Ted Galanos talks about switch input and the Darcy keyboard

Ted explains how using switch inputs, such as the Darcy USB keyboard, can take a lot longer than other input methods. He also tells us to properly label and markup interactive elements! Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Thanks to Make It Fable for sponsoring the guest appearance for this episode. Transcript Nic Hi I'm Nic Steenhout and you're listening to the accessibility rules soundbite. A series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairment and what barriers they encounter on the web Nic First I need to thank Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provide accessibility as a service. They offer testing, training, and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Also thanks to Make It Fable for their sponsorship of this episode. Nic Today I'm talking with Ted Galanos. Hi Ted how are you? Ted I'm well thanks and how are you Nic? Nic Doing very good. Super happy to be talking to you. So let me ask you this, the first question I have for you is what's your disability or your impairment? Ted Actually i have two the one that i've had the longest was my blindness. First legally blind then totally blind at the age of 27.  I'm 47 years old now due to retinitis pigmentosa. But also i have a physical impairment: peripheral sensory neuropathy which means the further away you get from the core of the body the less I can feel which means I can injure my fingertips or my toes, hands, or feet and not necessarily realizing. So I'm prone to bruising, burning skin tears and not necessarily realize that it's happened and I've had to deal with chronically this all of my life and have had to sustain many many different cases of bacterial infection such as staph and strep. And so when you have to deal with this over and over again taking loads and loads of antibiotics whether it be oral such as a pill or intravenous and dealing also with the resistance factor of bacteria sometimes the bacteria will get into the bone and then the only option is left amputation. And so I have if you imagine your hands and you have three bones for each of the four fingers and two bones for the thumbs coming from the palm of your hand well the bone under the fingernail and the bone just behind that the medial are gone on all of my fingers and I don't even have a ring finger on my left hand. Ted So my wife jokingly says well you'll wear your ring around your neck. Nic Yeah Ted Which I indeed I do. I have a gold chain with a gold ring around my neck. Nic That's fair enough. So what do you think your... What would you say your greatest barrier on the web is?What causes you the most problem? Ted Well the biggest barriers are if there's a whole lot of clutter on a particular web page and I've heard other blind people talk about for the sighted world there's a lot of eye candy and if the screen reader has to read through a bunch of garbage to get to the meat of the content of the page, the meaningful content of the page. it's hard to wade through a lot of that. And if labels and links and other actionable items are not labeled properly or don't function correctly then that is definitely a barrier. Now because of my fingers being amputated I cannot use a standard qwerty keyboard so I do use an alternative input device known as the Darcy USB. And what this device allows me to do is type using two switches one represents dot the other represents dash and in an expanded version of Morse code I can type through that code any character whether it be your alphabet, your numbers, your special characters and punctuation, your modifier keys, function keys. I can do anything with the Morse code as you might be able to do with the 104 type qwerty keyboard including certain JAWS/mouse cursor commands, putting it into a mouse mode or JAWS mode as it were. Ted So having said that I ran into a situation just the other day where I found a lin