Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

Jeff Bishop of The Desert Skies has been working with Amazon this morning. It seems the accessibility issue may be a side effect of a problem the company considers to be serious, thus a team of developers has already begun work on a prompt resolution.

Hello Everyone,

This has now been given very high priority status at Amazon and a team is on it.

I have an Amazon update. OK, I just spoke with Amazon.com and got a ticket submitted to their development team. We did quite a bit of diagnosing on this issue and I will report when I hear more. The developer will call me or contact me via email sometime next week once he hears more on the problem/resolution. You are taken to a gift central web site it seems, and this is a new piece of functionality rolled out this weekend by Amazon.

Jeff

A reliable source tells us that the launch of the new Gift Central functionality may have been premature and that this issue was certainly not intended. Amazon representatives reported to our source that they will resolve the problem and appreciated our bringing the matter to their prompt attention. Stay tuned for late breaking news on this situation as it continues to develop.

We just received and verified some extremely disturbing news on the inaccessibility front. It seems Amazon.com has given the blind a rather unwelcome present for the Holiday Season in the form of yet another of the ever increasing “No Blind People Allowed” signs. Blind users of the JAWS screen reader developed by Freedom Scientific, the most widely used screen reader in the world, are apparently no longer allowed to perform essential shopping tasks such as reviewing product information on the web site. Though Amazon does offer a separate accessibility site, it provides a level of functionality that is far, far inferior to that found on their home page.

The letter below, provided by a highly competent user of the JAWS screen reader, serves to illustrate the difficulties. It is absolutely critical that everyone who is blind or cares about what happens to the blind write Amazon concerning this matter, asking and insisting that they work with the blind community to correct the situation promptly. Make no mistake, this issue and others like it are not simply “frustrations” but are serious, often intractible challenges to our ability to participate in society. Inaccessibility in an online store is tantamount to walking into a brick-and-mortar store and being told to get lost because you are of the wrong ethnicity. The currently imposed state of affairs represents an example of yet another “No Blind People Allowed” sign we must challenge at every possible opportunity.

Hi folks

From the looks of things here, Amazon.com, one of my favorite sites on the net, no longer works with JAWS 7.0. You click on a link to take you to the information page for a specific product, but instead you are taken to a page to buy a gift certificate. From what I’m told, they made some kind of visual change to the site using javascript. It looks more visually pleasing, but JAWS doesn’t display the page properly. so you press enter on a link thinking you’ll land on one thing but you land on another. So I’m going to call the customer service line on Monday because even i, a pretty compident JAWS user, couldn’t find the contact us link. Well, i found the link but not the right page. Really frustrating. If anyone else has had a similar problem, or if you give the site a try and experience the same problem, I’d like to know. This way i’ll have as much information as possible when I make my call.

Last month, The information technology department at the state of Massachusetts announced it would soon initiate a move to the use of open source Office applications and the associated Open Document Format as the standard of choice for conducting state business. Disability related organizations, including the National Federation of the Blind, have gone on record in opposition to this move due to the lack of accessibility features found in applications like Open Office and Star Office as compared to the reasonable levels of accessibility currently found in Microsoft Office when used with screen readers like JAWS and Window-Eyes. Read The Middle Click: An Open Letter to the Disabled of Massachusetts, review the comment I submitted in response and let me know your thoughts.

Thank you for the well thought out open letter. As a blind person, I have lost numerous employment opportunities due to inaccessible technology. I fear this loss of opportunity and its associated consequences will only get a lot worse before they ever start to get any better. Inaccessibility is all about the consequences. In a downsized future, the very lives of the blind and others with disabilities may be at stake. I absolutely love open source software, using a number of such applications on a daily basis. All the same, I don’t much care these days whether the software involved is commercial or open source, so long as it is reasonably accessible and ongoing development is underway to improve its accessibility as the software evolves. Microsoft Office is mostly accessible right now. Years of testing and ongoing development have been put into this accessibility. It works with the JAWS and Window-Eyes screen readers I must use in order to learn, do my job, take care of my personal finances and accomplish all of my computing tasks right now, not at some point in the future. The analogy of the disabled to an abused wife is, sadly, not at all accurate. Though it is extremely difficult for a wife to leave her abusive husband, it can, ultimately, be done if she has the fortitude. In contrast, fortitude or not, we can’t simply walk away from our disabilities. We can and must, however, do all we can to reduce the artificially imposed accessibility barriers, what I like to call the “No Blind People Allowed” signs, that serve to hold us down and out of participation in society on terms of equality with our sighted peers. Though I love the concept and implementation of the open source community, I must, sadly, throw in my lot with Microsoft on this one for the sake of the ability of my blind brothers and sisters in Massachusetts to obtain and retain their rightful status as gainfully employed human beings.

