Re: I'm kind of concerned about the culture surrounding usability
Listen, I understand the importance of knowing how using a screen reader, but I don't think you understand the point I'm trying to make.
The screen reader is one point of the entire accessibility model. Screen readers themselves have very little to do with the problem with implementing accessibility in technology, outside of a few limitations they might have. Rather, the problem is implementation. This is NOT something that can be fixed by just learning how to study how to use a screen reader.
The problem I tried to bring up with this thread is the fact that UX designers take advantage of the fact that currently, implementation of standards is not consistent and at a lower rate than ever, so they have made a business model to capitalize on this, which may cause a serious monopolization as well as discourage further development. Furthermore, they don't challenge current standards that might actually contribute towards this implementation problem.
Fo r example, because of the growing number of people who know how to program, it's far less likely that many foreign-built applications will have accessibility built in, due to different education standards.
How can learning how to use a screen reader actually help this situation? This is the question that you have to ask yourselves. While it might be personally appealing for me to understand what you might experience as a blind person, you should think more about what is actually helpful to the situation - and using precious time that I need to do fixing bugs, promoting my project and trying to build momentum for improving audio models in gaming - which has almost nothing to do with screen readers and represents uncharted territory outside of audiogames. People already can slap on a screen reader support for many games but that doesn't make them accessible. But actually making a model that commercially shows that it's possible? That would blow the movement in a c ompletely different direction.
This is comparable to having a project manager learn how to code because it's important to the project. However, it's not their role to program, so they are effectively wasting their time - despite the fact that it might make them slightly more capable at their job.
That's not to say that I shouldn't ever sit down to work with one. Indeed part of the reason why I got involved was because I would like to use one in the future, but software that I use is not compatible and screen readers slow down my production time so much that I'm not able to efficiently keep on schedule - something that I think probably affects blind utilitization as well.
I'm not sure where the implication where "I will never learn how to use a screenreader" is coming from. I'm currently trying to promote a game that is intended to get my foot in the door as well as completely override the excuses of only implementing bar e-bones accessibility tacked on into a project. The problem is that people just think, oh, if I have a screen reader read it, I'm good. So no, I disagree, me taking the time to learn how to use a screen reader would actually be detrimental to my progress at this point.
And yes I've also used talkback before. Much more than NVDA to be honest. I would say that I have used it enough to say that I can comment on it - It's a huge pain in the ass. I don't like how it locks on stuff so much. It makes it feel clunky and slow. And a lot of apps dont' work well with it.
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