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The Idea Place Posts

Accessibility Island, The Journey of Many Experienced As One

Published June 24, 2022 by Kelly Ford

When I think of an island, tropical breezes, ocean surf and the warm sun-soaked sand between my toes is usually what comes to mind. Add in a blissful smile from memories of warm island beaches I’ve been fortunate to visit and for me the term island is generally a joyous one.

What then you ask do such happy ideas have to do with the term Accessibility Island? Yes, there is much that is joyous about both accessibility and islands but certainly not all.

I use the term accessibility island because of perhaps one of the downsides of island life. As marvelous as an island can be, you can be cut off from other parts of the world. Constraints, water in this case, can restrain you from all you want to reach.

So too with accessibility failings. You can be quickly cut off from achieving all you want, again through no fault of your own.

Several years ago I was talking with a good friend about the reality of working as an adult with a disability and how it differed from what we had expected before launching our careers. I don’t remember all the details of that conversation but now more than 30 years into my own career, the one thing I do recall being most surprised about hasn’t really changed. There are many, far too many in fact, times when you feel cut off or isolated through no choice of your own. I won’t lay claim to speaking for anyone other than myself here but suspect I’m not alone from various conversations I’ve had over the years.

At the start of my career, it was the meeting with paper handouts distributed to everyone. Oh and even me if I really wanted something I couldn’t read I could get the handouts also, to be read of course by that ubiquitous “someone can help you.” . Through all the technology changes, it is still far too common to end up in the functionally same situation. Sure you might get the PowerPoint deck, web site or app shared ahead of time but if the content itself isn’t consumable with a screen reader in my case it might as well be the same as those paper handouts.

This can be especially true in training or other learning activities. Accessibility Island is trying to learn the material in a class at the same time you are both educating the course creator about accessibility and figuring out how to use the technology in the course. Three for the price of one might be a great deal when shopping but is a disaster when trying to learn.

Anyone who has worked or lived around accessibility I’m sure can rattle off a long list of common failings. The point here isn’t to chronicle all that can and is wrong with the state of accessibility. Instead, it is to say that the truly unfortunate thing is that you are still left without a good alternative in far too many situations. Stay silent and you may not be able to contribute effectively because you are acting on limited information. Speak up and you are still far too often seen as complaining, not patient or counseled how you should have “handled that situation better” by someone after the fact. Please tell me how you should handle exclusion better other than feeling sad, frustrated, hurt and yes willing to educate still.

Meetings or training are not the point here. The examples are really illustrative of the entire workplace. What happens when a new software program, update or other technology is deployed? Has the organization ensured the experience is usable for everyone in the workplace?

Ask yourself how many workplaces are free from blocking accessibility issues? Now ask yourself what the new employee encountering these issues who is new to the organization, job or manager is supposed to do? Unless you have a policy in place ahead of time for how you are going to handle these sorts of situations, you are leaving the employee to potentially struggle and spend needless energy trying to figure out what they should do? You are also locking the employee out of opportunities and your organization out of all the employee has to contribute.

These are examples of finding yourself on what I’m calling accessibility island. You are alone, cut off and isolated.

Authenticity, the “lived experience” and such are the hot topics of the day in various diversity and accessibility circles. This is great but then do not shy away when people want to let you in on their true experiences. Don’t try and tell us all the things we could have done differently or how things will be fixed in a certain amount of time or to be patient. If you feel compelled to tell anyone anything, when you learn about people on Accessibility Island, tell those involved in sending people to such a destination what they can do differently.

Trust me, anyone who’s taken even one trip to Accessibility Island has likely tried dozens of creative problem solving techniques. Given the lack of alternatives I mentioned earlier I can also assure you that for anyone to actually show an outward sign that they’ve journeyed to Accessibility Island, things have to be quite problematic. The fact that is reality, is itself a problem too. It should be a safe space to acknowledge that you are experiencing such issues.

Educate about accessibility, ask if your organization has the right resources, not just policies, to ensure an accessible workplace. Do you have the right institutional policies and procedures in place from procurement onward to ensure what you are bringing into the workplace represents the values and qualities you want for your world? Are those policies backed with the resources and knowledge to ensure the policies are actually applied and working? Do employees have the necessary information and training to be successful and avoid sending their colleagues on unintentional trips to Accessibility Island?

