Not wanted on the voyage
I’ll give you my expert opinion right here for free: The Explorer 8000 PVR is completely inaccessible to blind and visually-impaired people. Great way to grow your subscriber base, huh? Make a product that an entire swath of potential customers simply can’t use.
What are the problems?
Visual interface
Like absolutely every other digital cable or satellite box in existence, you control the 8000 by onscreen menus and a remote control. It seems that PVR designers develop products for people exactly like themselves – geeks in their 20s or 30s. They’re good with computers, and maybe they wear glasses (which caused them to get picked on by Nelson Muntz types in gym class), but otherwise they’re perfectly hale and hearty. I merely surmise this; I haven’t talked to the developers, and this is an invitation for them to talk to me to set me straight if I’m wrong.
But where is the contrary evidence? Where is the evidence, anywhere, that Scientific Atlanta developers took disability into account at any time?
The fact that the only way you can control the box is by looking at control screens is a dealbreaker right there. It ensures that the box could never be used by a blind person. Some low-vision people might be able to struggle through, but as we’ll see, they strike out with the 8000, too.
The 8000’s remote control makes things worse, since the too-tight clustering of buttons makes them hard to distinguish by touch and location.
What we need
An interface that works for blind and low-vision people. That will probably mean speech output (and possibly input), plus a redesigned information architecture, and new typefaces.
Fonts
Screenfonts for captioning, subtitling, and PVRs are, in broad terms, a disaster. They’re not custom-designed for their respective media, and they’re not tested. And they’re ugly and there aren’t enough of them.
In the 8000’s case, they’re also ridiculously small.
- If you have low visual acuity, you could still use the PVR, especially with a nice big TV. You could get right up close to the screen and peer at it. You might have to look at one quadrant at a time. It’s slow, inconvenient, and kludgy, but possible.
- If you had a small telescope, you could scan even very small fonts adequately well. Perhaps some people would be able to do that. But why should they have to? You’ve got a whole screenful of space to use, yet the PVR displays very small, tightly-spaced sansserif fonts in widely-displaced regions. The 8000 wastes an enormous amount of space. It acts like a 1980s letter-quality printer confronted with an entire page to fill with 50 words: No matter how hard it tries, everything it writes will be small and dispersed.
What we need
Custom-designed, tested screenfonts in selectable sizes.
Colours
Colours are an absolute joke. They’re the worst-designed aspect of both my boxes, the 3200 digital-cable converter and the 8000 PVR. “You can’t possibly be serious” is my response to most of the provided colour combinations, one of which is actually green and hot pink.
Worse, most of the other colour combinations use at least one bright hue, which is a problem two ways:
- Bright pure colours can throb on even quite good NTSC television sets, like mine.
- Quite a few low-vision people simply can’t tolerate staring at bright illumination.
I have barely been able to make do with the cutely-named Campground colour scheme, which is (variously) black and white type on (variously) beige and brown ground.
What we need
Selectable colour combinations, with several of them dark-on-light (as white or yellow on black, brown, or navy blue).
Audio description
The punchline here is that you have to unplug the PVR and reboot it to listen to audio description on SAP. Space-age, isn’t it?
As explained previously, the Explorer 3200’s interface to turn on Second Audio Program was simply fabulous. You used the same sequence of three keys on the remote to turn it on or off; those keys looked and felt different and were centred around the thumb’s basic location, the Select key; you didn’t have to be able to see to make it work; and nothing went wrong if you tried it on an all-digital station with no SAP. You just zipped your thumb in a circle and hit three keys. It was great.
Whatever could go wrong with that?
Well, first of all, with the 8000’s remote they screwed up the capacity for eyes-free usage. The proprioceptive cues are simply destroyed – yes, all because the Settings key is a different shape in a different place. The method to turn SAP on or off is unchanged, so if you can find the keys to press, it works – if you unplug the power and let the PVR reboot.
Yes, friends, you cannot turn SAP on and off at will. The audio stream simply doesn’t change. If you want to be sure you can turn SAP on, unplug the PVR, let it sit, plug it back in again, and let it reboot. You must cold-reboot the PVR to get SAP to work. I kid you not.
Here are excerpts from my notes:
- Cannot get any SAP to play, unless SAP and main audio happen to be identical in all cases, which I doubt.
- The only SAP I could ever get was on Newsworld. Just now on Simpsons, I checked the VCR feed. DX. No DX on main feed until I deselected and reselected SAP.
- Cannot get SAP going on Simpsons, Newsworld, or anything.
- Required complete cold boot (impatiently, I did it twice). Silent audio → Disable SAP (main audio) → Enable SAP (DX).
- Had to unplug power to get SAP to work. Then extreme delay in responding to keypresses (which were buffered). I think it might have started up in SAP, having buffered pre-reboot keystrokes, but I can’t prove that.
- Yet again had to unplug to get SAP.
For an unspecified time after a cold reboot, the Settings key continues to work: You can keep switching back and forth between SAP and main audio. But at an unspecified later time, the PVR seizes on main audio and won’t let go.
Because rebooting the machine sits outside any rational conception of the normal range of operations, I judge the Explorer 8000 incapable of transmitting SAP audio. Essentially, if you have to put a new battery in your car every day just to drive to the office, does your car actually “work”? Not by any practical definition.
What we need
Control over SAP audio that’s as reliable and easy as the Explorer 3200’s interface.
Recording SAP
One bit of good news? If you manage to get actual SAP set up and running and schedule a recording, you do in fact record the show with SAP audio. Hallelujah!
However: You should be given the option to save both main and SAP audio with every program that has both. You could then select, via an accessible interface, which one you wanted to listen to upon playback. What’s wrong with recording SAP all the time?
- You could get bored of the descriptions on a show or movie you intend to watch more than once.
- You might not be the only person in the house; not everyone else might need to listen to descriptions all the time.
- SAP stays on indefinitely once you turn it on. (I really mean “indefinitely”: You cannot tell just how long.) This means all your shows from that point indefinitely forward will be recorded with SAP audio. You will thus record:
- On a digital channel
- normal stereo sound
- On an analogue channel
-
- in the best case, monaural sound (as on a station that duplicates main audio on SAP when there’s no description playing, or does so at all times)
- silence (for stations with silence on SAP when no description plays; I have at least one such station)
- some other service, like a radio station or VoicePrint (carried some or all of the time on certain stations’ SAP channels, e.g., VoicePrint on Newsworld, which Canadian subscribers pay for whether they like it or not)
What we need
An option to record both main and SAP audio, either of which could be selected during playback.
So let’s sum up
- Blind people can’t use the all-visual interface – period.
- Appalling colours and too-small, uncustomized fonts mean low-vision people must strain to use the interface. Many of them won’t be able to use it at all.
- You can record a show in SAP, but you’ll end up recording every show with SAP until you turn it off (or the Explorer turns it off unbidden).
- You can’t turn audio description on and off with any reliability.