The Bloglines people have just come out with their beta representing the future of the service. As it stands, things don’t look very good for us blind folks with respect to its continued accessibility. Once we lose Bloglines, there will be no accessible, web based RSS feed aggregator for blind people! Let’s all urgently provide our feedback to the Bloglines team reminding them of our existence and asking them to keep accessibility in mind.
Advocating full participation through equal accessibility.
We intend to fully support screen readers and other accessibility needs as we improve the beta. We will not be removing the classic site until many of these type of issues are fixed.
Thanks,
-Paul Querna
Bloglines Engineer
The classic version of Bloglines will not become inaccessible. The people behind Bloglines have promised that it will still be available for those who prefer, and those who need it because of older browsers.
http://google.blognewschannel.com/archives/2007/08/27/bloglines-launching-all-new-all-better-version/
According to Paul’s post (thanks for such a quick response) it seems that the modern version will ultimately be accessible as well. I hope this will ultimately turn out to be the case, as I have found that “classic” or “text only” user interfaces tend to result in significantly less overall functionality for blind users. I love Bloglines, and Paul’s statement gives me confidence it will, indeed, remain accessible to us! Thanks for the amazing responsiveness once again, Bloglines!
Darrell:
I have only used the Serotek RSS reader until now. I just registered for a bloglines account with System Access and IE 7 and found that everything including the Ajax stuff read just fine. I will admit that some links were not labeled however that’s easy enough to fix with our C-SAW technology that allows the client side labeling of links on a website.
While I agree that Bloglines needs to keep it’s eyes on accessibility, and I think that’s pretty clear considdering the speed of the comment above, I just have to wonder how many of your current challenges with this site are more the fault of your aging scrreen reader than actual Bloglines problems with accessibility. Try SYstem Access and let us all know how it goes with the new interface.
Now I am going back to play with my new Bloglines account.
Mike, make sure to be using the beta version of bloglines, not the normal interface.
Hello All:
I was using the https://beta.bloglines.com/ site with System Access and IE7. For sure.