I know for myself, I want to choose when I go to an island because I want to enjoy those tropical breezes, the sand and surf. I do not want to be isolated, trying to contribute and locked out. I’ve had more than enough visits to Accessibility Island.

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Creating a Power BI report Using a Screen Reader

Published May 20, 2022 by Kelly Ford

In my work at Microsoft, I work with a number of product teams on accessibility. One of the rewarding things about this is that I get to learn about a number of technologies and experiences. This is obviously accompanied by working to improve the accessibility and user experiences of these products.

I’ve been working with the Power BI team for close to a year and have learned a great deal about the technology. Creating a Power BI report using a screen reader is one of those things that having a few hints about how things work and such can save a lot of time learning what to do.

I put together this audio demo of the basics of creating a report, adding data to the report, understanding the visual layout of the report and how a few of the basic controls work. A transcript in text or Word is also available.

Microsoft has documentation on creating reports available. Accessibility information for creating reports and consuming them is also available. A help article on creating reports using assistive technology has also been created. You can also find various resources on the Power BI roadmap and other release plans.

If you have accessibility questions or concerns on Power BI, the Microsoft enterprise Disability Answer Desk is there to assist.

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Some Training Videos From Me

Published May 20, 2022 by Kelly Ford

In my work at Microsoft, I’ve created a few training resources recently. These have been shared in other arenas but I wanted to share them here as well. The list includes:

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Variations on an Automatic Image Description

Published April 30, 2022 by Kelly Ford

Reading through Twitter today, the following tweet showed up on the timeline of one of the people I follow as a retweet.

Doc🐕 – @DocAtCDI: A truck loaded with thousands of copies of Roget’s Thesaurus spilled its load leaving New York

Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralyzed, dazed, bewildered, surprised, dumbfounded, flabbergasted, confounded, astonished, and numbed.

I found the tweet amusing and was going to retweet but noticed it had a picture without any alt text. This lead me to be curious what was in the picture. From the tweet text, I’m assuming some form of vehicles on a road with a bunch of books scattered about is most likely.

I suspect most reading this know that iOS has the ability to automatically describe pictures. This functionality started in iOS 14. When using VoiceOver you can have a short machine-generated description of pictures such as the one attached to the tweet here.

Newer versions of iOS extended this functionality to include a feature called Explore Image. That allows you to use VoiceOver to step through individual objects recognized in the image. It can be accessed with a rotor option when focussed on the image. Here is where the experience gets a bit interesting.

My go to Twitter app on the iPhone is Twitterific. The accessibility of the app has been outstanding for years and the maker has been highly responsive if issues to creep in.

I’ve also been exploring another highly accessible Twitter app named Spring. So far I’ve had a great experience with this app as well.

As one would expect, both Twitterific and Spring offer the ability to view images included with tweets. When images are viewed in either app, the VoiceOver automatic image description and Explore Image functionality work. Differences in the same picture viewed in two different apps using the same automatic image description and exploration technology are plainly obvious though.

First off, the automatic description when viewing the image in Twitterific says:

an illustration of vehicles on a road X. VETERAN’S PLUMRNO. Rall

That same image viewed in Spring yields the following automatic description:

a group of cars driving on a highway ETERAN ‘S PLUMPING

Both descriptions mention that the picture deals with vehicles on a road in some fashion. and include what I’d suspect is the text of a sign on a van or truck in the picture from a plumbing company. Again the descriptions come from Apple, not the individual apps.

A picky point but cars do not drive, people drive them. I might not know what is in the photo for certain but I am quite confident it isn’t a bunch of Teslas with the self-driving mode engaged.

It is also interesting how the image description when using Spring is a bit more detailed. It uses the terms highway and cars, whereas the Twitterific version is more generic in nature. The detail about cars when using Spring is even more interesting when using the Explore Image feature to review the individual objects in the picture.

