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One of the arguments frequently made about why businesses should take accessibility seriously is that by failing to address accessibility significant money is left on the table. Time and again the basic argument goes something like the following:

 

There is this sizable untapped market of people with disabilities just waiting to spend money. If you make your web site comply with accessibility standard X, you too can tap this market and get part of the money just waiting to flow through your newly-made-accessible web site.

 

Today in twitterland, a UN fact sheet on disabilities is circulating that is the latest to make this assertion.

 

In the United Kingdom, 75 per cent of the companies of the FTSE 100 Index on the London Stock Exchange do not meet basic levels of web accessibility, thus missing out on more than $147 million in revenue.

 

Make no mistake, I’m all for accessibility ffor many reasons. That said, I’d love to see these claims about how much money is being left on the table be supported with more factual economic impact data. Consider this blog posting more of a question to the vast online community. Have people found quality economic studies to back these claims up? I’d love to see a business example that shows where company X invested a certain dollar amount in improving accessibility and saw Y return on that spending.

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A couple weeks ago I gave a presentation on Windows 7 at Accessible World for people who use screen reading technology. The audio of my prepared part of the presentation can be found at http://www.kellyford.org/audio/win7demo.mp3. A text transcript of the presentation is at http://www.kellyford.org/random/win7demo.txt.

 

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Well, this press release isn’t exactly my idea written about here previously of not buying printed books until the publishers make electronic copies available but it is definitely in the right direction. Public money needs to equal public accessibility.

 

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Reading Rights Coalition (RRC), which consists of thirty-one organizations dedicated to equal access to the printed word by people who are blind or who have other print disabilities, announced today that the Los Angeles Public Library system has agreed to suspend purchase of inaccessible e-books using the Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) format. The library was informed by the RRC that ADE e-books cannot be accessed by technologies used by the blind and others with print disabilities, including devices that read text aloud or convert it into Braille.

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The folks over at WebAim have launched a second survey on screen reader use and the web. Access the blog post talking about the survey at http://webaim.org/blog/screen-reader-user-survey/ and the survey itself at http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/.

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Going with the random musings theme of my blog, here are a few tidbits.

 

Twitter and Facebook

 

Postings to the blog have been a bit slow of late. In part this is because I have been spending more of my online time on Twitter and Facebook. You can follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kellylford. My Facebook profile is at http://www.facebook.com/klford. Twitter tends to be accessibility related info and Facebook more of a personal nature.

 

JAWS 11 Beta Available

 

Freedom Scientific has released a beta version of JAWS 11. You can find full details at http://www.freedomscientific.com/downloads/jaws/JAWS-public-beta.asp.

 

Room for Improvement in NFL Field Pass Accessibility

 

With the 2009 NFL preseason underway, I opted to give NFL Field pass a try again this year. As a former Wisconsinite, it is a great way for me to listen to Packer radio broadcasts.

 

Initially I was very disappointed to see the service switched to Flash and used it in a completely inaccessible fashion. Work arounds of using a low bandwidth version of the page and launching game audio from scores pages have resolved the blocking nature of the change. That said, the fact that the player itself still fails to use Flash in an accessible fashion is a disappointment. Audio control of the player for example remains inaccessible. One would hope for better of a leading sports league. Accessibility should not mean finding these work arounds in the first place.

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TechFlash is one of the blogs I read to stay current on happenings in the technology sector. An article talking about a $2.5 million site redesign for WhitePages.com caught my attention this afternoon.

 

Firing up my web browser of choice I navigated to the site. And wonder of wonder for $2.5 million I see the first link showing up to my screen reader as “images/AE5”. As anyone familiar with web accessibility can guess, this is a link without any alternative text. I guess $2.5 million isn’t enough to buy you a bit of accessibility these days.

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I’m not sure what it says about the social web that I’m writing a blog post about an exchange I had on Twitter. It feels a bit self-indulgent but that aside I wanted to expand briefly on some comments I made around accessibility of printed books.

