What are the great still undiscovered benefits of standardizing the functional layout and display the same functions at all websites?

What must happen so that people like me can work more efficiently is a standardization of the website layout with each category, e.g. citation should always be in the upper left corner and have an orange button, the Download button must be in the center and of light green color with black letters in it, the submit button must always be in the bottom right corner and must be colored with the same dark red background color and the same bright bold yellow letters on top of it, etc.

Somebody must program the mouse at least 5 times bigger than now so that even visually impaired users can easily find it on a laptop screen.

I find it challenging to gather all information from research articles because every provider of online scientific publications has its own layout, its own functionalities, its own format, etc. But instead of me having to remember the locations of each functionality for each provider, it would be much better if all providers would use the same general layout, color coding and a minimum set of function to which each provider is welcome to add whatever deemed beneficial.

E.g. here in ResearchGate it is hard for me to find the "Message" button with my Zoomtext because it is of the same color as the background and the only way to recognize it is by the thin blue letters spelling the word "Message". Even though Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net serve the same purpose, there are a lot of differences in navigating through their sites. Therefore, providers of similar content and functions should be required to offer a user interface option that follows the same standards regarding layout, coloring, contrast enhancing, screen-reader accessibility and other accessibility functions because that way sensory impaired people must only learn once, e.g. how to access scientific journals, figures, citations, supplementary material, PDF files, etc.

Knowledge-exchange and online employment websites must provide an interface for its users to interact. All providers of such kind of interaction interfaces should be required to provide a disability communication mode, which must adhere to strict standards pertaining to accessibility, layout, color coding, use of functions like "Search", "Submit", "Download", "Message Exchange", "User Lookup", etc. Each provider should be free to choose its own communication interface features, which don't need to be standardized to maintain options for commercial innovations, but that must be in addition but never instead a clutter-free interface that allows accessing the same kind of information always the same way across all provider platforms.

Each provider of any kind of web-based functions or services must provide the option to chose any older legacy version of its software, cloud or browser-based functions so that in 20 years I can still use the same method to accomplish the same things as today.

For example, I love my old MS-Office 2003. But since I have already used up all my maximally allowed 25 re-installations I can no longer use it because Microsoft no longer supports it. However, the big advantage of MS-Word 2003 was that it only had one view mode and that within it, the location of each button, function, menu, drop-down boxes and other settings could be accessed in the same way all the time. But from Office 2007 onward this essential feature is no longer available because as another category,, e.g. "Home", "Insert, "Layout" in MS Word 2007, is selected, the icons of features from the previously selected category will be replaced by other icons of features associated with the new category, to which the user has switched. The big challenge here for the visual impaired user with limited vision field is that, due to the high magnification, it is no longer possible to see the selected category and all icons associated with it at the same time. Although the challenges faced by the visually impaired user, who must navigate while depending on seeing only tiny fraction of the screen areas, which sighted users can see in a single glance, are universally encountered everywhere in the virtual electronic computer and internet world, it can still be overcome by training the visually impaired to imagine a mind map by remembering the relative positions of icons to each other and relative to the screen edges from past experiences even when they are outside his small visual field on the computer. The advantage of developing a virtual mind map based on mental memories, which can be provided by training, about the relative spacial screen position of icons to each other and the screen edges, is that the very really existing measurable reproducible visual field can be extended by as much as 100 times by using imaginary mental maps of the relative spacial positions of icons to each other and with respect to the screen edges despite not being able to see them with the really existing, but too small, yet objectively measurable and reproducible true visual field.

Visually impaired people can be trained in mentally imagining icon locations outside the small true visual field based on past memories about seeing and using them in past training sessions. This allows trained visually impaired to quickly access icons despite not seeing them.

This can enlarge the area, within which visually impaired can navigate efficiently, by up to 100 fold. That is why I am always looking for remote trainers willing to volunteer their time to provide me the experiences I need for developing such kind of imaginary mental maps from my past memories about the spacial relationships between icons and their positions relative to the screen edges.

