Category: Accessibility

The Northwest Access Fund is seeking nominations for their 2017 awards. Awards recognize individuals, organizations and businesses that have made a positive impact for people with disabilities in five different categories. The categories include:

• Innovation Award
  
• Best Practices Award
  
• Recreational Engagement Award
  
• Frances Pennell Economic Opportunity Award
  
• Ron Adams Outstanding Advocate Award
  

Nominations are due by September 15, 2017. You can submit nominations via an online form.

I’ve had the pleasure of attending the Northwest Access Fund’s award dinner for the past two years and have walked away deeply touched bye the range of talent, passion and energy exhibited by everyone involved with this organization. Previous award winners run the full range from individuals who make amazing contributions to corporations that devote resources toward accessibility and making a positive impact.

The 2017 Awards will be presented at the organization’s fourth annual Awards Dinner on Thursday, November 2, 2017 at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center in Seattle, Washington. If you are in the area, it is an event well worth attending.

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As I’m sure most in the web accessibility arena have heard by now, a Florida judge ruled that the regional grocer Winn-Dixie must make the company’s web site accessible. As usual Lainey Feingold has an excellent summary of the details. The full legal ruling is also available.

Reading through the full document, a few interesting tidbits of information jumped out at me. I’m always interested in the dollars and cents of accessibility costs.

Prior to this ruling, Winn-Dixie indicates it had set aside $250,000 to make the web site accessible.

Since launching the web site, Winn-Dixie has spent at least $7million for updates, without addressing accessibility.

The accessibility expert in the case estimates all accessibility issues could be fixed for around $37,000 and certainly not the $250,000 given by Winn-Dixie.

Interestingly, the plaintiff in the case testified that he expected to be able to use ctrl+s to jump to search fields on web sites. This one is particularly interesting to me because this is rarely the case and in fact it is generally on Windows alt+s that would be used, if such a shortcut were provided in my experience. Further, the Winn-Dixie web site does use alt+s as of now to jump to the search box. This may not have been the case earlier.

While I haven’t done a full review of the web site since reading this legal settlement, I will say it is still baffling to me at one level how many basic accessibility issues that are easily corrected get shipped. In less than five minutes I can quickly identify multiple issues that the most basic accessibility review would find.

Last, the full list of requirements placed on Winn-Dixie are an interesting read. Here they are as taken from the legal ruling. All seem reasonable to me but I’m particularly pleased to see the call to include vendors on the web site, the call for training and the repeated auditing to ensure continued compliance.

1. Shall not, no later than __(date)__________, deny individuals with disabilities, including the Plaintiff, the opportunity to participate and benefit from the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations provided through its website www.winndixie.com. The website must be accessible by individuals with disabilities who use computers, laptops, tablets, and smart phones.
2. Shall not, no later than __(date)__________, provide individuals with disabilities, including the Plaintiff, an unequal opportunity to participate and benefit from the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations provided through its website www.winndixie.com. The website must be accessible by individuals with disabilities who use computers, laptops, tablets and smart phones.
3. No later than ________(date)_______, shall adopt and implement a Web Accessibility Policy which ensures that its website conforms with the WCAG 2.0 criteria.
4. No later than __(date)__________, shall require any third party vendors who participate on its website to be fully accessible to the disabled by conforming with WCAG 2.0 criteria
5. No later than __(date)__________, shall make publicly available and directly link from the www.winndixie.com homepage, a statement of WinnDixie’s Accessibility Policy to ensure the persons with disabilities have full and equal enjoyment of its website and shall accompany the public policy statement with an accessible means of submitting accessibility questions and problems.
6. No later than __(date)__________, and at least once yearly thereafter, shall provide mandatory web accessibility training to all employees who write or develop programs or code for, or who publish final content to, www.winndixie.com on how to conform all web content and services with WCAG 2.0 criteria.
7. No later than __(date)__________, and at least once every three months thereafter, shall conduct automated accessibility tests of its website to identify any instances where the website is no longer in conformance with WCAG 2.0.
8. If the Plaintiff believes the Injunction has been violated, he shall give notice (including reasonable particulars) to the Defendant of such violation. The Defendant shall have 30 days from the notice to investigate and correct any alleged violations. If the Defendant fails to correct the violation, the Plaintiff may then seek relief from the Court.
9. In light of what the Court has already found to be the Defendant’s sincere and serious intent to make its website accessible to all, this Injunction will expire in three years.

