A collection of thoughts on what comes to mind
Despite installing as I understand it pretty much all the WordPress security you can, my blog has been hacked multiple times. It reached the point that Google was claiming my site was a security threat. As a result, I’ve opted for now to try a new name with the same old content and hopefully more frequently added new content.
I also like the new name better anyway. I like the idea of putting thoughts and ideas out and finding what resonates.
Leave a CommentAs much as I’m sure anyone familiar with web accessibility doesn’t need yet another example of why alt text matters, as a consumer of web content I certainly am impacted when it is missing.
For anyone exploring cutting the cord, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a handy resource to show you what digital television stations you can receive in your area with an antenna. Navigate to https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps and enter an address, city and state or zip code to get this information. Results are in a table that has headers and such. This is good.
Unfortunately, one of the key pieces of information, the signal strength from these results is a graphic. As you can expect from the title of this post, there is no alt text on these graphics.
Section 508 has been around for quite some time as have the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Proper alt text, again as I’m sure pretty much anyone working in the web environment knows, is a requirement. One can only wonder why something this basic was missed.
One CommentI’m a big fan of public libraries and the wide range of resources they make available. As a child making stops to my local bookmobile or summer afternoons spent at “Story Time Tree” to hear a fun adventure were two of my favorite activities. As an adult, I make frequent use of the eBook services, databases and other resources libraries make available.
OverDrive is as far as I know the largest player in making eBooks available to libraries. In many ways they provide a quality service but I’d encourage every librarian to fully understand the bargain you are making when you use OverDrive.
Would your library tolerate an author or other speaker coming to give a talk in your facility secretly whispering to some visitors they should not attend the talk? I think not, yet when you invite OverDrive into your facility, that is close to what you are doing.
OverDrive heavily promotes their Libby app as a part of the eBook services they offer. What I suspect most librarians do not know is that for users who rely on screen reading technology, the following is what greets their patrons when the Libby app is launched:
Welcome to Libby! This is a secret message for screen readers. We are working to improve your experience with this app. In the meantime, our OverDrive app is more accessible. You can find it in the app store. We thank you for your patience.
Libby is hardly a new app at this point and it should have been accessible from the start in the first place. This message has been present to the best of my knowledge for close to two years now. My own requests to OverDrive asking for any updates have gone without any meaningful response on multiple occasions.
Accessibility requirements too are nothing new. Nor are the technical details to make an app accessible a mystery. Apple, where this message appears on the iOS Libby app, has a wealth of resources. OverDrive itself by directing users to their older app, claiming it is more accessible, also demonstrates they understand accessibility to some degree.
I’d encourage librarians to ask OverDrive when this app will be accessible? Ask why is this message indicating the app has accessibility issues “secret”. It is beyond time that these sorts of challenges not be hidden away. It is time for them to be fixed and most definitely not hidden.
One CommentThe following is copied from email distributed to various American Council of the Blind email lists. The application deadline is December 19, 2018.
Vacancy Announcement: Director of Advocacy and Governmental Affairs
The American Council of the Blind (ACB) is seeking a Director of Advocacy and Governmental Affairs to work in its national office in Alexandria, VA.
The primary duties of this position will include:
The Director of Advocacy and Governmental Affairs reports to the Executive Director.
The successful candidate must have:
Desirable skills or training include general familiarity with assistive devices used by people who are blind, and a degree in political science or law, or other specific disability-related advocacy training. Experience in the use of social media to communicate organizational messages is highly desired. Salary depends upon experience.
Applicants must send a resume, cover letter, and brief writing sample by e-mail to search-committee@acb.org.
Applications must be received in the ACB national office by no later than December 19, 2018.
Leave a CommentBlog readers will know that accessibility is one of my interests and I’m always particularly interested in ways to make larger data sets more accessible and consumable. Weather maps for example that allow those who can see to quickly get a sense of the temperatures throughout a region are rarely in my use very accessible when you are not able to see.
I’m also a fan of the do it yourself approach to problem solving when possible so started exploring one of my preferred weather sites, Weather Underground, to see what might be possible.
My basic goals were to try and see what might be possible to get a sense of the coldest and warmest places in a state or country and just the general range of temperatures. Weather Underground makes this delightfully easy with just some basic web address navigation.