Unfortunately, this way of restoring the operational visual field available for computer work requires that the same icons controlling the same features in the same way all the time remain always at the same relative screen spacial position to one another and with respect to the screen as a whole.

Remotely training visually impaired users can increase the area of their truly existing - but very small - visual field, because it provides them with the needed guidance and experiences from practicing finding and using features of visually challenging new applications, interfaces, websites and programs, by more than 100 times. This restores the operational visual field, which is available for computer work, approximately to the same size as is available to non-handicapped users.

This approach to intentionally create mental imaginary memories, based on which they can gradually develop very good imaginations, which provide them with a mental mind map (i.e. imaginary visual field) anyone challenged by the limitations for too small visual fields can learn to expand their small visual field by adding and merging it with the gradually forming memories about the spacial relationships between seen and used objects from past training sessions about distances and angles between computer generated objects to one another and with respect to the corners and edges of the screen.

For this approach to work as desired visually impaired users depending on being able to always find the same control elements for controlling the same features at the same relative virtual position on the screen.

Most visually impaired users depend on their very small visual field for most of their computer work. This means that visually impaired users tend to depend much more on their residual vision. That is why they depend on assistive programs, such as Zoomtext or Magic, to magnify and sometimes the screen reader functions to listen to long texts but not to navigate on the screen. Major bottlenecks obstacles and barriers, which are still limiting the benefits of the visually impaired in unfolding the full potentials, which the virtual world could have in store for them, if the mostly sighted developers of assistive technology, programmers, website designers, cloud service providers, highly skilled and experienced volunteers and enthusiasts about open sources software could understand their visual needs much better.

Most of the visually impaired access the virtual electronic world of bits and bytes by struggling to navigate through it based on past memories of spacial relationships between virtual computer-generated, screen-based objects. They need magnification to navigate the sometimes visually very challenging and overwhelming virtual reality cluttered with too many poorly arranged, organized, presented virtual objects, methods, functions formats, file extensions, which must be improved before visually impaired users can handle more complex and visually demanding computing tasks.

They depend on screen readers to listen to long texts and magnifier programs, such as Zoomtext or Magic, to enlarge, for example, by a factor of 10 to be able to read text on the screen letter by letter visually. But the downside of such high enlargement factors is, that, e.g. a 10x magnification limits the visual field to only 1% = 1/100th of non-handicapped users, the remaining visual field declines by the square of magnification needed to read. This forces visually impaired users to form a virtual spacial memory about the relative locations of buttons, functions, search windows for downloading, messaging, saving, citing, etc.

Therefore, it is so essential for the inclusion of the visually impaired that they can use the same virtual spacial layout memories in a provider-independent manner all the time, every time, from everywhere. Even freeware and mobile apps should be required to offer at least one standardized information access and retrieval interface, which can be easily navigated by the sensory impaired and their assistive programs.

Furthermore, every service access smart phone app provider should be required to follow similar standards and make all app functions available to PC access. For example, I feel discriminated by Uber because I cannot see the small screen of the smart phone. But I still can work efficiently on PC and Linux computers as long as I can connect them to an external monitor of at least 50 inches. The objective of this requirement is not to exclude the sensory impaired from accessing the same good and services, which each company/provider offers to its sighted customers.

For example, since I cannot navigate a smart phone I cannot order an Uber to see the doctor. Only because smart phones are still too inaccessible for most sensory-impaired user unless they have been trained very well and can count on the help of their sighted friends when being challenged by accessibility problems, which they cannot overcome on their own without sighted assistance.

