NPR’s Weekend Edition featured accessible audio games today.
Leave a CommentCategory: Accessibility
I’m sure the court fights and battles will go on for years but at least for the first time today a court has recognized that the U.S. Government does not comply with our own laws on accessibility when it comes to money. Maybe sometime I won’t have to ask others what the bills in my wallet are.
Sure their are strategies (folding money) and gadgets to read bills but the fact is that U.S. money is not accessible today. It should be in my opinion. How can we claim we as a nation want meaningful accessibility when something as simple as our money doesn’t meet that standard?
The NYT has this article on the most current legal action over online accessibility. This time around it is the NFB against Target, with the case claiming Target’s web site is not accessible.
As the article points out, this is really just the latest in a series of legal actions to apply some sort of accessibility standard to the web. The typical question in these cases boils down to whether the web can be considered a place of public accommodation.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was written before the web became the ubiquitous part of society that it is today. That’s unfortunate because it has left room for much ambiguity in this area. Perhaps the legislation should have been stronger in the beginning to allow for more applicability in new circumstances but I think the spirit of the law is obvious—do not exclude parts of society from what you offer.
Whether it is this case or another down the road, I tend to think at some point the ADA or another legal standard will be applied to the web. Today it is mostly government web sites that have a legal obligation to meet accessibility requirements of Section 508 here in the U.S. There are other legal standards in the international arena as well.
Of course the real fun’s going to be determining what constitutes an accessible web site. Here in the target suit you see disagreement over even that basic fact.
The National Federation of the Blind sued Target, contending that the company’s inaction violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because the Web site is essentially an extension of its other public accommodations, and as such, should be easily accessible to people with disabilities.
A Target spokeswoman would not comment on those assertions, but in court the company offered testimony from three blind users rebutting the federation’s arguments.
From my experience pinning down exactly what’s accessible is often a challenge. I’ve successfully purchased items from Target’s online site on several occasions. Does that mean the site’s accessible? I also know of web sites that I’ve not been able to use but know that the reason was attributable to the particular screen reader I was using at the time.
Then too comes in the question of accessible versus usable. It is ironic that the article site’s Amazon’s “accessible” option here as an example of a company doing the right thing.
Amazon, she added, “is already generally usable for people with screen readers.” It has offered a text-only, streamlined site designed for such devices (amazon.com/access).
Ignoring the entire question of having a separate site for accessibility, opening the referenced Amazon.com web page one can quickly find a basic accessibility issue that violates any known standard on accessible web design. Specifically, the edit box used for entering search terms is missing the HTML title or label tag. These are used to give the box a menaingful name for screen readers and other assistive technology. Today this box reads simply as “edit” to a screen reader.
Now does this make the site inaccessible? By definition one could probably say yes. That said, the page is clearly usable. If there were multiple edit boxes on this same page, the missing labels could become quite a problem though.
What about user skill and knowledge? What level of familiarity with the web , access technology and such should be expected when considering accessibility and usability?
Technically I suppose this isn’t around the corner but in driving home from the airport recently we noticed a construction sign on a road near our house indicating lane closures that were about to start. The road in question is Old Redmond Road in the city of Redmond and is the road where I catch a bus for work. There’s also the typical suburban strip mall down a few blocks from where we live on this road.
Regretably there’s been no sidewalk on part of Old Redmond Road and for more than two years a project to put one in was in a stalled state due to funding issues or so I was told. This has made it difficult for me to walk to things like a grocery store and such in this shopping center.
A bit of web browsing this morning tells me that the City of Redmond must have found some money. The project descriptionn says that the missing sidewalks will be added.
Personally this is great news for my little corner of the world.
Comments closedOne feature in the JAWS screen reader is known as “custom label assign”. This is particularly helpful on web sites that fail to label graphics or other items that should contain alternative text or other such labels. This can turn the gibberish of /../images/33342.;gif into something more meaningful.
In the case of www.nfl.com, many of the team logos are not labeled correctly.
I’ve created a custom label file that gives these items correct names. You can obtain the file from http://www.kellyford.org/random/nfl.zip.
To use the file, ope it in the JAWS settings packager and choose the import option. For more detailed instructions see the JAWS help file within the Settings Packager.
An early morning dental appointment had me catching a cab to return to work. Getting out of the cab I noticed a sign on the door with the large raised letters giving the taxi ID and such. A couple seconds more exploration showed this was reproduced in braille.
Walking into work I had to stop by the ATM. I grabbed an earphone I carry with a portable radio (old school I know because it isn’t an MP3 player) plugged it in and had the ATM speaking my entire transaction.
Both small items but at times you get a glimpse of how the world should be with respect to accessibility. It should just be there and just work. Taking the glass is half full perspective, these simple experiences really jazz me when it comes to accessibility.
