if I move it back to right about where it was like this. That's fine. If I scroll down a little bit more, the pointer, that is this over here, I can adjust that too. And you can see I've pushed it all the way up to the largest possible size. Now I can change that, of course, to make it smaller. It really makes it hard for me to find where the pointer is. And I just found out a little bit ago that you can change the color of the pointer. That's interesting. Now I don't use this color filters option over here, so I'm going to bypass that. Let's go over here and look at spoken content. I'm going to click on that over here. Now this one I use all the time. So in addition to zooming, the other way that I understand content is to use this control right over here. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to move this out over here. And I've got this text document over here that I'm writing for a post on my website about being chosen to speak at WordCamp Europe. Now let me just show you this right over here. You can listen to this. And I'm going to select these three paragraphs. And by the way, if you haven't noticed, the font is much bigger than it would normally be. And it makes it easier for me to see. And what I'll do is just press Command and B. A couple of years ago, I was watching a live stream from Harris. It was WordCamp Europe 2017. Or maybe it was WordCamp 2018 from Belgrade. Or maybe WCEU coming from Berlin. Looking back, it doesn't really matter. All I thought was wouldn't it be cool to go to WordCamp Europe one day? Now when I do that, you can see the visual control goes away. So I can't pause it anymore. And it just stops, which is a little bit inconvenient. Sometimes I wish there were a pause operation available. It's either just start or stop. Now you might be wondering, how do I even understand what I just heard? And yes, over time, I've gotten adjusted and used to hearing speech at a much faster rate than most people can understand. This also has the interesting ability to do the following. Let's just zoom in over here. I sort of use a combination of zooming and text to speech. So we've got this option over here. Oh yes, I can change the person that's speaking. But I've been with Samantha so long, I just stay with her. And for the speech rate, you can see I can change it to tortoise or hare, which is what these little symbols are, I guess. Now down over here, let me scroll, let me push this out a little bit because even my wife always says it's too close, too big, which makes it hard for her to see. Anyway, I'm going to go over here, let's see. Speaking announcements, fine. This is the one I want to show you. I put this on over here. So this is very interesting. So I don't use this, as you can tell. Speak announcements. So whatever. So that's very good. Now you might be wondering, well, what about like third-party applications will it work? I can't tell you that. It probably does, but it's certainly going to work for all Apple-based products. Now I'm going to turn this off. Okay. I'll show you one other option here, too. Again, this is not what I used, but just to give you a little touch of something that you probably don't know much about is... Okay, now what about if I wanted to hear the whole thing? I'm just going to highlight it like so. All right, not bad. And that's a pretty good overview of the things that I use. Now you know I don't use dictation and there's a whole lot of other things that I could use, but as I'm a very big proponent of only using the technology that you really need. And what do these technologies do? They provide alternatives for a person like me so that I can access and understand information in a way that I would not otherwise have been able to. Okay, and just a couple of little notes from the presentation that I just noticed while I was doing this. One is you didn't see the... There was a demo of changing it to an inverse or reverse black and white and it didn't work because of the way the software works. Another thing, too, is that you can pause. There's a little visual bar that you can click pause while the voiceover is working. But I think you get an idea. It should anyway. The takeaway is that I use technology specifically for my own needs and everybody will do this a little bit differently. And one of the really great things, too, is a lot of things that are built in that we call accessible. They're good for everybody. Like, if I wasn't visually impaired, I would like to know that I would be able to hear the computer talk to me so that while it's talking to me, I could do other things, which I do all the time. Okay, and let's go on. So one of the ways... Oops, I don't want to go... Yeah, so how do I do the things that I do and what have I learned? Well, patterns is really important to me. So I don't necessarily see things the way you do, but if I recognize and see shapes and patterns, that will make it easier for me to understand content and to learn and to teach. And for example, these are easy patterns, right? This is code, obviously. This