When I have to see the doctor, I must take a much more expensive taxi cab instead of a much cheaper Uber car. Hence, I feel that Uber excludes me from its very important and much lower priced transportation services, which are even of much higher concerns for anyone, who cannot drive, because of disability. Even operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, Apple or MacOS, internet browser, online banking software, online shopping portals, such as Amazon, online payment processing interfaces, medical, government e.g., for paying taxes, applying for visas, SSI, Medicare, Obama Care, food stamps, free school luncheon and any other aid, e.g. hurricane, FEMA, etc. for visas, social security, vocational rehabilitation, insurance, award, loan, education,, such as university admission, course content, scheduling, job applications, electronic abstract and grant submission, learning and training products and services, emailing and chatting interfaces, service requests, text-processors and other office programs should be required to offer a standardized sensory-impaired user interface. The key take-home message that standardization is essential for accessibility because it is unacceptable that sensory impaired users face the risk of losing accessibility with every software update that is incompatible with their third-party accessibility software; and thus, may exclude them from engaging in any computer-based virtual activities and deprives them from asking their virtual friends for assistance until they can find somebody, who would take their computer and reverses that damage caused by the uninvited automated update.

I am really wondering why all these virtual features, which I'd like to have, don't already exist. For example, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has pushed legislation to require speech output in all elevators in all newly build public buildings, but no blind person ever comes and uses them to find his/her own way independently. The same is true about the required to provide Braille labeling for all the rooms of newly build publicly accessible building. But I have never seen any totally blind student in the EIT building.

I actually very much commend the American federal and state governments for putting so much effort to include sensory-impaired people in mainstream society.

But I am wondering that - if it is already important enough for all elevators to speak and for all rooms labeled with Braille, then it is definitely worth our efforts to make Linux and other still very inaccessible computing environments more accessible and user friendly to anyone struggling in using computers because of problems of their senses.

Since visually demanding tasks can be automated by well trained and experienced coders, there is a push to encourage the sensory impaired to consider schooling and jobs in the IT sector, programming languages, such as R, Perl,, Python, C, C++, C#, Java, Java Script, Ruby, MATLAB, etc. should be required to offer a fully functional, accessible and highly standardized common user interface, which meets the needs of the sensory impaired and which can be install of any already existing application in order to make it more accessible.

All software developers and providers, website designer, programmers and executives should be required to make their products and services fully accessible by providing hotkey shortcuts to all of the features and functions, which their software or service provides to fully sighted customers.

Any object, into which the user can type text, must be colored so that it really sticks out from the background. We could, for example, require that the writing field, into which text can be typed, must be of light purple color. I took purple in this example because most websites don't contain purple items, which could be camouflaged if shown on equally purple background.

There must be a standard, by which providers must be required, to label links. I suggest a medium underlined blue.

I had lots of problems finding links on websites when the link was identical with the word. Generally, text is black and link-words are dark blue. This causes lots of grief for visually impaired computer users because people, who struggle with low eyesight cannot see the differences between regular black-colored text and words, on which one must click, to access a certain link, because often they are colored with a very dark blue, which most visually impaired cannot distinguish from regular back text because this prevents visually impaired users to ever find the link they have been looking for many hours because in the instructions it says there must be a link. Regardless, if a link is provided, it must be labeled according to the standards applying to all properties and features pertaining to links.

Recently, I noticed that even fully sighted people struggle in learning the features of websites, which they have never visited before. Implementing standards into the electronic virtual world, which clearly show to all users, what kind of control element they are, e.g. link, email, text box, pull down menu, radio button, would make allow many more people to access many more features of the Internet.

If we want to be a welcoming and including society and provide participation opportunities for people of all walks of live, ages, educational levels,, income level and preferences, we must take more efforts in making even complex tasks so easy and intuitive because those people, who face a higher risk than could be explained by random chance alone, to be left behind and thus, remain excluded from benefiting the electronic virtual world offers everyone, who has been given access to the resources needed for participating virtually by engaging into any activity that is impossible without access to the Internet and other computing equipment.

Every website, which provides the user with an option to share information by typing it into text fields, e.g. to apply for jobs, admissions, credit cards or any other goods or services over the Internet should give the user the option at any time to submit all information already shared even when it is still incomplete. E.g. I could not apply for many jobs, for which I was fully qualified, because their application portal seems to be set up in such a way that only fully completed applications can be submitted. I kept getting the error message that some required text fields were still empty, but I could not find them because they must have been colored and designed to fit in with the background behind them; thus, preventing me from ever finding them. If this job application interface would have given me the option of submitting my partially completed information with my name, email and phone number, then this employer would have had the opportunity to contact me regarding my incomplete application. Then I'd have a contact person from my prospective employers’ site. This would help us in agreeing upon a reasonable disability accommodation, which would allow me to still complete the job application in an alternative format, i.e. most like in a MS-Word file attach to an email.

