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I imagine the metal inserts in the wooden banister (see the video, above) are detectable warnings for people who are visually impaired, but that’s only a guess. If you watch the video again, you’ll see that the metal inserts do not occur at every bend in the staircase.

Whatever the intent, the banister fully met my needs.

The person I was observing was visually impaired and had his GUI enlarged by about 1000% or more. As he attempted to troubleshoot his wireless connection, he was very rapidly scrolling horizontally and vertically in order to read the text and view the icons in the Wireless Connection Status dialog box. The hugely enlarged GUI flew around the screen. His screen displayed only a small portion of the total GUI, but he never lost his place.

In contrast, I lost my place repeatedly. I couldn’t relate the different pieces of information, so what I saw was effectively meaningless to me much of the time. His spatial awareness—his ability to navigate quickly around a relatively large area—was clearly more developed than mine.

I could not keep up with all of the text, either, even when he was reading it to me out loud: ”It says ‘Signal Strength” is 4 bars, but it won’t connect. See?” (Well, actually, I didn’t see.) Though I’m very familiar with this dialog box, I could only read the shorter words as they flew by on screen. The larger words were illegible to me. His ability to read rapidly-moving whole words when only parts of them were visible at any given instant was much more developed than mine. I felt sheepish about being functionally illiterate under these conditions.

It was interesting to see how my own user performance depends on such a narrow range of conditions. I need to see the whole word and its context. I need to see at least half the dialog box at once. And, if the image is moving, it must be moving slowly.