is HTML, and it's just a recognizable pattern. So it was easy for me to learn. Here's CSS. Again, a specific type of pattern that was reliable. It was always in a certain format. It's sort of easy to follow. Then we get to JavaScript and not so easy. More free form, more unpredictable, more varied than CSS and HTML. Harder for me to learn, because the pattern isn't there. At least the way I think of its patterns. Okay, and what about... I'm just... I can't remember. Sorry, what about teaching WordPress? Yes, that's an important thing here. So I do teach WordPress. I've been teaching for years in New York City and online, mostly online these days. So the first thing is I can't wing it. So even though you think maybe I'm winging it today, I'm not winging this. I have to prepare for everything that I do. I can't go into a classroom and not know exactly what I'm going to teach, where I'm going to go with this, what I'm going to show people, the order I'm going to do it, which is good because I'm prepared. I don't go in there saying, gee, I'll just make it up as I go along. It's not... I can't do it that way. So preparation is like number one, not just in teaching, but just like everything I do, I need to know in advance where I'm going. And sometimes that requires practice. When I do videos, I need to know everything before I do it because I can't read a script. Anyway, the next thing is I define everything. This is like one of the principles of accessibility, really, is define or describe everything so that people will understand what you're doing. When I teach, I'll describe and define what are themes, what are plugins, what's WordPress core, what's everything about the WordPress world and ecosystem. I like to define and describe things in detail so that people will understand. And I think that makes it for a better learning experience. And then grouping content is also a standard or a practice of accessibility, like navigation is grouping and content can be grouping. Grouping is a very important aspect of accessibility and I've learned that through my own experience of being visually impaired about grouping things and making that easy, helping me be better at teaching. And then one of the last things is you have to have patience, not just in teaching, but with yourself. And I've learned that it takes me a little bit longer to learn or to do something and trying to get frustrated, because you do get frustrated, but try just to have some patience with yourself as you try to get over the hurdle of learning something. And with students, I've always been really patient. I'm not always with patient with everybody, but with students that are special to me and clients, try to be patient. I think it's one of the things I do. And finally, I do get back with a little help from my friends. These are students, clients, but if I'm in class and I'll say, hey, I can't see something, can you help me read this or whatever, or like my wife did something reading the survey, I'm not afraid to ask anymore. When I first was diagnosed, and I would never ask for any help, it would be like, forget it. And today, why not? So I look at low vision sort of as my special filter, my own app on how I look at the world literally and figuratively. And in some ways, it gives me, I know this kind of sounds strange, but it's sort of a blessing in a way, because it's taken me to places in doing things that I probably wouldn't have had an opportunity to do. Oh yes, this is, I don't just teach WordPress. I also teach my little grand boy. I will eventually, when he gets older, I think how to play guitar. And with that, let me say thank you. And that's it. So yeah, but wait, there's more. So there's always more. So three reasons why being visually impaired really is not as bad as you think. First, you get to speak at WordCamp Europe, which I think is pretty good. So I like that one. Number two, you don't see junk food in the grocery store. So if you don't see it, you're not as apt to buy junk food in the grocery store. And one of my favorites, you don't see people getting old, and especially yourself. So that's really good. Oh, I should say there's a fourth that I didn't put up there, which is you can drink as much alcohol at a party as you want. You don't have to worry, because you're not going to be driving. All right. So thank you. So please ask some questions because we have some time. So go ahead. You can ask me like whatever you want about WordPress teaching, vision impairment. Tell me about your mother who has macular degeneration. When did you first get macular degeneration? Why is it such a hard word to say, you know, anything you want? Do we have any questions? Yes. Go. Yes, hello. Hello, hello. Yes, I would like to ask you what would we do as WordPress developers to make websites better for you to see and understand? Okay. Great question. And I have an answer for you. Okay. The key in this, okay, not just for web development and operating system is flexibility, is alternatives, okay, and not to lock people into no