The Idea Place Posts

Obviously one web site does not an accessibility statement make but an experience I had this morning still to me sums up the real state of web accessibility in 2010.

 

I kicked off the day reading an article from SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s online site claiming the web was more accessible to people with disabilities. In my opinion this is both a poor article and a very misleading headline. There’s a world of difference between the utility offered by the web and the accessibility of that utility.

 

Articles like the one I’m talking about here always trot out people with disabilities and site how things like online shopping, recreation and the dozens of other things one can do on the web are such a boon to the population of people with disabilities. I won’t disagree with the benefits of an online world. I know firsthand that I do things online today that were at best tedious and in some circumstances all but impossible before introduction of various online offerings.

 

Still it is a mistake to equate this with real web accessibility. I think half the reason people with disabilities tolerate such a pathetic state of true accessibility is because the alternative to doing things online is that much more of a challenge.

 

Back to my experiences of today. I read an article from the Seattle Times talking about an interesting burger joint. I’m someone who enjoys a good burger from time to time so decided to check out the menu for the restaurant.

 

So I surfed on over to The Counter’s web site. I chose to view the online menu and selected the city of Seattle. I was perplexed when I still couldn’t find any meaningful menu and only alt text for a graphic that read, “Build Your Own Burger Menu”. It turns out the menu is just a graphical representation of the menu. There’s no real text to be read by a screen reader.

 

Again I recognize that one web site can hardly be used to measure the state of web accessibility at the debut of 2010. Still in my experience my experience with the burger joint is far more common than any improvements in web accessibility and in general I think the web is really not getting more accessible. How about you? What are your experiences?

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Queue the broken record theme and maestro, hit it!

 

Earlier I wrote about my hope to see improved accessibility from CBS College Sports All Access. As of that writing I was told the accessibility fixes were expected on November 30. That day came and went with no update.

 

I received a brief update today from the people I’ve been exchanging e-mail with at the University of Wisconsin about the accessibility issues.

 

What’s that you say? You’ve read this before. Yeah, that’s about how I felt when I received the latest update from contacts at the University of Wisconsin. I had been promised that accessibility issues with a streaming media site for Badger athletics would be corrected by the end of November. This was by my count at least the fifth promised deadline for such fixes to be missed, dating back to September.

 

I no longer have any meaningful date for improved accessibility beyond a promise to “hold CBS’s feet to the fire,” and to involve UW legal folks if there is no progress by the end of the year. Consider me confused because one would think UW legal officials were involved when any contract establishing the relationship between CBS and the UW was signed. One would think the dozens of other universities using this service would also be calling for accessibility fixes.

 

As I’ve said earlier, I will give the UW and CBS some credit for making arrangements for me to get access to the streaming links for broadcasts of interest. Basically at this point I e-mail some contacts at CBS prior to the start of a broadcast and I’m provided a direct link that launches the media stream. I will also say that the UW has not yet charged me the equivalent fees for the online service, although I’ve made it clear I’m willing to pay the appropriate fees.

 

Still, this policy is not documented anyplace on the UWBadgers.com site or CBS site. Further, meaningful accessibility should mean I and others get access to the full functionality of the web site in question without having to ask each time. For example I have no access to archived broadcasts which I believe is made available on the main site.

 

It is my contention that as a public institution, the UW and any other publicly funded institution is required by the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehab Act to make services accessible. This is my personal opinion and I’m not a lawyer. Still if you are trying to access online broadcasts of a similar institution and are having difficulty due to the accessibility issues with the All Access site, I’d encourage you to make your concerns known to the appropriate people at the institution in question.

 

As a graduate of the University of Wisconsin I am disappointed in the level of accessibility and attention this issue has received. The UW may not be responsible for developments from CBS, but the UW is certainly responsible for the accessibility of the resources they choose to use, no matter who creates those resources.

 

As a Badger fan who enjoys the entertainment college athletics offer, I am saddened to have the experience soured by this lingering accessibility issue that is no closer to resolution some three months after I first brought it to the UW’s attention.

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Web accessibility issues are certainly easy to find. Calling attention to each one any user encounters would quickly be overwhelming. But every once in a while you come across examples that are just so basic they need to be mentioned.

 

I’m sure just about everyone has heard of Morningstar, the financial research giant. The company’s star ratings pepper the financial world, with Morningstar ratings being used in any credible financial research source.

 

In addition to providing data to the financial industry, Morningstar offers research tools directly such as their mutual fund screener.

 

This screener is filled with examples of missing alt text. The one that caught my attention in particular is the missing alt text on a series of checkboxes for selecting the Morningstar ratings you want to include in your search. Graphics are used along with checkboxes to choose star ratings from 1 to 5. But without any alt text, anyone who is not able to use images, such as screen reading users, only gets to know that there are a series of checkboxes.

 

One would hope that the bread and butter for which a company is known would get a bit more accessibility attention at some point. Then again as I said web accessibility issues are widespread. No secret I know but this Morningstar example is yet another to add to the collection when trying to illustrate why accessibility, alt text in particular, matters.

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If you’ve not yet tried Walk Score, it is to me a web site worth having in your favorites list.  You enter an address and the site gives you what is termed a walkability score for the address.  This score is based on proximity of things like shops, restaurants and such.  You get not only the score, but the list of businesses.  Site accessibility needs some improvement but you can generally make it work.

 

Of note is that a couple days ago public transit info has been added to the info about an address.  In 40 markets you now get a list of the nearest public transit routes as well as other info that was previously provided.

 

Walk score can be found at http://www.walkscore.com.

 

An example address from an apartment I used to live in back when I lived in San Francisco can be found at http://www.walkscore.com/get-score.php?street=75+capra+way%2C+san+francisco%2C+ca&go=Go.

 

You can read a blog posting talking about the public transit info on Walk Score at http://blog.walkscore.com/?p=344.

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For the past several years, September has been the time for me to renew my subscription to the University of Wisconsin athletic broadcasts offered on Yahoo’s college sports broadcast services. This year I hunted and hunted but Badger broadcasts were not to be found. As it turned out, Bucky Badger decided to go with a different online partner for streaming media, namely CBS sports.

 

Well, the first football game day rolled around so I tried to sign up for the new offering only to find about zero accessibility of the site. A Silverlight player is the heart of the site and much like Flash there’s potential for accessibility or not, depending on what’s done.

 

I was disappointed to say the least. As a Wisconsin alum, I expected better from the UW. I recognize Wisconsin didn’t build the service but before making the switch I would have hoped to see more investigation of accessibility. To Wisconsin’s credit, once they were made aware of the accessibility challenges, they’ve been great about finding ways to allow me to listen to Badger broadcasts while the issues are resolved. I can only wonder what other universities who use this same service are doing.

 

The UW now tells me that CBS is supposed to be releasing an update to the site that fixes both keyboard and programmatic accessibility. Recent communication from the UW said in part:

 

Kelly: We truly appreciate your continued patience. CBS informed us last week: “Our release including the ADA fix is targeted for 10-Nov-09. We are exposing both accessibility info as well as making items reachable from the keyboard”, so expect that their site will be fully accessible.

 

I don’t know about “fully accessible” but I’m somewhat hopeful for improvements here. We’ll see next week about this time what I can say.

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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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