Require that employers don't force job applicants to setup an user account on their site when applying for their open positions because this causes too much stress on the visually impaired because they must learn to navigate in a new environment making very slow progress initially because since instructions are often not easily accessible, visually impaired job-seekers are confronted with the unacceptable situation of having to choose between only two alternatives, i.e.

1.) To spend hours trying to complete the entire application on the employer's website in a new account environment that is very dissimilar to all the other user accounts, which had to be set up to apply for jobs, but which user name and password had long been forgotten. Since visually impaired people struggle a lot with retrieving the desired information out of a lot of data, they might just setup a new user account to apply for a job with an employer to whom he had previously applied. As I found out this caused a lot of problems and almost resulted in my application not getting properly considered because the job-application database had detected ambiguous information and kept returning error messages, which did not seem to make sense for anyone. Finally, all my application information was taken over the phone and typed into this job-seeker database in order to make it available for full consideration.

It would be most desirable if all providers offering the same feature to their clients could come together and invest in programming a mask software, which can be instead over their regular interface, and which complies with all the accessibility and layout homogeneity standards for such particular feature so that it could be accessed universally exactly in the same way from anywhere.

But sometimes competitors refused to cooperate. Then we must choose the second-best option, which would be to require each provider to take all steps necessary to comply with all the standards for all of the features, which they offer to non-handicapped customers.

Even social websites like Facebook, networking websites like LinkedIn, ResearchGate and Academia.edu, should be required to comply with all standards needed for the same function, e.g. posting a question or job opportunity, on any other website, which provides the same features. Despite the expected initial skepticism about the government imposing standards for any virtual feature in order to make it fully accessible to everyone and to ensure that nobody gets left behind, it will benefit everyone because it makes it easier for customer to order from new sites.

if the feature providers are smart and have some foresight, they should not wait until the government dictates them all its requirements to make all features available to everyone, because despite the initial resistance to change, uniform standards to ensure full accessibility and universally easy usage are actually a blessing for providers because the more readily a larger customer target group can access and use more of the features offered by the provider, the better the chances for this provider to grow its business. If feature providers can see the big payoff of their investment in voluntarily developing their own standards in order to lower the barrier preventing less technology literate people from joining their customer group.

Finally, I want people to understand that we are losing too many resources by trying to find more talented people for programming and coding. Not everyone has the talents and gifts to program applications for personal use. Therefore, those people, who possess talents, gifts and passion for coding, should be supported in also developing a GUI and easy-to-use interface, which can be used by anyone regardless of their coding skills.

Software updates are coming so fast and the changes between different versions are just too many for anybody to keep up with. Probably, in 10 years, all my programming skills, which I possess now, and which took me lots of efforts to acquire, will not be of any value only 10 years from now.

We are trapping too many of our people in learning and relearning the same functions and procedures by creating the misconception that the never-ending need for updates is just in inevitable part of transitioning from an industrial into informational based society.

Our scientists tend to be very clever and successful in convincing funding providers from the benefits and the needs to keep improving but also changing our methods to achieve our objectives. But most of their efforts cannot pay off unless more people are given the opportunity to find out and apply them for their work. We have so many universities. At many of them new software is getting developed. When looking at the -omics tools, the creator of such tool must have gone through a steep learning curve before his tool could be posted online. But even though I found more than 30 online tools to cluster time series plots trajectories, I could not figure out how to use any of them. If - instead of 30 people working on programming time series dataset analysis in isolation and leaving them without resources to keep developing, improving and for training new customers in the proper usage by demonstrating to them what their software can do to them - would have chosen 5 and provide them with the needed tools and resources for developing, maintaining, supporting and provide training for a single much better programmed and much more accessible time series data analysis interface, there would be no more need for future students to go through the steep trial and error learning curve to code their own still very immature time series analysis code with much fewer features, the improvements in algorithm they used in their analysis would benefit many more people and the society at large, if we would focus our limited R&D resources, which keep falling behind the Chinese, who keep raising their R&D budget every year whereas it has not much increased in America in the past few years.