Again, the newest versions of iOS added a feature called Explore Image to VoiceOver. Focus an image, change the VoiceOver rotor to Actions and one of the choices will be Explore Image. This opens a pop-over experience with individual objects from the picture. You can use VoiceOver previous and next commands to move from object to object and have them highlighted visually in the picture.

Here are the objects from the picture in the tweet I mentioned when explored with Twitterrific:

  • Automobile near left edge
  • Automobile Centered
  • Automobile near right edge

Recall how the automatic description for Spring talked about cars driving on a highway? One can only wonder where the cars went and where the train came from when using the Explore Image feature. Here is what is reported when exploring the image in Spring.

  • Van near bottom-left edge
  • Van near right edge
  • Van near bottom-left edge
  • Train near top edge

Automatic image descriptions are another helpful tool for shaping the accessibility landscape. They’ll be even more impactful if the technology continues to advance to reduce the variability of something as simple as viewing an image in a different program seems to introduce and the accuracy and detail of what is described improves.

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What Happens After the Accessibility Agreements End?

Published April 1, 2022 by Kelly Ford

It is unfortunate that it takes landmark agreements far too often for progress on accessibility in the first place. Several years ago Major League Baseball was heralded for their agreement and commitment to accessibility. Progress was indeed made and I know I was one who commented on the agreement and progress.

The agreement closing date has long past and so the answer to the question about what happens afterword in their case is, “Unlabeled image Unlabeled image /121.svg.” If you don’t like that answer, how about “Unlabeled image Unlabeled image /140.svg?” Both of those answers are taken from www.mlb.com/scores as of this writing, and are how two teams are indicated from the live scoreboard when accessed with multiple screen readers.

They are just two of the more than 370 accessibility failures reported by multiple accessibility auditing tools run on the page. Of course, accessibility tools are just part of the story and I’m a big fan of user testing for accessibility. In this case I’m serving that role and just wanted to look up the score of a ballgame. I guess when I sort out who is represented by 121 or 140, I’ll know the score.

This is not a criticism of the efforts that lead to MLB’s agreement. It is, however, a serious question around what it is going to take to make accessibility matter long after the agreements end because I can assure you representing a baseball team as 121, 140 or any other random nonsense is not accessibility the way I want to experience it.

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An Interesting Discovery for Capturing System Audio on a Mac

Published February 19, 2022 by Kelly Ford

At times I want to capture the audio from VoiceOver on a Mac to illustrate a point or otherwise demonstrate something. This is a bit of a hack but I made an interesting discovery when recording some audio on a Mac computer today. I also know there are 3rd party utilities that make this easier.

Although it doesn’t show up in the system input devices when you go to Sound in Mac System Preferences, when you install Microsoft Teams, there is a recording device in some audio applications that does show up.

For example, I use Audacity on the Mac and when I view input sources, there is an entry that says Teams audio. This also shows up in QuickTime when recording audio or video.

Now actually using this as an input source, isn’t quite as easy as just picking the device in the recording application. You also have to:

  1. Start a Teams meeting. The Meet Now option works fine.
  2. Share some content with Teams and check the option to include computer sound.

When you take these two steps, any future actions taken with VoiceOver are captured by the audio recording application. Note other audio isn’t captured in this fashion, such as microphone audio.

As I mentioned, there are 3rd party utilities that work better, including being able to get microphone input and system audio at the same time. However, this is a nice trick to add to the recording toolbox.

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Rocket Launch Audio

Published January 22, 2022 by Kelly Ford

Recently I had the opportunity to view a rocket launch. My wife and I were about 13 miles away from NASA’s launchpad at Space View Park in Titusville, Florida.

Here is a bit of audio from the launch. I’m not sure how to add captions directly to this file so a bit of a description follows.

The audio starts with a fair amount of crowd noise. Someone was playing a live webcast of the launch in the background and a few seconds into this recording you can hear the rocket launch from that audio. It was really interesting to note how quickly the crowd grew quiet and remained so for about 90 seconds.

Shortly after you hear the rocket, again from the web cast, someone says, “Wow!” Then you hear a child laugh and then say, “Oh my God, I can see it, fire.”

At about 90 seconds there is some applause from the crowd and just a few seconds after that you hear the rumble of the rocket itself while the webcast plays in the background. The rumble continues for the rest of the recording as crowd noise picks up.

