Category: Accessibility

What often gets lost in all the talk of accessibility, conformance, WCAG standards and more is how challenging task completion can be for an end-to-end experience. I recently celebrated another birthday and have been doing part of my overall evaluation of financial tools and services I use as a part of my financial life.

I did this back in 2017 when I moved back to Wisconsin and again in late 2022 when I changed jobs. This time the driving factor is nothing quite so dramatic but rather a departure from one financial services company that simply wasn’t making progress on some accessibility basics where I honestly thought they might be different.

I’m certainly not here to give anyone investment advice but for my purposes have been evaluating ETF screeners from several of the leading financial services companies and industry resources. I’ve yet to find one that I’d consider truly usable with a screen reader and just about everyone I tried had at some point a blocking accessibility issue.

Frankly, the interactions required here are relatively few to complete the task. Choose from various criteria for the evaluation, get a list of results to interpret the data and be able to take action on items of interest.

The disappointing thing is that most of the accessibility failures are still the same basic challenges of poorly named controls, custom web controls that fail accessibility, poorly constructed tables, charts that fail to address accessibility and more.

None of the tools I tried were completely broken. But kind of works doesn’t cut it for this kind of task. Nor does mix and match between providers to work around issues in one tool.

What is also disappointing here is that the biggest workaround for these sorts of challenges is often downloading the results for processing in Excel or another application. However, every experience I tried puts a restriction on the number of results you can download to the point that downloading the data is not a realistic option.

Unlike my previous forays into this task, a new wrinkle about being able to download the results has also emerged and was present on more than one site. By this I mean that you actually have to interact with some control to choose the type of file you want and those experiences fail web accessibility basics.

These sorts of tasks need to be models of web accessibility. I’ve long said that it is a struggle to try and accomplish a task, learn the experience and wrestle with accessibility issues all at the same time.

Add in the fact that in an area such as financial tools, it isn’t enough to be accessible. A financial tool that is very accessible but works poorly at the financial task is not helpful. Additionally, assuming there was something that stood out in this area, changing financial service providers isn’t always a straight forward option. It can be costly, has potential tax and other consequences and may not even be possible depending on the type of investment account you are trying to move.

Finally, much like healthcare, financial management is a highly personal task. Many of the last-resort strategies of asking a friend or family member to assist are not good options here.

In just about every case, the tools I’ve tried come from industry players who have ongoing accessibility efforts with people who I am sure are as dedicated to accessibility as I know I am. Given my own employment and as I wrote in my post on Ethical Accessibility I understand the challenges for everyone involved in these situations.

Several of the same companies here are listed as corporate partners for Disability:IN. Perhaps that organization needs to expand what they measure as one example.

Those more familiar with the legislative and executive processes of government may know if an agency such as the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) could adopt a requirement for any organization involved in the buying and selling of financial instruments having to meet certain accessibility criteria to conduct such business. Legal requirements tend to bring a level of clarity, for better or worse, that is otherwise hard to achieve in many organizations.

Many of these organizations already make claims of acting as a fiduciary, especially if you use their advising services. I find it hard to call this an accurate statement with the cornerstone of fiduciary responsibility to put a client’s need ahead of your own interest. Comprehensive accessibility would seem to be a must if you were serious about this.

Writing 101 would say I should close this post with some call to action or other engagement strategy. Well, there is no great close here just now beyond a call for the financial industry to step up efforts because what is happening today is broken.

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Apple recently introduced Personal Voice to newer devices on various hardware in their lineup. I have had a little experience with the basic concept behind this sort of technology from my time at Microsoft where I dabbled with one of Microsoft’s Azure cognitive services to do something similar.

The basic concept behind these experiences is that you record some set of known text and then software converts that into a synthetic version of your voice. In Apple’s case it is 150 phrases ranging from just a few words to maybe at most 20 words in a single phrase.

After you finish recording, there is some processing time and then your voice is ready to use. On an iPhone 15 Pro, my voice was ready in about five hours. You are not able to do anything else with the phone while this is happening. On an M1 MacBook Air from 2020, processing took about two hours and I was able to do other tasks at the same time, such as writing this blog post.