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I spend a significant part of my professional and personal life working in the area of software accessibility. I’m pretty familiar with all the positives and negatives of various operating systems, strategies for accessibility on those environments and the various tricks and techniques one can sometimes try to work around challenges when they come up. Then too, unfortunately, there are times I’m reminded of the consequences when a solution does not exist.

 

I’ve been a long time user of Quicken for personal financial management. Entries in my current use of the program go back more than 15 years. And yet every three years or so there’s been this race I play against the current level of accessibility of whatever version of Quicken I’m forced to update to and my ability to resolve issues to the point of continuing to be able to use the program. If you want to use the automatic transaction download features of the software, most, if not all, financial institutions cut off support for older versions of Quicken at versions older than three years from the current year. Looking back through my software archives, I find copies of Quicken I purchased in 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012 and most recently 2015.

 

It has been quite some time in my experience that Quicken has worked with ease for me and I suspect others who use screen reading software. But I’m pretty comfortable with all the advanced features of screen readers so have managed to keep things working throughout the years to the point that I felt the trouble in using the software was offset by the benefits. The automatic download of financial transactions, categorization, reporting and investment tracking all combined into a single app have made the program worth continuing to try to keep using for me. I know I can do much of this myself in programs such as Excel and I do some of this today. Still Quicken has, until now, been at the cornerstone of what I’ve used, even if more and more of my analysis and such has moved to Excel.

 

Earlier this year I knew the clock was ticking on the version of Quicken 2012 I had been using to support automatic transaction download. I took the plunge and purchased Quicken 2015 a few months ago. My luck with the program wasn’t good when I first tried to use it. But the deadline hadn’t quite hit for the older version to stop working so I kept trying different techniques without any luck.

 

But after several hours invested over the last few days really trying to make things work and the fact that automatic transaction downloads stopped working about 85 days ago for me, I’m now faced with the reality that my time with Quicken is about to come to an abrupt end. Manual transaction entry hasn’t worked right for several years with all of the screen readers I use which is why the automatic download has become so critical and most financial sites only allow 90 days of data download. To be clear this is only one of the challenges and for what I need to do not nearly enough of Quicken 2015 works right with the screen readers I use and I use pretty much all that exist.

 

In the grand scheme of challenges, I recognize whether I can use Quicken or not is not high on the list. I write about it here mostly I suspect as a bit of catharsis because at an emotional level there is some level of frustration when an environment you’ve been using stops working. And with so much of my time spent in the accessibility space, I have no illusions about some magic behind the curtain. I understand about development priorities from all the players involved. It is just not fun to be on the wrong side of where the line gets drawn and this still happens far too often when it comes to accessibility.

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It is nice to see that Safeway has updated their iOS app for online shopping with an improved VoiceOver experience. I’m not a regular user of this app but as luck would have it, I happened to use it over the weekend before the update. So it was nice to read the description of what’s new for the 2.6 update saying, “Enhanced usability and performance for users of VoiceOver and other built-in iOS accessibility features.”

 

Browsing the virtual shopping isles and other product areas seems much improved. Each product is now a heading, meaning you can use VoiceOver’s navigation by heading feature to jump from product to product. I do wish the headings were put on the entries in the list where the price for the product was given as that would have made browsing even faster. As it stands now, you must move to the product heading and then back two objects to read the same product name that includes a price when using VoiceOver object by object navigation.

 

For example, when on a product listing page, you can set VoiceOver to heading navigation and step from product to product with swipes up or down. When on a product of interest, issue a swipe left gesture twice and you’ll be on the same product but will hear the price and other details. One swipe right and you are on a button for more information about the product. A second swipe right and you are back on the heading for that product. Subsequent swipes right put you on buttons for decreasing the number of a given product you want to buy, a text box for the same quantity info and another button for increasing the amount. One last swipe right and you are on an Add button for putting the product in your virtual shopping cart.

 

The process for selecting a delivery time also seems much improved when using VoiceOver. My recollection from my weekend use was that you had to use a complicated grid where it wasn’t very easy to identify available delivery times. Again I’m not a regular user of the app but had used it a few times before the weekend. With the update, selecting a delivery time has been separated into three different controls for choosing the day, time and number of hours in the delivery window. It seems much easier to navigate.