At the distance we were from the launch site, it wasn’t the loudness of the rocket I found striking. It was just the full range of the sound spectrum the sound consumed. If power has a sound, that was an example.

The other interesting thing for me that I really didn’t notice as much during the actual launch was how quiet the crowd became. From all the laughter and chatter just before the launch, things go almost silent, excluding camera clicks, for many seconds.

Experiencing a rocket launch live was a first for me. Even though this flight was crewless, it still makes you think about how we’ve harnessed the technology to escape the gravity and atmosphere of our planet. I can’t help but wish we could find the resolve to do the same for many of the other ills that we impose on ourselves as a race here on our home though.

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Small Doses of Accessibility Joy

Published January 12, 2022 by Kelly Ford

As a part of escaping the chilly Wisconsin winter, my wife and I are staying in a rental condo in warmer weather for for the next several weeks. Using the microwave and water dispenser on the refrigerator today I was reminded of the small but significant things when it comes to accessibility that can bring joy.

Flat touch screen-like control panels are pretty much universal on kitchen appliances these days. I often find myself playing the Button Lottery as it were, pressing random buttons until I get the device to do what I want as a result. When it is early in the day and all you want to do is heat something up or get some water, well I wouldn’t say this rises to the level of a full annoyance but it it does get tedious. Sure, a bit of tape or some other marking that isn’t permanent can be added on strategic buttons but it is just one more thing you have to consider.

Both the microwave and refrigerator in our rental condo are handy because of how Whirlpool, at least on these models, has constructed their version of the control panels. On the microwave, all the buttons have slightly raised outlines of the button shapes so it is easy to figure out the numbers and make strategic guesses about which buttons will stop and start independently. The water dispenser has a control surface that is a feel much like fine-grain sand paper. The shapes of the individual buttons are cutouts that are completely smooth and again lead to easy guesses about which will be water and ice.

Sure, I could point out more that could be done to enhance the accessibility here. I have reduced, not eliminated I suppose, my game of Button Lottery. Still, simple things matter and these small changes make a huge difference in the practical experience of appliance use. It is always nice to be able to start the day where something you are trying to do more or less just works.

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Stuff, Stuff and More Stuff

Published January 9, 2022 by Kelly Ford

While traveling, I was looking for some over-the-counter medication that I occasionally use. It lead me down one of those rabbit holes you can go down with the Internet.

Whether is a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes or the aforementioned over-the-counter medication I was looking for, I’m always amazed at the quantity in terms of both location and maker of products you can purchase here in the United States. Within 2 miles of my current location, there are at least two pharmacies and a full scale supermarket. The over-the-counter medication I was looking for is available at all of them. But that is not what sent me down the rabbit hole today.

All three of these stores sold electronics of some form. What was I guess striking was between the three of those stores, I could purchase at least 15 different pairs of headphones from at least six different manufacturers.

This eventually led me to part of the U.S. Census Bureaus’ website where you can get reports on overall retail sales.

I recognize this isn’t overly profound, but it is just amazing to me how much stuff is sold overall and all of the locations where you can buy it. It makes me wonder when consumption became such a mainstay of our economic activity.

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OverDrive Improves Libby Accessibility

Published December 30, 2021 by Kelly Ford

I have written several times about accessibility problems with Libby and other apps made available from many public libraries from OverDrive. I am overdue in acknowledging some of the progress that has been made on this front.

OverDrive has detailed many accessibility improvements to the Libby app in a recent blog post that were made throughout 2021. . The company has further outlined upcoming enhancements users can expect in 2022.

The blog post itself is detailed about what’s been done so I won’t restate it here. I will say that the overall experience of using VoiceOver with Libby has improved dramatically to the point of actually being usable.

Thank you to users, libraries, librarians and OverDrive for the progress here. I also want to give a special thank you to the city of Madison, Madison Public Library, staff of the South Central Library System and my city alder Lindsay Lemmer. It was just before COVID really hit the U.S. by force when I had extensive discussions with these individuals and will say that everyone’s response and follow-up was outstanding.

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