Once your voice is created, you can use it as one of the voices available with Apple’s Live Speech feature. This allows you to type in various apps where you would typically use your voice and have the synthetic voice used. It compliments the existing voices Apple makes available and has the added benefit of allowing you to have some relationship to your own voice used in the experience. In situations where a person may know that they are going to lose their voice ahead of time, it does offer some ability to preserve your own speech.

Multiple factors influence the quality of the end result here—Microphone, recording environment and more, just to name a few. For short phrases it likely is not noticeable but in my sample, even the pace at which I appear to have read the samples was different. There is a 21 second difference in having the voice read back the same text.

I made two voices in trying this experience. The first was recorded using the default Apple headphones on an iPhone 15 Pro. The second using an Arctis 7 headset. Both samples are my Apple Personal Voice reading my blog post on Accessibility Island.

I have also made a sample of my original voice sample of three phrases and then Apple’s Personal Voice speaking those phrases from my recording with the Arctis 7 device. The Personal Voice speaking the phrases is the result of my typing them into an edit box and asking for them to be spoken using my newly created voice. The phrases are in this recording and have the original voice sample followed immediately by the Personal Voice speaking the phrase. After all three phrases are played, the entire series is duplicated once. The phrases are:

can you call me in an hour

Did you remember to take out the trash?

Is she going to the grocery store now or in the morning?

Creating a personal voice is straight forward. On whatever device you are using, go to Settings:Accessibility:speech:Personal Voice. You’ll be prompted to record a short phrase to test your recording environment and advised of any changes you should make, such as too much background noise. You then start the process of recording 150 phrases. They do not all need to be recorded at once. When you are finished, you’ll be advised to lock your phone if doing this on an iPhone or just ensure your computer is charged if using a Mac.

When the voice is created, you can start using it with Live Speech by going to the same Speech area of Accessibility settings and going into Live speech. Turn Live Speech on and then pick from the list of voices. Your personal Voice should be listed.

If you are doing all of this with VoiceOver, Apple’s screen reader, as I did, the process of creating a voice works well with VoiceOver. You can use VoiceOver to read the phrase to be read, then activate a record button and repeat the phrase. Recording stops when you stop speaking. If you turn on a setting for continuous recording, you will advance to the next phrase automatically and can repeat the process. I did notice that sometimes VoiceOver automatically read the next phrase but not always. Focus seems to go to the Record button and I suspect there is a timing issue between the phrase being spoken and VoiceOver announcing the newly focused button.

Having created two voices, I would say it is probably a good idea to take a short break during the reading of the 150 phrases from time to time. I found myself not speaking as clearly as I wanted once in a while as well as having sort of the same singsong phrasing. Listening to my voice samples and how the voice came out, I would also say the microphone used has a big impact on the voice quality. This isn’t surprising but is made apparent to me comparing the samples of what my recordings sounded like and how that turns out when the same text is spoken by Personal Voice. I don’t think either microphone that I used would be what I would recommend for creating a voice to be used permanently.

I was curious if Apple would allow the personal voice you create to be used with VoiceOver. I didn’t expect it would be possible and that does seem to be the case.

As with pretty much anything in AI, synthetic speech is a rapidly changing technology. There are certainly higher quality voices in the arena of synthesized speech but Apple has done a good job at allowing you to tap your own voice on consumer hardware in an easy to use process. Listening to my own voice, it is clear it isn’t me and I wasn’t expecting it to be. But even on the basic hardware I used, there are characteristics of my voice present and if I were in a situation where I was going to lose my physical voice permanently, this is one option I would definitely explore further.

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Opinions may differ on this, but I am of the opinion that you should not add extra instructions on the names of column headers in tables on the web. If you are going to do so, ensure it is done in a fashion that allows a screen reader to avoid announcing those instructions if the user desires not to have them communicated.

I recently encountered an experience with one of the financial services I use where some excellent table functionality is ruined by breaking this simple rule. It makes getting the actual data from the tables much more difficult. The tables properly use both column and row headers and have good keyboard navigation even when not using a screen reader as just two examples of what works well.

In the case of my financial service, an example column name is now:

Last Price, (press Enter to sort)

Because this is part of the column header, albeit hidden visually, you must now hear this or read it in braille before you get to the details for a cell when moving through a row of information with a screen reader’s table reading commands.

