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Tag: accessibility

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.

DocšŸ• – @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, Iā€™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.

Iā€™ve also been exploring another highly accessible Twitter app named Spring. So far Iā€™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 Iā€™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 isnā€™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. Theyā€™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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A Good Example Of What Not To Do and Using Color To Convey Information

Published September 25, 2021 by Kelly Ford

I’m not a huge golf fan but with the Ryder Cup being played here in Wisconsin, I was a bit curious about the Whistling Straits course design. There is a good hole-by-hole guide that gives a description of the course.

Selecting a more details link for any hole takes you to a page with additional information. I know enough to know that golfers can start from different tee positions and assumed the numbers for each hole represented the distance for those locations. That’s largely where my understanding of the numbers stops so I was curious why there were five numbers for each hole.

A brother of mine tells me that for those familiar with golf, the colors for each number are fairly established as far as what they mean. Black represents the distance for professionals for example.

This to me is an excellent example of what not to do for web accessibility as far as conveying information with color alone. For those who do not see the colors, as obvious as they might be to golfers, the numbers by themselves are clearly not obvious. Similarly, for those less familiar with golf, I contend attaching a descriptive word to each number would be of benefit.

This is also an illustration of why manual review of web accessibility is so important. I ran multiple accessibility tools on one of these pages. Some contrast errors with other text on the page were flagged but not a single automated tool called attention to these numbers. Automated testing is just not at the point to handle that level of analysis.

This is going to be an example I add to my learning materials on web accessibility. For me it illustrates the concept of not using color alone quite well.

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University of Wisconsin Hangs Out No Screen Readers Allowed Sign For Big Ten Opener

Published October 25, 2020 by Kelly Ford

On Friday, the University of Wisconsin Badgers kicked off the COVID-19-influenced 2020 football campaign with a resounding 45-7 victory over the Illinois Fighting Illini. Like much in this year of change, Camp Randall was empty of the typical 80,000 fans.

To bring some of the gameday experience into the home, Wisconsin social media touted a new Badgers Live gameday experience.  Unfortunately, what Wisconsin Athletics clearly failed to do was ensure this experience was open to all fans. Instead, they hung out a sign to people who use keyboards and screen readers saying, “You are not welcome.”

Anyone familiar with web accessibility will recognize obvious WCAG failures on the opening signup screen.  Missing form labels and lack of keyboard access to needed controls just to name a couple.

If you manage to get past that, the signup experience has another basic failure where you are asked to pick an image to represent your user account.  The images are not reachable from the keyboard and are missing proper alt text.

There are likely many other failures beyond this.  I gave up after the inability to pick an image in the account creation process.

Web accessibility is not new and in fact is not optional for public institutions such as the University of Wisconsin. The university has detailed accessibility policies at https://www.wisc.edu/accessibility/.

At this point in my mind there is no reason beyond institutional indifference from at minimum the Athletics department to accessibility for these situations to keep happening.  This is not the first time I have experienced accessibility issues with web offerings from the athletics department.

It is far beyond time that Director of Athletics Barry Alvarez and Chancellor Becky Blank take accessibility of the online experiences for Wisconsin Athletics seriously. This new gameday experience may be exciting or it may be of absolutely no interest to me. But I, like any other fan, should have the opportunity to join and evaluate for myself.

As of Sunday, inquiries to Chancellor Blank on Twitter have gone unacknowledged. Email to a member of the athletic department indicated the issue would be investigated but with no date for an answer.

We are in unique times with all of us facing many challenges that were unexpected at the start of the year. But it is important that as we respond to those challenges, as Wisconsin Athletics has here, we keep our values and responsibilities in mind. Clearly someone at the university had the time to find this service. In fact, pregame radio interviews with members of the athletic marketing department repeatedly promoted how the team was looking to respond to COVID-19 and still create quality experiences for players and fans. This should have included accessibility and failing to do so is simply unacceptable.