Washington State is my current home and with a quick navigate to http://www.wunderground.com/US/WA/ I quickly get a table listing 45 cities in the state and the current temperatures and related details. Activate a temp button that is one of the table column headers and that list of cities goes from being sorted alphabetically to temperature. So I can quickly tell that as I write this, Bellingham, WA, at 45 °F is the warmest place in the state and Wenatchee, at 32 °F, is the coldest.
A quick web address edit to replace the “A” from “WA” for Washington with “I” for Wisconsin lands me at http://www.wunderground.com/US/WI/? Where I can easily say, “Wow it is cold back home,” in my home state of Wisconsin. The warmest place is all of 12 °F. And once again, a quick activate of the Temp button and I can sort by temperature to get a sense of the range of temperatures.
My simple address bar change of web address works great for a state-by-state exploration. But at times I’m curious about the big picture. More address bar magic yields results for an entire country. For example, browsing to http://www.wunderground.com/US/USa// brings up 500 different locations that are part of the US. Ignore the fact that the page title says this is for Wyoming and be aware this also includes territories such as Guam. You’ll have to have a bit of a sense of geography as the table lists just city names but it is a good way to get a sense of the temperature ranges for a country.
Some trial and error has shown me the URLs to use for a few other countries such as Mexico, the United Kingdom, Russia and Australia to name a few. Again use the Temp button to sort by temperature where I see that Australia has a range of 109 °F for the hottest location down to 40 °F for the coldest as of now.
Situations like this lend themselves to loads of creativity for accessibility. I could imagine an app on any platform that uses touch and the accessibility infrastructure on that platform to use sound and more to turn my little table explorations of temperatures into a customer-engaging accessibility experience.
One CommentTerrill Thompson, the driver behind an accessible NCAA basketball tournament bracket, is following that effort with what he bills as the “Accessible Sports Survey”. The survey asks for some basic info about the sports you enjoy, sources of sports information you use, number of sporting events you attend and some basic demographic info about any assistive technology and disabilities you want to share. Thompson indicates data from the survey will be used to help develop a business case to convince major online sporting outlets to improve accessibility. Take a few minutes and add your responses to the survey.
Leave a CommentEach March, college basketball fans are consumed by March Madness and filling out countless NCAA brackets. With my favorite Wisconsin Badgers having a number 1 seed in this year’s tournament, you can bet I want to get my bracket in.
I’m as much of a fan of accessibility as I am sports, so this time is always an interesting checkpoint to see how far accessibility has come or not when it comes to something as basic as completing one of these brackets. Each year I browse around to the various online offerings to join a bracket challenge and each year I’m largely disappointed. Rarely have any of the mainstream sports sites done anything to make either the basic bracket one can download as a PDF file or their contests where you create brackets accessible.
Back in 2012, I wrote about Yahoo’s iOS offering in this space. In three years from my first browse of the latest offering here, it seems we’ve made no progress in this app and have even gone in reverse as there are even more nameless buttons than when I wrote about the app three years ago. I first wrote about searching for an accessible bracket back in 2007.
The one mainstay of accessibility here has come from Terrill Thompson and his work on an accessible NCAA bracket. He’s been doing this for several years now and for me it is one of those items in web accessibility that I personally appreciate immensely. So a big thanks to Terrill for the continued work on this each year.
It would be nice if some year the main players in this space from the sports world actually addressed accessibility of their bracket experiences also. But I’m sure glad Terrill does what he does here and when his contest is open this year you can bet I’ll be submitting my bracket and looking for the Badgers to have a great tournament. So sports and accessibility fans, come join me and thank Terrill and join his contest when it is available and let’s have some March Madness fun.
Leave a CommentYears ago when I worked at the Trace R&D center, I had the opportunity to be on a panel of judges at least once for an engineering class taught by Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden for a competition looking at accessibility of consumer appliances. My recollection was that students hat to come up with a design for a stove to maximize accessibility. TV Lenny, of American TV fame, was the main judge. One of the main criteria for the competition being that the appliances had to be aimed at the mass market while addressing accessibility.
I mention all of this because having just concluded a search for a new dish washer I’m once again reminded of the vast landscape of inaccessibility that still exists in the consumer appliance market. Simple changes could make a big difference.
As just one example, the dish washer I ended up selecting comes from General Electric. It has physical buttons, which in itself is a challenge to find these days. Better yet, when pressed, the buttons make a short beep sound. Great until you realize that the buttons cycle between multiple settings with no way to know where you are at any point in the cycle and no way to get back to defaults.