It has been more than a year since people from Washington and several other western states have been able to obtain free copies of their credit reports. Over the past year, citizens of the rest of the nation have had the same access made available in a staged process. As a recent article in the Seattle times points out, the process hasn’t been perfect but according to the article things should be getting easier. I must ask, “Easier for who?”
The legislation making free access to credit reports is something that we should have had years ago. With the number of companies using the details of your credit report it is vital that you know what it contains, especially because sometimes there are inaccuracies. I know in my case back when I was living in Portland, there happened to be another Kelly Ford living in the same apartment complex as me and some of that person’s bad debts did appear on my credit report at one point. It was a major effort to get them removed.
That’s in part why I’m a big fan of the required access to your credit report. Sadly in the year that the process for this has been in place, there’s been no progress on accessibility to the report request process or the reports themselves.
Obtaining a copy of your credit report requires you to go to the official web site to start the request at http://www.annualcreditreport.com. Aside from basic accessibility flaws like missing alternative text for images, the web site uses the increasingly common visual word verification test in the initial stage of the request process. With no alternative, such as audio of the graphical word to be entered that is used on some web sites, you are locked out if you are blind.
True you can request a copy of your report by phone or e-mail. Thus far my attempts to use these methods have not proved to lead to any greater accessibility as there’s no provision that I can find in these methods to get an actual accessible copy of the credit report. By contrast the online process will lead you to an online version of your report that is more or less accessible. Still it shouldn’t be necessary to get someone else to assist in the process at all, especially for government-mandated access to personal information.
I hope others reading this will consider writing to the editorial staff of the Seattle Times as I have done asking them to cover the accessibility aspects of this issue. Letters can be sent to opinion@seattletimes.com and must include day and evening phone numbers as well as your full name and home address. The paper’s web site gives full details.
In the past year I’ve exchanged several e-mails and phone conversations with officials from various congressional offices for the house and senate of Washington State. Thus far I’ve been unsuccessful at getting any politician to take a serious interest in this issue. In my view the process and credit reports one obtains should be 100% accessible and individuals with disabilities should be able to obtain and access the information independently.
A comment about braille signs on hotel room doors caught my attention in this article. Far too often folks slap a few braille and large print signs on doors and think they’ve done all they need to in order to make something accessible. This article is worth reading because it makes the point that accessibility is really about going beyond basic compliance to whatever accessibility standard you are using.
Comments closedCall this a self-serving blog post since the position is working on my team, but we have an opening for someone to come lead accessibility testing for Internet Explorer. The link has the full job details and I’m happy to answer any questions on the position.
Comments closedI noticed an article talking about how Brazil was going to start production of braille writers in the country.
Likely you can pick any population demographic and see the striking difference between the haves and have-nots on the planet. Each time I read one of these articles about an accessibility technology being built or used in a place that hasn’t had it in the past, I’m thankful for the education and experiences I’ve had.
I grew up during a time when it was no longer standard practice to send kids who were blind off to a residential school. In my case I was offered a choice between what I’ve come to call the “Braille Jail” (Wisconsin’s school for the Visually Handicapped) and what was a pilot program in Wisconsin at the time to send kids with disabilities to “regular” schools and provide the additional resources necessary as part of the education within the school.
This was long before terms like “mainstreaming” and “classroom assistant” were a part of the educational landscape. In my case these additional resources simply meant a full day of school in kindergarten instead of the traditional half. My afternoons were spent doing things like learning braille and developing my sense of touch. In later years it meant a resource was available to do things like read books, tests and such. This is an over simplification and perhaps I’ll blog about my entire education experience at some point.
Reflecting back on my education today, I am so thankful I had the experiences I did. I’ve talked to many people who are blind who didn’t have anything approaching the positive attitudes from teachers and other students I did. All wasn’t necessarily perfect as the school system I attended was not in the city where I lived. Today living in the Seattle area, a distance of 17 miles doesn’t seem like a big deal. Back then the same distance–from Fond du Lac to Oshkosh–was like two different worlds.
Perhaps my only regret is that I didn’t attend any of the same schools as anyone else in my family. Sure the stories of school days past are pretty much the same the nation over, but the characters in mine versus others in my family are all different. That said I wouldn’t even call it a regret. In a family of 11 kids, it was assuredly easier to be my own individual when I wasn’t lost in the shuffle of being just another “Ford” at the local high school.
I’ve used a lot of gadgets, technology and devices over the years. That’s likely another blog post or two but it is nice to see what I regard as one of the standards, namely a Perkins, being made available to more people. Screen readers, scanners and such are all great but I’ve had my Perkins since I was five and it is still something I treasure. Some do not have the physical ability to read or write braille, but for anyone who does, braille is a must and the sound of a Perkins hammering away as someone writes is music to my ears.