The Idea Place Posts

Blog readers may recall my earlier writing about struggles with the online media experiences for streaming Badger athletic events. It is disappointing to this Badger alum and fan to once again have to point out that Wisconsin Athletics seems to show little care for web accessibility.

 

A posting from the Wisconsin Athletics (UWBadgersdotcom) twitter account earlier today said, “A @BadgerFootball game is better with family & friends. Check out great group tix packages that include free concessions. http://ow.ly/4zwVr.”

 

Well I’m always looking for good reasons to visit Wisconsin and the idea of a family outing at a Badger football game later this year captivated me. Sadly, following the link in this tweet leads to http://wisconsinfootball2011.com/, a web site that was clearly created with no attention to accessibility.

 

Using the latest release of multiple screen readers for Windows, you experience a web site that makes extensive use of Adobe’s Flash. You can read some buttons with labels including one titled Group Tickets. Presumably this is the one I’d want. Activating any of the buttons, including the previously mentioned Group Tickets button, fails to change the content that a screen reader reads from comments about the season this fall from head football coach Bret Belema. In addition, there are multiple buttons in this Flash content that have no labels for accessibility purposes.

 

It is common for Bielema to end interviews as he does in the statement on this web site with the phrase, “On, Wisconsin!”

 

Sadly I must add to this and say, “Shame on Wisconsin!” Shame on the university for ignoring both the legal and ethical responsibilities you have to take accessibility, including that for the web, seriously. This is not the first instance of such behavior. One can only hope it will be the last and that the university will institute policies and follow the same to ensure that accessibility is taken seriously.

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I’ve heard nothing but positive things around the people behind SXSW and accessibility over the years. This posting is not meant to detract from those efforts. In fact, all things being equal, I think most people who put content online would prefer it to be accessible. I do not think people go out of their way to make content inaccessible but rather often do not extend the effort to make content accessible so are left with the default result of whatever process their content publishing tools use.

 

Visiting one of the pages on the SXSW site talking about attending, this is what greets users of screen reading software.

 

icon_hotelmap.jpg

sxsw_go_2011.jpg

-1_23.jpg

sxsw_tech_summit-4.jpg

comedy11_bug.jpg

stylex_171x80.png

sxsw_hiring_hubproof.jpg

 

Looking at the source HTML, we see that the screen reader is doing exactly what’s expected. Namely, it is presenting the alt text, albeit rather confusing in this case. I’m not sure how one should know that -1_23.jpg equals something about iTunes.

 

<A href=”http://www.itunes.com/sxsw” jQuery1300063703657=”50″><IMG class=centerednb alt=-1_23.jpg src=”/sites/sxsw.com/files/-1_23.jpg” width=171 height=84></A>

 

At times I’ve experienced progress but believe the web has a long journey before even something as simple as meaningful alternative text is eliminated as a basic accessibility problem.

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I’ve written previously about frustrations with the Pandora music service to take accessibility seriously and address the shortcomings with the sign in process and the Flash in general used on the web site. While Pandora hasn’t changed the basic response of get someone to help you sign in or lack of addressing accessibility, I am delighted to announce there is Hope for Pandora.

 

Hope in this case is an accessible Windows Pandora client created by the same developer who is the driving force for the wildly popular Qwitter Twitter client used by many computer users who are blind. At a cost of $10, Hope is well worth the investment for the functionality the client makes available today and to support continued work from this developer. With the first release of Hope happening just a few days ago, and the track record I’ve seen of improvements from the developer, this is something I’m more than willing to support.

 

You can learn more about Hope from the product’s readme document.

 

Since I have talked about Pandora accessibility previously, it is worth mentioning that the iPhone version of the Pandora client works well with VoiceOver, Apple’s screen reader. And should you be curious how easy it is to create accessible apps for the iPhone or iPad, read one of the best articles I’ve ever read on accessible software development. Even if you have no interest in the iPhone or iPad, read the article because it does a great job at knocking down many of the myths I’ve heard over and over about how people who have visual impairments use or do not use software.

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People who know me in person know that I’m from Wisconsin and a fan of the Green Bay Packers. Fortunes for both the Pack and accessibility have improved since I was a kid watching Packer defeat after defeat and limited to only radio coverage of the post game aftermath.

 

Today there’s a better than 50% chance the Pack will win a game and I can read all the press coverage I want from hundreds of online news sources. One of my favorites is the Packers Blog from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Packer beat reporter Greg A. Bedard is really a standout reporter and illustration of how to use a blog effectively for sports journalism.

 

Bedard recently started rating player performances after each game and a summary of what the team would do to cut the roster down to 53 by the time of the 2010 NFL campaign. The initial blogs for both of these topics featured a graphical chart for the data being discussed, which was obviously not very accessible.

 

I wrote a simple e-mail asking for a text version of the info, making the standard offer to give more details and such as needed. It was a treat then to see Bedard start including tabular versions of the data by publishing Google Docs versions of the spreadsheets I suspect he uses to generate the graphical info.