The keywords here are specialization and universal access.

Very few specialized, well-trained and experienced specialists are sufficient in providing the entire nation and even world with the training and support all potentially interested users would need to feel confident in applying it to their data, to answer their questions, which they understand and on which they could be trained, if needed, Such kind of services would have shortened the three years I spent on my master's thesis to about a month. But since I had nobody to go to I had to figure out everything the hard way, i.e. mainly by trial and error.

By not connecting interested user with highly experienced specialists for a particular method, procedure, algorithm, analysis, etc. we get what we deserve for not paying attention to this important problem, i.e. for analyzing time series trajectories, there is no go-to person, I am still stuck with trial and error trying to get it to work properly, which is now putting me at risk of not being able to even include it in my dissertation because I had to struggle too long in finding an acceptable analytical algorithm, which could predict results that are more consistent with our experimental observations.

Ideally, all providers of the same electronic virtual feature would see their common interest to increase their customer group by taking initiative before the government forces them to and setup their own standards for their features. The specifics of the standards, i.e. whether or not a web-link must be identified by red or blue color, are not important. Important for the kind of standards, which I believe have been neglected for too long, and of which many are still not aware of, is about consistency, applicability in all situations using methods, to which potentially interested users have access, availability of resources needed for proper training, support and conceptualization and the prevention of any kind of ambiguity and counteracting the spread of common errors, misconceptions, improper applications in inappropriate situations, misinterpreting results and drawing wrong conclusions.

Consistency universally followed standards should be implemented for all operating systems, programming languages, GUI (Graphical User Interface), remote access control programs, social sites (e.g. Facebook, professional and networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn, dating sites, electronic library access, which works in the same way for every public, private and university library, information retrieval searching and finding functions, etc. Accessibility cannot be achieved without a priory standardizing the format, layout, hotkeys and procedures by which information can be retrieved.

Furthermore, it is extremely important to require hotkey to remain the same in all applications and on all sites for every function everywhere every time.

This is especially important for sensory impaired users, who need third party programs, such as JAWS, Zoomtext, Magic, Window Eyes, etc. in order to participate equally in any virtual event activity because they only need to be trained once to access a particular function, such as download, find and replace, search, submit, etc. as soon as an accessibly standardized alternative has been implemented.

This is essential because without implementing prior accessibility, standards regarding layout, text , color, links, pull down menus, icons, functions, retrieval, storage, hotkeys, online user accounts, etc., no feature can be universally accessed regardless of providers in exactly, the same manner for all services providers for their respective features.. That is why all electronic service providers, which offer the same function, feature or service, must be required to implement exactly the same accessibility standards, especially for hotkeys, for every function and features, which they offer.

This would not only help the disabled, but everyone, because actions like banking shopping, paying, saving, submitting, accessing, depicting, representing, retrieving, finding and replacing, relative screen positioning, chatting, emailing, applying, booking, browsing, bookmarking, downloading, setting up online user accounts, posting, storing, plotting, compiling, printing, citing,, spell-checking, etc., only need to be taught once as soon as the user can chose the option to use alternative universally applicable virtual standards optimized for the disabled.

This would allow applying to more than 1,000 universities or for more than 100,000 open positions with a single application.

Consistency standards would help all virtual feature providers to reach a much larger customer group while requiring much fewer resources, efforts, manpower and funding that virtual feature providers must make presently available in order to keep their customers happy and interested, the commercial demand for using their features high because no single full-proof, universally applicable method to reach all potential paying customers is currently available and probably won't be for much longer than necessary unless people start reading and understanding my writings.