 

I’ve written here previously about Bookshare.
Basically the organization takes advantage of a 1996 change in U.S. copyright law to make accessible copies of books available to people with print disabilities. The simplified explanation is that I can scan a book, upload it to Bookshare and other people who are blind can read the book without having to invest the hours it takes to scan the same book. This makes sense to me because it seems incredibly wasteful to have multiple people converting the same printed pages to an accessible format.

 

Bookshare recently celebrated the fact that 50,000 books were now available on the site. I’m a big book fan and part of me is thrilled to see this milestone reached.

 

Yet this 50,000 number falls far short of the 300,000 books Amazon currently touts as being available for the Kindle. The point here isn’t to talk specifically about Kindle accessibility (the device isn’t accessible today) but rather to say that current best efforts at book accessibility fall far short of what the marketplace is doing when it comes to the number of books being made available in electronic formats.

 

I’ve not done all the research yet but one thing I frequently (You have a lot of time to think when turning pages to scan a book.) wonder about is what would happen if all the libraries and other book buyers spending public tax dollars told the publishing industry the checkbook was closed until the book accessibility problem was solved. For example, suppose no public money could be spent on books unless an accessible copy of the book being purchased was made available through Bookshare or the National Library Service. I know some of this has happened for some educational categories of books in theory.

 

Today across the U.S. we spend hundreds of millions, if not billions, supporting the publishing industry through public purchases of books. I know when I looked into what my own property tax dollars to the King County library help support, it was something around $10 million annually spent on material acquisitions. Sure, not all of this buys printed books but I’m sure even today the vast majority goes for books on the printed page. What changes in accessibility are we getting with all this public spending? Little to none from what I experience.

 

These books bought with public money are the same books that I or someone else still has to spend countless hours turning page by page on a scanner to make accessible. I say close the public checkbook until this isn’t needed. My guess is that the public dollar isn’t a dollar the publishing industry wants to lose and they’ll take book accessibility much more seriously.

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A couple of interesting news items in the accessible web browsing world worth mentioning here.

 

Yahoo Funding NVDA Development

 

I noticed on the NVDA blog that Yahoo is now providing them some funding.  You can read the details at http://www.nvda-project.org/blog/YahooSupportsNVDA.

 

From the blog posting, initial work will be for some further ARIA support and table navigation in HTML documents.

 

Firefox 3.5 Accessibility Improvements

 

A blog post at http://www.marcozehe.de/2009/06/26/new-accessibility-features-in-firefox-3-5/ details many of the accessibility improvements expected in FF 3.5. Give this a read.  Improved access to text attributes when editing, better DHTML support, accessibility to parts of the HTML5 audio and video embedded controls and improved ARIA support are a few of the items mentioned.

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Today’s announcement that the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind have joined forces to try and stop Arizona State University from taking part in a pilot program using Amazon’s Kindle to make electronic versions of textbooks makes for an interesting legal challenge. My reading of the situation is that it gets to the basic question that needs to be asked much more often when it comes to accessibility and technology. Namely, if an organization who has an obligation to meet a certain level of accessibility is going to deploy technology from another source, how much responsibility does that organization have to ensure accessibility of the technology being deployed?

 

While accessibility legislation would likely never dictate that Amazon needs to make the Kindle accessible, I say if an organization covered by accessibility legislation is going to use such technology, it has an obligation to ensure accessibility. I’m sure the counter argument here is going to be something around the typical we’ll make the books accessible without making the device accessible and such. That’s typically what happens.

 

Yet at some point it isn’t about just the content but the full experience afforded by the technology. I’m no lawyer but the University seems in the wrong here. To me they should be pressing Amazon for accessibility before using their population as a pilot and really helping Amazon sell more products.

 

There’s no good reason other than lack of commitment why the Kindle isn’t accessible today.