 

Oh sure, the accessibility isn’t perfect and the industry behind any tool that generates HTML can do more to make accessibility happen automatically. Hint, The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative has an authoring tool working group devoted to this very topic with guidelines out for last call review.

 

It was refreshing to have these tables just show up after one simple request without a lot of back and forth or need to convince someone that accessibility really does matter. So as they chant at Lambeau, Go Pack Go! And thanks to one beat reporter for making his work available to more of his audience.

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News stories about web site redesign tend to catch my attention in part because I’m curious to see how accessibility is on the new site. More often than not, I find a disappointing experience.

 

Today an article about Nordstrom’s web site being redesigned appeared in the Seattle Times. I have nothing against this retailer but will say this is not a shopping destination for me personally. That said, I was curious about the web site so took a browse over to http://shop.nordstrom.com/.

 

Coverage in the news story says in part:

 

Three years in the making, the new site promises easier navigation, bigger photos and a prominent place where people can express their thoughts about the latest trends.

 

Amazing, because the main navigation for the highlighted areas would fail any accessibility validation. Web site items to shop by department, brand or explore the conversation options, all use strictly OnClick behavior to expand lists of entries within those areas.

 

This is such a frequent failure in web accessibility that screen readers have worked around this problem and with several I tried you can actually expand the lists and see the entries under each area. But if as an example you are using only a keyboard to browse, you appear to be out of luck.

 

This pattern continues at the product category level and I suspect throughout the web site. As an example, try narrowing by any of the suggested options for men’s jeans.

 

Then there is mystery flash again used on the site. I say mystery because it would appear that the Flash content fails to take advantage of the accessibility options for making Flash accessible from Adobe.

 

Web accessibility has a long journey to go. I’m sure the folks at Nordstrom didn’t set out to build a site with basic accessibility challenges. I don’t know if they attempted to ensure accessibility and as I said at the start, just happened to browse this site because an article caught my attention in the news. We need more education, awareness, application of standards and just an overall sense that accessibility matters or else we’ll continually be stuck in the state of having to advocate on a site by site basis for accessibility.

 

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I’ve written here on a few occasions about my frustrations with MLB accessibility. In particular the lack of response to phone and e-mail to the dedicated accessibility resources listed on MLB’s web pages.

 

About 10 days ago I received an e-mail indicating MLB was trying to get in communication with me. I connected by phone with someone about a week ago.

 

While the phone conversation was pleasant, I really don’t feel there is any meaningful update on the item that’s been the topic of my repeated communication here. Specifically, I have asked on multiple occasions about accessibility plans for the At Bat functionality that provides things like pitch speed, box scores and such.

 

Two things the MLB representative did tell me that I’m sharing here with permission were that research into how to make the At Bat functionality was in progress and that MLB had recently hired someone to work on improving accessibility. The representative further explained that they were trying to have things like pitch speed announced automatically with some audio functionality. Interesting I guess but I don’t understand why they don’t start by making what exists accessible before trying to get overly creative and doing some kind of automatic audio.

 

I am appreciative of the communication from MLB but remain disappointed at the lack of progress on making site features more accessible. I understand work has been done on some of the media players so I suppose that’s good. But I believe MLB could be doing more and doing it more rapidly.

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More than a month has passed since MLB.com’s announcements about improved accessibility started making the accessibility circuit. I for one find the organization’s supposed claims to be improving accessibility largely empty and little progress being made.

 

I’ll state up front that I’ve not done any comprehensive review of the full site. Perhaps efforts are happening in areas I don’t use, but in the part of the service I use most frequently and spent money for, there’s been no change. Further, MLB seems dismally unaware that the area even has accessibility issues.

 

Specifically, I purchased a Gameday Audio subscription which allows one to hear the audio from home and away broadcasts for all games. MLB touts a feature called At Bat as new for this year and indicates that At Bat is supposed to include details on the speed of each pitch, live box scores and much more along with the radio broadcasts. Trying multiple combinations of web browsers and screen readers on the Windows platform, this feature still strikes me as100% inaccessible. I’ve heard things may be better on Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod touch but have not independently confirmed this.

 

MLB help on accessibility makes no reference to this At Bat feature. On three separate occasions I phoned a “dedicated” accessibility help line to ask about accessibility of At Bat with the only definitive answer I ever received being no this feature wasn’t accessible and there were no plans to make it so. All three phone responses were more interested in telling me how to play audio than anything else. This despite the fact that I opened each call clearly stating I was currently listening to a game.

 

Assuming you have an MLB.com account with the appropriate subscription, you get to the audio with At Bat experience by going to www.mlb.com/mediacenter and launching the radio feed for a game in action.

 

I made my first attempt to understand the accessibility of At Bat in early April. That was the phone call that yielded the response that At Bat wasn’t accessible and that there were no plans to improve the situation. That’s strike one.

 

Replies from the accessibility community that I must have received some bogus info from MLB prompted a second phone call in the middle of April. That phone call ended with a promise that someone higher up in MLB accessibility would return my call with accurate info about MLB At Bat accessibility. I’m still waiting for that return call. After a month I think it is safe to ring that call up as strike two.

