Darrell Hilliker Shownotes
Only two full days till Christmas begins!
Shownotes
Jeff Bishop reminds us that, ultimately, Podshow should take the lead in fixing their accessibility issues. We must all be very careful when balancing the need to make our own accessibility with the need for the technology industry to become more accessible.
Shownotes
We applaud FreedomBox for their willingness to enable access to a major component of the Podsafe Music Network, allowing blindcasters to add tracks to their playlists for downloading and playing on their podcasts. Will Podshow fix their broken HTML code that continues to deny most blind podcasters this capability? Will other screen reader developers like GW Micro and Freedom Scientific rise to the challenge by enabling this ability for their customers?
Check out Sean Patrick McGraw on the Podsafe Music Network.
Karen’s sister, Mary Beth, goes into the hospital tomorrow to have her second baby, making Karen an aunt for the fifth time. Will the child be a boy or girl? Stay tuned for all the details!
Jim, an avid Yahoo! Mail premium subscriber, reports that the company’s latest beta is almost completely inaccessible to those of us whom rely on screen readers. True to form, Yahoo! has not yet chosen to respond to Jim’s concerns. Yahoo! has been ignoring our need for accessible visual verification for a long time now without consequence. It seems the blow off of the blind continues with this latest beta. Any additional news on this front would be quite welcome.
I deeply regret having to report that the beta of the new yahoo mail
has been made mostly inaccessible to us as screen reader
users. While it is hit or miss possible at times to route the mouse
cursor and click some of the controls and have them work, it is not
reliably accessible by any means and certainly is not practical to
use in such a state. The technology they are using as of the beta
does not allow the screen reader to work with the controls in many
cases. For example messages no longer show up as a link that you can
activate to open them and there is no longer any checkbox to check to
perform actions on messages. You can no longer even see anything
that allows you to get to any subsequent pages of messages in a
folder beyond the first one. Some of the controls such as folder
names, compose, reply, forward, etc are now on mouse over links which
actually can be manipulated more or less depending on which version
of your screen reader you have. That we could live with. The bottom
line is that yahoo mail has gone, practically over night, from being
a wonderful user experience that I personally have been a paying
subscriber to their premium services for a number of years and it has
been fantastic for my needs to a mostly inaccessible unusable
service. I have written to them via their beta feedback form twice
now. One time on Friday Dec 16, 2005 categorizing it in their
predetermined list of categories as a problem using the product and
also on Sunday December 18 selecting the category of technical
problem. In both cases I spelled out the problem and referred them
to the screen reader manufacturer web pages of GWMicro and
freedomscientific as well as offering them any help I could provide
in determining and resolving the issues. I have not gotten any
response to either message as of Monday morning December 21. I will
certainly let you know if that changes.
GoDaddy blames me, my users, and everything else they can think of for their problems. Site starts dying after 50GB of transfer. They also try to get me to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
Add inaccessible visual verification to this volatile mix and, perhaps, it is a good thing I was unable to complete this order.
Shownotes
Karen and I chat about the first anniversary of the journal, Christmas vacation, one of her early Christmas presents, our issues with receiving snail mail, a holiday poem by one of the Seeing Eye instructors and more. Enjoy.
I ask Lainey Feingold for advice on how we might be able to achieve positive settlements of technology accessibility issues. Though I prefer working with the technology industry in a cooperative manner to obtain the accessibility we must ultimately be granted, I am certainly open to considering legal approaches. The issues are just too important for us to ignore as a blind community. Our futures are at stake.
Dear Ms. Feingold,
My name is Darrell Shandrow with the Blind Access Journal blog and podcast, where we hit technology accessibility issues hard and press for positive results in order to retain and improve our ability to participate in an accessible world. It seems that, despite all efforts, the amount of technology to which we are able to access with screen readers is shrinking on a minute-by-minute basis. I have recently learned of your accomplishments with the inaccessible Walmart debit card machines and was wondering what advice you may have for dealing with these accessibility issues from a legal or other basis.
Here are just a few examples of serious technology accessibility issues currently on the radar screen:
Software from companies such as Siebel is still being implemented by employers in ways that are inaccessible, even when making reasonable adjustments would be easily done, causing an inability to obtain employment or the loss of existing gainful employment for the blind.