choices. Okay. Case in point. You go to a website. It's playing a video. There's no way to stop it. There's no way to rewind it. There's no way to, no, give people alternatives. Give them flexibility because everybody has different needs, different ways of consuming information. So, you know, that is such an important thing. Now, one other thing I have to say in general, the web has become, I think, a more accessible world. Not just because of the web. It's operating systems and technology and a whole series of factors that, you know, I'm talking about. But if you're asking me, if I'm a developer, what's the first thing that I really give, choices, don't, hard code us into a few things and we can't make any changes. Okay. And the other thing is, and it's not really developer, but it's, you know, the browser, let's use, you know, the web and browsers are a user-centric world. And but a lot of people don't know that, you know, that I can change the font. I can change the second. In other words, it's not really, it's an education process for the public to understand that they can change their environment of how they consume content. But people just don't know that because they don't know that they can do that with their browsers. That's a really good question. I hope that helped answer. Sure. Anybody else? Oh, come on. Going once, going twice. Oh, hello, hello. Yes. I should say hi. That woke me up. I guess, you know, that I am on your right side. Yeah. By the way, if I, if I, even if I didn't have a vision and problem, these lights make it really hard to see. Yeah. I have one question regarding, regarding website design. What is the most frustrating thing regarding the design across the web? I'm going to change your question just a little bit. What's the most frustrating thing I have getting access to information using a mobile phone? Because so much of our information is like, I'm, you know, I'm one of them. I need to use a mobile phone too. And I find that I use an iPhone and the way the content is created a lot of times I can't, I use a voiceover and I can't, once I have that voiceover turned on, I can't go, I can't use my fingers to scroll down the page. It just stuck. And I have to turn the voiceover off, scroll, turn the voiceover on, listen to it and then turn it off and scroll. So it's a real laborious and frustrating problem. And I, you know, it, it, it, this is a matter of like what websites, you know, it depends what applications it depends, but it is not as smooth as consuming information on the web and using a desktop. So, but just the, I think the web itself, desktop web, has become much more accessible to my way of thinking. Yeah, sure. And, oh, another one. I should say, you got to come up here and say, you got to say your name, where you're from. So what's your name and where are you from? Hi, I'm Alex. I'm from Germany. My question is when you're looking at content in a way that you're trying to get an information out of it, do you care about the layout and looks at all or would you prefer having just a plain text document? Great question. And I was having a little chat with someone before the talk and web accessible design, there shouldn't be, you know, I don't even like these terms accessible and not, you know, it's sort of so artificial, sort of the way I think, but there is no reason why accessible sites should not be visually appealing sites. I want visually appealing sites. You know, maybe 20 years ago, if you go really back in time, like 25 years ago, we talked about making a separate site just for the blind and visually impaired. Of course, we don't have to do that anymore for lots of reasons and we, you know, but I want, there's no reason why they should not be visually appealing. So now if a user knows how to use their browser, they know they can turn off images, they can do all kinds of things. I can make, you know, websites look very different than what the designer intended them to look like because, remember, it's a user centric medium. It's not a designer centric medium. And if designers understand that, then I think they're going to be way ahead of, you know, others. So I hope that helped. Yeah. And come on, somebody. We have anybody? Anybody on the left? There's nobody on the left. Anybody on the right? Well, with that, I'm probably out of time. Yeah. Okay. So thank you all. And I want to say one other thing too, just in closing. The fact that I am here is, well, I'll just tell you real quick. I never expected in a million years to be speaking at WordCamp Europe, it was always my dream just to come here. And really, I want to, you know, I would be home in the United States streaming WordCamp Europe and thinking like, God, wouldn't that be cool to come to WordCamp Europe? The fact that I'm talking, come on now. That's like, I still can't believe this happened. So I want to thank the organizers, the sponsors, and all you wonderful people for coming because it really means it will, it's something I'll remember forever, at least for the rest of my life. So thanks again.