The simple change here as an example would be to have the buttons make two beeps when they’ve reached the default setting when cycling. For example one button is to select the washing mode and cycles between settings including Automatic, Rinse and a couple others I’ve already forgotten. The dish washer uses the same settings unless something is changed so you might say, great set things once and forget it and most of the time you’d be fine. But if anyone changes the defaults, it is a guessing game when you do not see to get back to known settings. And yet again, had GE just added a second simple beep when the Automatic setting was reached in the cycle, ease of use for people who do not see would be that much greater. By no means perfect but certainly better than what exists today.
I won’t claim to profess to be any kind of expert on who’s a leader in the consumer appliance accessibility space. These are not exactly everyday kinds of purchases for most of us. That said, it would be fun to see a panel at whatever industry tradeshow is the leader in this arena reviewing consumer appliances, much like that class competition I sat in years ago did. I suspect there would be a lot of ideas made available that when amortized over the scale of products sold by any manufacturer wouldn’t impact the bottom line.
I don’t recall all the details of that class competition but I do recall that one team included an optional handle of some sort for the stove for some individuals with disabilities. I also recall Lenny’s advice about that handle and is went something like, heck no, don’t make it optional. Include it in every box, most people won’t use it and will think of it as a throw away but the people who do need it will have it instantly and besides, people love throwaways like that because they think they are getting a better deal.
So readers, what are your experiences with appliance accessibility? Who’s the industry leader? What simple changes would you like to see made in consumer apliances?
One CommentA few weeks ago I wrote about accessibility issues in an iOSapp from The University of Wisconsin app for following Badger football. This is just a short update to say that the University has been very responsive around these issues and corrected the problems I detailed within a couple weeks. The latest update to the app has improved support for VoiceOver.
Leave a CommentAs I’ve written here previously, I’m an alum of the University of Wisconsin and take pride in having attended the school and my degree. I’m also a sports fan so enjoy following the Wisconsin Badgers and fall Saturdays still remind me of the many rich traditions in Madison that go along with Badger football.
Today I noticed a tweet from @BadgerFootball talking about a new Wisconsin Football Gameday app to stay in touch with, as the name implies, happenings during Badger football games and more.
In just a few minutes of trying the app with Apple’s VoiceOver—a built-in screen reader on the iOS platform—it is a disappointment to see that the University of Wisconsin has once again failed to pay attention to accessibility. Blog readers can search the archives for my last adventures with the Wisconsin athletic department over accessibility issues with football broadcasts over the internet. The service used back then has once again been replaced and to the University’s credit they did provide me with work arounds when the accessibility issues with the broadcast streaming technology were identified.
One can only wonder what processes are or are not in place though to ensure University offerings are accessible. In the gameday app for example, one need only launch the app and use basic VoiceOver gestures of sweeping right to quickly find the accessibility problems. The first items encountered talk about tickets for a game against Northern Iowa. And as a note to UW staff, Northern has a typo in your app where you have it spelled Nothern.
After the first two sweep right gestures, all one finds with subsequent gestures of the same type is a series of seven nameless links. It is this basic problem that leads me to wonder about processes to ensure accessibility. Does the University know about VoiceOver? For apps created for the iOS platform, is VoiceOver compatibility a release requirement?
The nameless links on the app home screen are not the only issues encountered. As an example, following the second nameless link leads to an area of the app called Gameday. Within the Gameday area is a link for Rosters/Depth.
The team depth chart is exposed as one single object to VoiceOver and even worse, read as first a series of position indications and numbers followed by a list of player names. It is impossible to make sense of and even associate player names with their numbers. Major League Baseball has clearly demonstrated making team rosters readable with VoiceOver can be accomplished in their MLB At Bat iOS app.
As just one other example of a basic accessibility issue quickly discovered in the app, there are a series of buttons that appear in many locations. They have names that include “arrow left 72@2x” “arrow right 72@2x” and “but refresh 72@2x”. Obviously one can guess the purposes of these buttons but any reasonable accessibility support of an app would not include such nonsensical names.
I’ll start the process of outreach to individuals at Wisconsin. That said, it is a disappointment to see that this level of inaccessibility exists and something released by an institution under multiple legal requirements to support accessibility and an institution that has a publicly stated accessibility policy that would seem to imply that this app fails to comply.
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