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Improved Sports Descriptions

Published August 24, 2020 by Kelly Ford

I enjoy sports but often find myself wanting more details than even the best play-by-play announcer can provide. I find myself wondering if technology could help in the situation.

I’ll start by taking football as an example. As most fans of the sport with know you have 22 players on the field at any given time. It would be simply impossible for any announcer to describe the location of all 22 players, let alone what each of them is doing during a play.

Imagine though if you divided a football field up into a complete grid where you could express the location of any spot by a set of coordinates. Then imagine that you can describe the location of players based on this grid. So at the start of the play you could indicate where all 22 players are lined up. Then as the players move during a play, you could have technology that would communicate how any player is moving throughout the grid.

Or imagine if you could combine this technology with the accessibility improvements that have come in various touch devices so you could slide your finger around in the application window and tell the location of any player at any time. Obviously doing any of this in real time would likely still be tough but imagine if you could do this on demand for certain plays just to get a sense of what’s really going on.

I have no idea how possible this is with today’s technology. It seems like it could be an interesting research project for someone in the right environment. I’m tossing this out there because it’s some thing I’ve thought about lately. Anyone want to take up the challenge?

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Another Day, Another Example of Missing Alt Text

Published August 29, 2019 by Kelly Ford

As 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.

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A Request to Librarians: Please Ask OverDrive About Libby Accessibility

Published August 4, 2019 by Kelly Ford

I’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.

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MLB Strikes Out on Accessibility

Published July 6, 2019 by Kelly Ford

Although it took a structured negotiation and settlement, at one point MLB seemed like it was turning the corner on improving and sustaining accessibility. Sadly that time seems to have passed, much like a favorite star of yesterday.

Most recently, MLB added a simple game to their AT Bat app with a bracket challenge to pick winners in the upcoming Home Run Derby. The problem is for accessibility purposes, MLB used “Player Name” as the accessible names for each player. Obviously this means if you use a screen reader such as VoiceOver on the iPhone, you have no idea what names you’d be selecting. Capping the problem off, when I called MLB’s dedicated accessibility support phone number to report the issue, the support representative asked me, “What’s VoiceOver?” I spent more of the call teaching the person how to use VoiceOver versus anything else.

One can only wonder if MLB did any accessibility testing of this game. It took me less than two minutes to notice the issue. For an organization that seems to keep statistics on almost every conceivable aspect of a game, it doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to ensure accessibility testing is a part of all processes.

After trying the game in the At Bat app, I did try the web site as a part of writing this blog post. That does work a bit better but still has issues. Further, why should users of screen readers be forced to jump through extra hoops and try multiple versions just to have a bit of recreation? MLB has demonstrated the ability to be a leader in accessibility previously. Here’s hoping the organization finds a way to return to those levels. In this case, it is a strikeout on accessibility, leaving this fan disappointed and more.

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Inaccessibility Simply Gets Old

Published December 16, 2018 by Kelly Ford

There are times when the continued lack of accessibility in basic tasks gets old. Today I wanted to see if my local Staples store carried a product so conducted a product search. Between all the instances of “icon”and “product tile large” on the resulting page, I have absolutely no idea if the product I was searching for is actually available.

I could write all about web accessibility standards or why it is important to make your web site accessible. I could also write a detailed analysis of what is wrong on the web site. Instead I’ll just say, it is disappointing that near the end of 2018, a product search on a major retail company’s web site still leads to every product reading”product tile large” with  multiple screen readers.

Staples does have an accessibility policy of sorts.

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Three positions with the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative Available in Europe

Published October 29, 2018 by Kelly Ford

The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) project has three positions available based in Europe to work on various aspects of web accessibility.  All positions indicate they are for a period of three years starting on Jan 1, 2019.

The organization is looking for a Web Authoring Tools Accessibility Specialist, an Emerging Web Technologies Accessibility Specialist and a Web Accessibility Education and Training Specialist.  Full job descriptions and application requirements can be found at https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Recruitment/.

An email with the original announcement of these positions is also available.

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