 

In experimenting with the app a bit, I also noticed more progress messages being read automatically by VoiceOver. This included hearing that item lists were downloading when I selected a given isle and such.

 

In general this seems like some good attention to making this app work better with VoiceOver was given. I’m sure I’ll use it more frequently now because of the ease of use improvements and because of major pricing changes coming to Amazon Fresh in the Seattle area.

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The Customer Services and Support (CSS) team I work for at Microsoft is growing with several exciting opportunities now available. The team has eight new positions available across the three areas where the team has a charter and focus. This includes three spaces: Disability & Accessibility, Online Safety, and Privacy.  The team is focused on driving innovation that will enable all customers with Microsoft services and devices. The Disability Answer Desk is one such innovation, providing a rich support experience for all our customers.  It came from small beginnings with a pilot 18 months ago, and is now handling over 1000 issues a month.  It’s been received well (check out this from the AFB), and we’re excited to look at how we can expand and drive to reach more customers globally.  Subject Matter expertise in Disability and Accessibility is a huge asset to roles in this team: the more we can understand our customers, the more empathy we have to designing the right experience!  The team is also hiring an Accessibility expert to help manage broad spanning programs across a division of 50K folks.”

 

If you are interested in any of the roles, please follow the directions on the external link and feel free to share this information to any individuals or locations that may be interested.

 
 

 
 

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I’ve written a time or two about the accessibility challenges with MLB and that league’s internet offerings. To the credit of the various advocates who have worked with MLB to improve things, MLB has resolved the vast majority of issues around the accessibility of what they offer on the web and in various apps. In many ways MLB could be a model of how to handle accessibility for live sports and screen readers.

 

Unfortunately like much of accessibility, it seems we have to go over the same ground time and time again. This time it is with the NFL and many of their offerings. As just one example, the NFL now has an iOS app that could serve as a model of what developers can do wrong for app accessibility. Nameless controls, poor support for VoiceOver and more. Even the NLF’s main mobile app page is a dizzying array of accessibility challenges. Thus far emails and phone calls to various contacts I can locate for the NFL have gone unanswered. It is really unfortunate that it takes this much effort to make progress but I guess it is time to crank things up a bit and try to get some attention from the NFL around accessibility.

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Any study of the journalism business will show that even today by and large the media does not understand disability or accessibility. Typically we get stories on one of the two ends of the spectrum of possibilities. Either stories talk about everything being horrific or they tout things that are basics that people with disabilities accomplish as being something magically fantastic. And that’s assuming you get coverage at all.

 

The lack of coverage is I suppose a bit frustrating to me on a personal level at various times. Last year I found it interesting to see how the work Apple did around accessibility in their Maps app getting absolutely no coverage in the mainstream tech press. And now the same tech press is trumpeting improved versions of several Yahoo mobile apps as a sign of rebirth at the company with no reference to the reversal in accessibility for many of these same apps. As an example, the updated fantasy football app has become all but unusable on the iOS platform with Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader.

 

I hold no illusions here. I know how the news business works and recognize that accessibility isn’t something viewed as important enough to cover, let alone understand, by most of the press. It is though I suppose a bitter pill to swallow at times to recognize where one does and does not stand within the mainstream universe.

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Recently I wrote about an update to the Amazon Fresh app that was supposed to make the app more accessible but actually did the reverse. A little more than a week ago, Amazon released a second update that had the actual accessibility fixes I suspect were supposed to be present with the first update. The app now works better than ever with VoiceOver. Amazon Fresh currently only delivers groceries in the Seattle area but if you are in the delivery area, the service is worth a try.

 

The improvements involved giving correct names to multiple controls in the app. It makes shopping significantly faster.

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Amazon Fresh offers grocery delivery in the Seattle area. One of the methods you can use to place orders is with an iOS app. The app was updated today listing accessibility improvements as one of the items addressed in the update.

Something must have gone wrong because the app actually introduces some critical accessibility problems that make it tough to use the app at all. Most notably, in an area where you shop by isle names, the isle names went from perfectly readable with VoiceOver to generic names of “isle title”.

Similarly, when you pick an isle, all the products listed now get the name of “item title, item price”. Ironically the price per ounce and such actually reads correctly as a number.

I have reported these issues to Amazon. If I hear back I’ll update things on the blog.

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