Instead of just hearing the column name and the value, I must hear the column name, these instructions, and then the value. This is now how the result is communicated when moving to a given cell with a screen reader’s table navigation commands.

Last Price, (press Enter to sort) $174.01-$0.81

Examining the HTML, I find this is part of the column header name.

<span class=​"screen-reader-only">
", (press Enter to sort)"

I would suspect this was added in an attempt to be helpful. It is complete speculation on my part but it is even entirely possible that a usability study was done on this table and one of the questions asked was if the users knew they could sort the table. I would be willing to bet, continuing my speculation, that the answer was no and this extra text for screen reader users was added.

The problem is that this breaks the actual functionality of the table. Reading through the row, you are trying to study the details of the data. That flow is interrupted by the instructions on sorting being inserted between the column header and the data. You either have to learn to tune it out or some other strategy of ignoring the instructions. Again it is inserted as part of the column name so it isn’t as if the screen reader can ignore half the column name here.

It is also interesting that prior to the table, there is a full paragraph marked up with the same “screen-reader-only” class giving all sorts of instructions on reading the table with a screen reader.

There are a range of options to improve on this in my opinion. At minimum, given the way the full site has been constructed, move these sorting instructions into the other instructions you already have for getting information from the table.

Other solutions are possible of course and my point here is more to point out how in trying to be helpful, you can easily break what works well with screen readers and other assistive technology.

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AI offers many opportunities for information access among the other benefits. However, if the basics of web accessibility are not followed, the promise of that access will be difficult or more to some parts of the population.

Both Bing and Bard, from Google and Microsoft respectively, currently need to improve at one of the most basic tests here in my trials. My instruction to both AI services:

Show me a list of U.S. states in a table based on population.

In both cases I received a table with proper column headings but row headings were not present. I tried a range of commands to get them to appear with no success. I tried more with Bard leading to Bard eventually acknowledging that it didn’t know how to add row headers yet. I suspect trying similar additional instructions would yield some equivalent result with Bing.

I added an instruction to both services as my first attempt to improve the output where I added the instruction to ensure the table had proper row and column headers for accessibility. This had no impact on the result.

It is vital that the information from AI technology be accurate. It is equally as critical that proper accessibility be used for that output.

Asking both services for details on how to create an accessible table yields good results talking about both row and column headers among other points that would be common from an accessibility perspective. So both services should be following their own advice here.

As these AI experiences become, if they are not already, more mainstream in society, developers need to ensure proper standards are used for information display. My intent is not to single out Bard and Bing exclusively. These are two services I have immediate access to for experimentation but I suspect other AI experiences would yield equivalent results. If you know of a service that passes this test today, please share it in the comments.

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I suspect anyone who has tried some of the newer AI-based image descriptions, such as those from Be My Eyes, has noticed the high quality image descriptions that are available. I’ve been curious about how I could apply that to videos so did a little experimentation.

I want to emphasize that I do not consider this a replacement for audio description. There is so much more to that experience than just giving details on what’s in an image.

The first step for my experiment was getting individual images from the video. An article on doing this with a tool called ffmpeg was very helpful and getting the images is a snap with this tool. Options for getting an image for every frame in the video, at specific time increments or a specific time are just a few of the choices you have.

This alone is one reason why I do not consider this a replacement for audio description. There is so much content, even in a single picture, that it can be overwhelming. Then too is the challenge of identifying when enough change has happened to generate a new description.

From this point, so far I’ve simply used Be My Eyes to generate a description of the various extracted images. For example, a video clip shared on social media can quickly be separated into one image per second and then image descriptions provided from Be My Eyes or another service.

I’m sure there are APIs I can explore to automate the image description part of my experiment. Anyone with experience doing this already is welcome to share your knowledge in the comments here.

My 30 minute experiment also tells me that it would be great if the various media players would add an option to describe the current scene. Again, this is not audio description but imagine if you could press a button at any point in a video and get a detailed description. The technology to make all this happen definitely exists today. Here’s hoping the media player makers will incorporate it into a user-friendly experience sooner than later.

Even without such experiences being added directly, I have found that a screen shot of the current point in time or even a photo of the television screen can yield quality results.

I view what I’ve explored here as a supplement to human-created and human-narrated audio description and will continue to explore what is possible.

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