 

BALTIMORE, June 25 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) filed suit today against Arizona State University (ASU) to prevent the university from deploying Amazon’s Kindle DX electronic reading device as a means of distributing electronic textbooks to its students because the device cannot be used by blind students. Darrell Shandrow, a blind ASU student, is also a named plaintiff in the action. The Kindle DX features text-to-speech technology that can read textbooks aloud to blind students. The menus of the device are not accessible to the blind, however, making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX. In addition to ASU, five other institutions of higher education are deploying the Kindle DX as part of a pilot project to assess the role of electronic textbooks and reading devices in the classroom. The NFB and ACB have also filed complaints with the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, asking for investigations of these five institutions, which are: Case Western Reserve University, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Pace University, Princeton University, and Reed College. The lawsuit and complaints allege violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.s

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A little more than a year ago I wrote about
Pandora’s failure to understand the current state of Flash accessibility. The net impact is that you are unable to sign into the main web site to use your Pandora account. The Flash used on the web site has several other accessibility issues as well. As I wrote back then, Pandora’s main response was that Adobe needed to do more to make Flash accessible.

 

I used a recent announcement about an update to the Pandora service to revisit the state of Pandora accessibility with the folks from Pandora. While the conversation did move beyond a restatement that Adobe needed to do more, the end result seems to be that improving Pandora accessibility isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

 

I will say that if you use Pandora through the alternative of a Squeezebox, things have actually improved. The integration between Pandora and the Squeeze Center software has improved to the point that you can delete stations, add music to them and in general use your full Pandora account. Still it would be nice to see the main web site fix basic accessibility issues.

 

What follows is an exchange of comments from myself and a Pandora representative on the Pandora blog. Note that in the below I did edit to correct two typing errors in my original comments.

 

Any chance of fixing the sign in accessibility issues for people who use screen readers. I’m on my second year of subscribing to Pandora and Adobe has built an infrastructure to make Flash accessible years ago. Yet the last time I talked with your support department about this a year ago, I was told Adobe had to make Flash accessible. They did long before this so I still wonder if you are looking at this or what’s causing the delay. I shouldn’t have to get assistance just to sign in here. Other web sites have resolved this.

Posted by: Kelly Ford at May 26, 2009 04:27 PM

 

@Kelly Ford–Here’s our FAQ entry with the skinny on accessibility for visually-impaired users: http://blog.pandora.com/faq/#530. Please write support@pandora.com if you have any further questions.

-Alee

Posted by: Alee – Listener Advocate at May 28, 2009 11:49 AM

 

@Alee,

You are missing my point. I already know about the support link telling me the hints for people who are blind and have discussed this very issue with support on numerous occasions. And that support link says to sign in I need to get someone who can see to sign me in. My point is that this an endless circle. Pandora tells me Adobe needs to do more to make Flash accessible. And I’m saying Adobe has done the work and did it years ago. For some references please see http://theideaplace.net/archives/2008/05/trying_to_conne.html, the Adobe accessibility blog at http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/, and the Adobe Best practices at http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/best_practices.html.

The last time I exchanged e-mail with support on this topic I was told to go tell Adobe you needed Flash to support accessibility. And Adobe says they do support it and my use of Flash web sites that comply with Adobe’s accessibility requirements shows that it is possible to make an accessible flash site.

So I’m trying to understand what it will take to get Pandora to move forward on this. Is it a resource issue (you don’t have the funds), a knowledge issue or something missing from Flash’s accessibility support? I’d really like to not have this same discussion in 2010.

Posted by: Kelly Ford at May 28, 2009 04:57 PM

 

@Kelly Ford–Allow me to apologize. It will indeed take more than Adobe’s accessibility for Pandora to create an independently useable sign-in interface for visually impaired users. It is on our to-do list and I am very sorry to say that we have no new developments on when this will be available.

-Alee

Posted by: Alee – Listener Advocate at June 2, 2009 12:12 PM

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