Many companies are moving to the use of visual verification schemes to improve the security of the services they offer. Since most of these CAPTCHA implementations provide no accessible alternative, the blind are being increasingly locked out of the ability to register at many web sites and, at times, even the ability to do business is severely abridged or made completely impossible for the blind. While some accessible alternatives allow independent access through an audio playback of the characters to be entered, others require a separate manual process that is almost never followed through by the company while most simply provide no accessibility at all. Examples of offenders are Digg.com, FEMA, GoDaddy, Google, The U.S. Postal Service, Yahoo and many, many more!
There are also many companies that are simply developing their products and services without any consideration of accessibility, then failing to address the issues as they are brought to attention. Examples of offending hardware that is completely inaccessible would be many appliance manufacturers, most of Apple’s iPod and similar hardware lines, and so many others I just couldn’t begin to count. Software issues are similarly numerous, including Intuit’s Quicken and QuickBooks, numerous software development environments, many Java based applications and many more examples abound. Finally, it seems that more and more web based services are using AJAX, Flash, Microsoft .Net, and other programming languages and techniques in ways that make them completely or partially inaccessible. Again, in almost every case, requests for increased accessibility simply fall on deaf ears or otherwise receive lipservice which is never followed through to a positive conclusion. Offenders in this category include Google’s Gmail, Yahoo’s mail service, Podshow’s Podsafe Music Network, some difficulties with Microsoft’s live services and many, many more.
I am extremely concerned about the certain tragic consequences that will result if we don’t figure out some way to start gaining a foothold in our accessibility evangelism efforts very, very soon. We will, in a hurry, find ourselves not only locked out of the ability to learn and work but even to enjoy any sort of leisure activities if we don’t start seeing some real, significant positive changes in the area of technology accessibility. We currently endure a 75 percent unemployment rate in the blind community. Let’s all get ready to see that number climb much higher in the near future if we don’t start getting a handle on this stuff.
Thanks for any and all advice you can provide in our efforts to evangelize for accessibility and actually get results. Merry Christmas to you and your family!
All the best,
Darrell Shandrow
Dear Todd,
Merry Christmas to you, your family and all Geek News Central Listeners from Darrell Shandrow of the Blind Access Journal blog and podcast. I just finished listening to your Dec. 13 episode of your podcast, where you mention your willingness to work with your sponsors, such as GoDaddy, to get critical issues resolved. I hope you can help myself and thousands of other blind customers and potential customers of GoDaddy.
As you and others have been advertising, GoDaddy offers an absolutely astounding web hosting deal that is especially suited to our bandwidth needs as podcasters. Unfortunately, at the end of the order I placed with GoDaddy, I was presented with a visual verification requirement without any alternative for blind customers. Upon placing a call to GoDaddy’s sales team, Chris promised a call back from a supervisor the following day to work on addressing the issue. This call back never came and I am continuing with my current web hosting provider at this time.
Please, please, please, close your eyes and imagine how you would feel if you were unnecessarily barred from doing business, then make use of your contacts at GoDaddy to start the process of getting this issue positively resolved. Visual verification tests (what Bob Parsons calls the human verifier) lock out the blind from participation and the ability to do business when no reasonable accessible alternatives are provided. An example of an accessible alternative
would be audio playback of the code to be entered in order to pass the test. Blind people are humans just like the sighted. It is thus absolutely critical that any “human verifier” be able to recognize all human beings, regardless of the presence or absence of eye sight.
We in the blind community are looking forward to great things with respect to your ability to work with your sponsor to get this critical matter resolved. Thanks as always for a great show. I am a loyal subscriber who listens to every episode.
All the best,
Darrell Shandrow
Listen to a short sound seeing tour of some new speedbumps on our street, followed by discussion of my follow up efforts with Podshow on the accessibility of their services, some pontification about our shrinking accessible world and more.
Shownotes
Just a brief podcast discussing the importance of keeping in mind the differences between public and private communications as we conduct the online aspects of our lives. Recent indiscretion in this area may have the potential to harm working relationships necessary to improve the accessibility of vital podcast related products and services.