My wife and I have been on what I’ve called the Escape Winter tour during part of the coldest part of the year for the past few years here in Wisconsin. We tend to book properties through various services, one of which is VRBO.
Little did I know that property owners can you review you as a guest through VRBO’s system. Imagine my surprise when for the first time this year in renting multiple properties I received an email saying a property owner had rated me and to see the rating, I had to submit my own review.
Well, I wouldn’t be writing here if as you can guess, trying to write a review, I encountered some serious accessibility issues. Beyond the immediate frustration of not being able to submit a review, I learned that other property owners can see how you are reviewed in this same system. So, you have people submitting ratings of how you were as a vacation renter that you are not able to read until you submit a review. But I’m not able to submit the review.
The first time this happened, in the end we were curious so see what was said about us, so I asked my wife to play screen reader. It was a five-star rating in the end.
We returned from this year’s Escape Winter tour a week ago today and just now received a second email that another property had rated us through this VRBO system. The same accessibility issues are more or less still present.
VRBO, at least on the desktop, appears to have made a slight change. If you are using a screen reader and turn off any web reading mode, such as the JAWS Virtual PC Cursor or NVDA browse mode, you can now tab through the ratings. Unfortunately, you have no idea what the ratings apply to as you can just read the names of the ratings in this mode, such as excellent, and such. To figure out what rating goes to what prompt, you have to toggle in and out of the web reading mode, keep track of how many times you have tabbed and in general take a lot of convoluted steps.
Experiences should be accessible and easily usable for multiple reasons. But if you are going to have a review system where people can make comments about you and being able to read those comments requires you to work through multiple accessibility challenges, I say you need to be much better.
Kelley, sorry for the extended rant, but I guess I needed to get this out. PI hope you are taking whatever steps you can with the company to get this corrected. Lots of problems with air B & B as well. But you don’t know the half of it. Citizen M hotel’s I really enjoyed my stay there. But sometimes you just get tired of fighting. And I was literally psychologically traumatized after being handed and inaccessible iPad to control the room that had all the accessibility basically ripped out of it. Here is that story as I posted it to Facebook later. I need to post more reviews and take it farther and do more.
I stayed in your Pioneer Square location in Seattle. We loved the hotel. There were two of us that were visually impaired, pretty much totally blind.
When I found the iPad in the room, I was ecstatic. I expected it to just work for controlling the TV, adjusting the climate, and so on. I tried to launch Siri by holding the home button to turn on voiceover. Nothing happened. Voiceover is the built-in screen reader in the iPad. I am in assistive technology specialist For the state department of blind services, and I did not expect to have trouble with these things. Another way to launch accessibility features is to triple tap the home button. This also got me nothing. The next morning I came down and handed my iPad to the front desk person and said I needed them to enable voiceover so that I could control my room. He knew what it was and he tried to turn it on and then had to go to his manager. We quickly learned that all audio had been disabled on the iPad. The basic interface available said nothing about Accessibility. So no dark mode, no large, print or high contrast settings, all of that is hidden. This was very disturbing to me. I got a little bit stressed and emotional, and had to walk away after talking to the manager, because Apple takes accessibility and universal access seriously. When someone hands you an Apple product you Take for granted that is going to work the way it’s supposed to. I felt betrayed. And it was very disturbing to discover that they weren’t going to work in our hotel. On another issue, Before I came for our stay, I installed the iPhone app, and on the top level it’s easy to create an account. but once you actually get into the room or media controls, or many of the screens, you have no way to navigate back to the front because the built-in screen reader voiceover does not recognize some of the buttons. so you have no way to control the blinds, temperature, or anything from the iPhone app if you are using voiceover. This is really not cool in 2022 when the technology is available. I later did find the physical controls for the lights and the shade but it doesn’t tell you whether they’re on our offer upper down or what the temperature is set to so that is not a solution. You have accessible rooms but they’re not accessible to blind people. So that still is not a solution. The iPad has the capability of letting a blind person control all these things if the apps are designed properly. Yours are not. This is a problem. I did not ask for any compensation on the two rooms that I purchased and none of us offered and that was OK. But this needs to be addressed as soon as possible. It goes without saying that Citizen M is a technology company. That’s great. But Apple is known for putting Accessibility first. they should be concerned that your company is using iPads to control the rooms, but the accessibility features on the iPads, and the settings that would control these functions are deliberately disabled for blind users and others who could benefit.
