The Blind Experience: A visual impairment simulator

[Start transcript]

AUDIO: Music starts playing.

VISUALS: RMIT University logo appears on white background and animates onto the screen. The logo and white background then swipe off the screen revealing a dark grey background with pixelated lines running across the whole screen with an image of a female's face with her eyes closed on the left side of the frame. The heading 'The Blind Experience' appears across two thirds of the screen. There is a 'start' and 'info' button below the heading. The start button has a white background, while the info button has a white border with a transparent background. There is an 'exit' button on the bottom right side of the screen with an icon of a person going through a door frame.

TEXT ON SCREEN: The Blind Experience. A visual impairment simulator. Developed by Lionel Chew with audio assistance from Keith Hibbert.

[Voiceover]

Hi, welcome to The Blind Experience. This is a visual impairment simulator that lets you experience what it's like to be visually impaired or blind, engaging with online learning material.

So, according to the World Health Organisation, 2.2 billion people globally suffer from some form of visual impairment or blindness. As you can imagine, developing accessible learning material for students has become more imperative than ever.

VISUALS: The mouse icon appears, and the user navigates to the start button and clicks on it. A new screen appears with a navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. The bar includes a home icon button, an eye icon, a slider with a range from 0% to 100% sitting at approximately 80%, a closed eye icon, two buttons labelled "not accessible" and "accessible", and an icon that has three right triangles indicating 'speed' within a headphone. The main screen has extremely low brightness and is almost greyed and blurred out.

TEXT ON SCREEN: Not accessible. Accessible.

So, with that in mind, let's get started.

When engaging with content, a person that is legally blind would actually see something closer to this.

VISUALS: The user moves the slider to approximately 50%. The brightness of the main screen increases to show a screen with blurred out text and images.

They are able to see a little bit of images. They can see a little bit of background.

VISUALS: The mouse moves away from the slider and hovers next to the 'not accessible' button and then moves across the main screen.

So, having good accessible content will really help them engage with learning material.

Also, having content that has good colour contrast will make it easier for them to identify shapes and objects as well. So, most people with vision impairment or vision loss will actually engage content using a screen reader. As you can see, this is non-accessible learning material.

VISUALS: The mouse hovers over the blurred header bar and the images on the right side of the screen.

So, for example, this area here, there is no voiceovers. The images here, there is no voiceovers and I can't derive what is actually in this area.

VISUALS: The mouse hovers over the main screen content.

So, this is not very useful for the students. They are losing a lot of critical information from this non-accessible content.

VISUALS: The user clicks on the 'accessible' button.

So, if you would like to see what an accessible content really should be like, click on the accessible button here. When the student rolls over this top part--

[Female Computer Voice]

Interstitial lung disease.

VISUALS: The mouse hovers over the header bar on the main screen.

[Voiceover]

You can see that the screen reader is able to effectively read that word.

VISUALS: The mouse hovers over the top right image on the main screen.

When this user rolls over this picture--

[Female Computer Voice]

[Crosstalk] *0:01:39.4 lung scarring due to interstitial lung disease.

[Voiceover]

They are able to note that this image is actually about how the scarring of interstitial lung disease appears. And over down here--

VISUALS: The mouse hovers over the bottom right image on the main screen.

[Female Computer Voice]

Please click to play a video.

[Voiceover]

They can recognise that that is a button to activate the video.

VISUALS: The mouse hovers over the graph bar.

There is also--

[Female Computer Voice]

Graph showing 80 male cases versus 67 female cases with interstitial lung disease per 100,000 people.

VISUALS: The mouse moves towards the 'accessible' button on the navigation bar.

[Voiceover]

So now, they can find out that this is actually a graph with critical information for their learning. For most people, if the content is not properly catered for accessibilities, they are going to lose out all this critical information.

When most people engage with a screen reader, this is not the speed at which they engage at. So, let's say we turn on the speed here.

VISUALS: The mouse hovers over the speed icon on the navigation bar.

This is the actual speed at which most people engage with a screen reader.

[Female Computer Voice]

[sped up female computer voiceover] *0:02:33.5.

[Voiceover]

So, as you can imagine, it is really fast, because most people would like to just engage with the content quickly, so that they know where they are navigating. But if you have developed any video or audio content and you don't use clear audio, it could be very hard for the vision impaired person to actually engage with the content.

VISUALS: The mouse moves to the brightness slider and drags the slider from approximately 50% to 0%.

Now, let me turn on and show you what it actually looks like without any vision impairment.

VISUALS: The main screen is now visible. The background colour of the main content is a diagonal gradient going from dark red to yellow to blue. There is a black background header with the page heading in white text followed by three paragraphs of text. Underneath the text sits a horizontal bar chart with two bars for male and female. On the right side of the screen is a top image of a vector diagram of lungs and an image thumbnail of red coloured lungs on an x-ray image of a chest area with a 'play video' label in white font on a black background coming off the thumbnail.

TEXT ON SCREEN: Interstitial lung disease. This disease describes a large group of disorders, most of which cause progressive scarring of lung tissue. The scarring associated with interstitial lung disease eventually affects your ability to breathe and get enough oxygen into your bloodstream. Interstitial lung disease can be caused by long-term exposure to hazardous materials, such as asbestos. Some types of autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis also can cause interstitial lung disease. In some cases, however, the causes remain unknown. Once lung disease scarring occurs, it's generally irreversible. Medications may slow the damage of interstitial lung disease, but many people never regain full use of their lungs. Lung transplant is an option for some people who have interstitial lung disease.

This is the actual content a person will see. Through this program, you can see that students can feel stressed and anxious over learning material that is not made fully accessible for their needs.

So, with that in mind, we hope in the future you will consider developing content that is more accessible for the students to engage with. That way, alternative formats can be generated from fully accessible content.

VISUALS: White background swipes across the screen and the RMIT University logo animates to the centre of the screen.

[End transcript]