March 2026 – The Idea Place

This is a textbook example of a complete lack of accountability from both Fidelity Investments and Elan Financial Services for a fundamental accessibility failure. On January 11, 2026, I reported a serious accessibility issue to both Fidelity and Elan around the website used for a Fidelity-branded credit card from Elan. Fidelity confirmed the issue via email to me on January 16, 2026. I’ve had no response from Elan. Two months later and there is no change. Why?

As I mentioned, Fidelity offers a credit card that comes from Elan but is branded as a Fidelity credit card. As you’d expect, there is a website where you can view transactions and more.

When reviewing transactions, an ARIA-Label on the table row with all the transaction details is used. This is an absolute disaster for accessibility. On top of this, just about all the table columns are filled with blank cells when read with a screen reader because ARIA-Hidden is used on the data in those cells.

It is bad enough that all the data, as a result of the ARIA-Label, is jammed into one long string. The fact that an actual table is still present but the columns are all blank with a screen reader, when you really need a properly structured table to review financial transactions effectively, just compounds the problem.

Ironically, maybe a month ago, the credit card was changed so that if you have multiple cardholders on the account, transactions show up under the name of each cardholder. This column is actually shown in the table when using a screen reader with data.

A Real Example

This is an example from my account just now for one of the ARIA-Labels. Note I changed the ending digits from my card here to 0000 and deleted some of the HTML for styling.

Can You Say Double Standard?

You can bet if the visual experience was broken in some equivalent way, such as all the table data jammed into a single cell, it wouldn’t take more than two months for something to be done. The sad thing is that this is just par for the course when it comes to accessibility. There is little to no accountability for accessibility basics when they are broken. Fine, mistakes happen. What you do or do not do about them speaks volumes. Leaving the user to deal with this kind of garbage, well, what’s that message? Using a screen reader should not mean you get an inferior experience.

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Background

Virtual machines, running one computer as an application inside another, still give me that “kid in a candy store” feeling. They allow me to test, experiment, and safely break things; if it all goes horribly wrong, I can just delete the virtual machine and start over. There is no risk of losing computer access or screen-reading functionality.

For the past couple of years, my primary environment has been Parallels on a Mac. I mainly run Windows virtual machines, and Parallels has done a great job of supporting Windows 11 despite its more stringent hardware requirements.

For sighted users, Parallels makes creating a VM easy: you simply choose “New VM,” and there is an option to download a Windows ISO directly from Microsoft. Unfortunately, this part of the Parallels interface (along with several other features) suffers from significant accessibility gaps.

One workaround is to use VOCR, a tool that performs optical character recognition on the screen. It is incredibly handy for this and many other situations where standard screen reading fails.

As someone who originally set out to be a journalist, the combination of AI-assisted code development and my own ideas has been a game-changer. I’ve long said, “I’ll tell you what to build; you build it.” We still have a long way to go, but the progress I’ve seen in just one year is truly amazing.

Another Solution: The Unattended Install

I decided to use AI to improve the Parallels experience. I asked it to help me create a script that would download a version of Windows for ARM hardware, create the Parallels virtual machine, and perform an unattended install so that the OS is ready at the desktop. This essentially replicates what Parallels does natively, but through a more accessible interface.

Managing Machines

Once I had a script that allowed me to trigger a VM creation from the Mac Finder and have a working desktop in 20 minutes, I wanted to go further. Managing existing VMs through the Parallels UI can also be hit-or-miss regarding accessibility.

Parallels does offer a robust command-line utility called prlctl. While powerful, command-line tools can be unforgiving if your syntax is slightly off. To bridge this gap, I went back to the AI and created a very basic Parallels Machine Manager. This utility displays a list of your running machines and provides basic management tasks like starting, stopping, cloning, and deleting. I also integrated the targeted Windows VM creation script directly into the app.

Getting These Tools

You can download the standalone unattended install script here, or download the full Parallels Machine Manager here.

Contributions Welcome

I’ve hosted the script and the app on GitHub in a repository I’m calling The Workbench. You can find it at github.com/kellylford/TheWorkBench.

I create simple solutions like this from time to time and plan to populate this repository with more of them. Contributions—whether to these projects or sharing your own—are more than welcome.

My contributions to this repo are functional, but they are “immediate-need” projects. Once I’ve solved the specific problem I’m facing, I don’t typically invest significant time in extending them. While these tools are valuable, they would require more work to become “production-quality” software.

More Formal Projects

I also maintain a list of more formal projects at www.theideaplace.net/projects. These include:

A weather app
A sports scores app
An image description toolkit
A simple RSS reader

Month: March 2026

Fidelity and Elan Show Zero Accountability for Accessibility