Your manager there, Melissa, is fantastic! she did pass our feedback on to the main corporate offices,. However, I still intend to put reviews on Facebook, travel advisor, yelp, and LinkedIn once I have assessed all the pertinent information. I also have connections in the national blindness organizations, such as national Federation of the blind, American council of the blind, and foundation for fighting blindness. I would like to get your assistance withthese concerns. Please put me in touch with the app developers, and people that make these policies so that this can be addressed.
respectfully,
Reginald George, a.k.a. Reg, CATIS certified assistive technology specialist for the state of Washington.
PS,
You have an opportunity here to show that you are serious about universal design. Your accessibility statement has not been updated since 2019. This could either attract more disabled people from all over the world to stay in your properties, or it can turn us away. Please put me in touch with someone who can make the diffe rence and help to resolve these issues.
I actually did receive a response from CitizenM, and your blog post inspired me to write them back today. Hi Reginald,
My name is Diego and I’m part of the team responsible for the digital products at citizenM, which includes the iPhone/Android apps and in-room iPad application.
I appreciate your message, and for sharing your experience with us. I do feel sorry to let you down, that your expectations were not matched during your stay at citizenM in Seattle. I recognise and acknowledge that there’s a journey ahead of us in improving the access and experience of our applications.
It’s a continuous learning journey from us, and your feedback is valuable to make things better. Immediately, I’m personally reviewing any opportunities for improvements that can be done in the short term.
Specifically on some of your comments, the in-room iPad application is built to protect the privacy of our guests, for example, so that guests do not have any access to the information, history and interaction from others who stayed in the same room previously. This has a drawback, which is limited access to some of Apple’s standard functions such as siri. However, this is no excuse, there are certainly options for optimization. As for the app, it’s about maturity and continuous improvements so that it’s better accessible to more guests.
Internally with Melissa and our teams, we are taking your feedback forward so that we can improve our service in other aspects you addressed, and hoping that in the future, we would have your trust back, and that you have a more enjoyable experience at citizenM.
If there are any other comments or feedback related to the digital experience, please feel free to reach out to me directly.
Wishing you a great day ahead and all the best.
Thanks,
Diego
Hello Diego. I have not been back to the Seattle property since I sent that feedback about the Inaccessible iPads. I have passed my comments onto Apple because I personally think that they would be appalled that some of their accessibility features have been disabled. And this has nothing to do with Siri. It has more to do with voiceover and zoom and magnifier and Some of the other features that were specifically designed to help people with disabilities. I was wondering if anything had been done since my initial feedback to address any of my concerns?
The current situation and your hotels really does deny independence to an entire class of sensory disabled people under the ADA and section 55 of the FCC communications at. it should be looked into further as an accommodation because there’s no reason that some of these features could not be made to work without affecting anyone’s privacy.
Reg
Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans. Alan Saunders, John Lennon
Sent from my self driving starship!
I had that same issue about a year and a half ago. I have a guide dog and stayed at a Air B&b. I only had my guide dog downstairs had brushed him out before going on our vacation. I was shocked later on when my wife told me about the poor review, we received from the owner. I did not have him upstairs and did not have him on any furniture. However, I got a bad review from the owner, who complained about the dog hair. She wanted to charge more because of the dog hair. I find it intresting that a place is complaining about cleaning the floors of their building. I guess that having clean floors does not apply to anybody else who stays at a Air B&B. I have talked to people who clean Air B&B’s and find that they hardly do any cleaning. So I guess what the real issue is that they had to actually clean the place! My wife a couple months ago scheduled to stay at the same place without me because she likes the town, and would you guess that they cancelled her stay! I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but this is discrimination and really makes me wonder how clean owners properties are? We like sstaying at Air B&B’s, but I find the laws related to guide dog users a little murky. When we go to places, we move items around in the house so that I or my kids do not knock them over or break them.I can validate the owners concerns of having a person stay at their place and trash it, but a few more pieces of dirt/hair being on the floor is a little over the top.