 

My third call happened on Saturday. This time I was told no fewer than three times how to launch the audio from games. Questions about At Bat were once again met with an “I don’t know.” At least there was no offer for a phone follow-up that never happened from call #2. And the accessibility ump says, “Strike three!”

 

We’ll give At Bat another turn at getting a hit. This time I’ve tried the “dedicated” accessibility e-mail address listed within the accessibility info on MLB.com.

 

Good for MLB to have started some effort. I suppose something is better than nothing. But make no mistake, this is a multibillion dollar business that has no problem telling me how much economic activity it is responsible for each time it wants a new stadium built as the public money faucet is opened. Were this a physical building, the equivalent lack of accessibility would be plain and simple a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. So don’t tell me you are unable to find the relative few dollars and time it would take to fix these problems now. This is purely a lack of meaningful commitment. Talking is easy. Doing is showing real commitment.

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The penultimate tune on Bonnie Raitt’s Road Tested is a track titled My Opening Farewell. Ending a relationship with a financial institution is hardly fraught with the emotional angst of the end of a love relationship but severing the entanglements can often be as tough.

 

Well good old Citibank, you and I are through. Farewell after more than 24 years of a credit card relationship, five years of a mortgage relationship (love the resale of mortgages) and 20 years of a banking relationship started when you were a pioneer in online banking. You’ve told me one too many times to go to my nearest branch, which in case you didn’t understand the concept of online banking any longer, is more than 900 miles away. And when the latest episode of nonsense was the result of you old Citibank putting a block on a savings account indicating checks shouldn’t be written against it for reasons you’ve yet to explain, well like I said we are just through. Given you opened the account over the phone and it was impossible to write checks for an account for which I had no checks, does it make any sense to block transfer of funds from the account?

 

Oh yes but there’s still my favorite from 1998 when one of your representatives in all seriousness told me if I wanted a cashier’s check to make a down payment on a house at the time my best option was to fly to New York City and get the check. And to think I gave you another dozen years. Fool or forgiving, I’m not sure which one that makes me but enough is enough and I’ve reached my limit.

 

Transfers have been started, signature cards mailed and research on other options is in full swing. So Citibank, consider this my opening farewell and nice to have known you but I’m on to a world that understands what the online in online banking really means.

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MLB has been getting loads of positive commentary in the accessibility community of late. While I’m glad to see the organization step up to the plate as it were and start to take accessibility seriously, it is still far too easy to find basic accessibility issues wrong with the main MLB web site.

 

Take a browse to an offering to play fantasy baseball for example and count the number of instances of text such as images/trans or perhaps mlb/fantasy/wsfb/index.jsp or another variation depending on how your screen reader handles missing alternative text for actionable links. By my count there are at least three instances of this problem and the bigger issue is that the links in question lead to different locations. This is not some esoteric side feature, 3^rd party text or something else beyond the immediate control of MLB. So while I’m delighted to see MLB getting into the accessibility game, I’d like to see basics like these sorts of issues already fixed because they are just so obviously wrong and disconcerting to the basic user trying to sort out where to go on the site in my experience.

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I’ve mentioned several times here that I’m a big fan of Lainey Feingold’s work on accessibility. The Structured Negotiations process used has proven to pay dividends time and again in moving accessibility forward.

 

Two recent announcements from Lainey highlight the road this work often travels.

 

First is an announcement that all Bank of America ATMs in the U.S. are now talking ATMs. This represents more than 18,000 ATM installations and covers more than 15 years of effort since the bank was initially contacted about accessibility. Sure it has taken a long time and a big part of me wishes we never had to go to these efforts to achieve accessibility, but success is still success and when is the last time we could say “all” of anything met any accessibility definition?

 

Last week at CSUN I was talking about accessible ATMs with a few different people and will say here what I said to those individuals. I think the progress that has been made over the last several years on accessible ATMs is one of the better examples of how accessibility has moved forward from across the spectrum of areas where people have made attempts at improvements. The vast majority of ATMs today seem to at least have audio output and back when I used my first ATM in 1985, audio just wasn’t around. It is often hard to measure the positive of accessibility and like many I’ve used ATMs with relative success without audio. But the degree of confidence and independence I feel when I slide my headphone set into the audio jack on a talking ATM is the feeling I want when I use any technology.

 

And to be clear, using an ATM without audio access is only relatively successful. It requires memorization of a set pattern of key presses as just one limitation. Good luck if the prompts change as they seem to the one time you really need to use the machine.

 

The second success is an announcement that Best Buy will start adding tactile keypads to their point-of-sale devices, meaning individuals who are blind can independently enter PINs when making purchases at the stores. This is the way it should be. Conducting business shouldn’t require anyone to reveal this level of personal information to anyone else and should support full independence.

 

Press releases detail several involved in the progress here so congratulations to one and all. And make no mistake, while accessibility efforts like this tend to garner the headlines, I know many who work equally as hard making progress in other arenas and those folks deserve equal credit for what they do.

 

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