Thanks to the new Comment Moderation feature, it is now possible to safely resume the posting of comments to Blind Access Journal! Each comment will be submitted for approval by the moderator before being published for all to see. Please, do comment away! Enjoy.

Listen to The Desert Skies tonight on ACB Radio Interactive where Jeff Bishop will be spinning a triple-play of Natalie Brown’s excellent, podsafe music. The show is on between 6:00 and 8:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, that’s 02:00 to 04:00 UTC. Don’t miss it!

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At a critical moment, Rosa Parks made the decision to stand up for what was right by not simply giving up her seat on a bus to a white person. This event helped to spark a seachange in American society that has served to enable African-Americans to fully participate in all that the USA has to offer all its citizens. As I boarded the Red Line to work this morning, I learned that the name of the route has temporarily been changed to the Rosa Parks Line in her honor as a tribute to her life and all she did for the Civil Rights Movement. The Mayor of Tempe was riding the bus earlier in the morning, and some flowers were placed in the front seat, just behind the driver.

The tributes to Rosa Parks remind me that we, too, must not simply be forced to get up and step aside while the rest of society passes us by on an ever increasing pace. We must struggle against discrimination and segregation and for the acceptance and accessibility we must have in order to participate in society. Will we, the blind, ultimately stand up for what is right, or will we get up and step aside? The decision is up to each of us. Let’s make the right one and follow the hard, winding road toward a better, more inclusive future for the blind!

As we struggle for our right to survive in an increasingly inaccessible digital world, the following quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to mind:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

This quote is an excellent reminder that we all must speak up when it comes to advocating for the accessibility we need in order to participate in the world around us on terms of equality with our sighted peers. Equal accessibility will not happen automatically, and industry won’t pay attention if only a small portion of the entire blind community’s population advocates. We must all hold our weight to evangelize accessibility, to get the word out to the world that we are capable human beings deserving of equal consideration and reasonable accomodation in all areas of life.

I have just composed and sent the following request for accessibility to the Podsafe Music Network to C.C. Chapman at Podshow. I hope this will result in some constructive movement forward and will report any response to this correspondence I may receive.

November 1, 2005

Dear C.C.,

I am a podcaster who has been registered on the Podsafe Music Network for a couple of months now. Like other podcasters, I am excited about the opportunity to participate in a new independent form of media by playing and promoting music on the Blind Access Journal podcast. Yes. That’s right. I am a blind computer user who relies on a screen reading program that provides on screen text in Braille and spoken form.

Unfortunately, to this point, I have not been able to add music to my playlist for download and use on my podcast. There are currently a number of barriers that could be resolved with relatively minimal extra effort. Just a little concerted action to insure the accessibility of Podshow’s products and services would go a long way toward allowing the market of potentially hundreds of thousands of blind and visually impaired people worldwide to fully avail themselves of all the opportunities you are providing in podcasting.

The first accessibility barrier is the visual verification that follows the e-mail confirmation process. The currently accepted accessibility accomodation is to provide an audio playback of the characters to be entered in order to solve the CAPTCHA. Please browse to http://cvs.livejournal.org/browse.cgi/livejournal/htdocs/img/captcha/ to learn about Live Journal’s implementation of accessible visual verification. If companies like Live Journal, Microsoft and Spam Arrest can provide accessibility to their visual verification schemes, we expect you can, too.

Other barriers come into play once signed up as a podcaster on PMN in the form of inaccessible web site design. Though searching for artists seems to work, there are serious problems with listening, adding to one’s playlist, downloading and possibly other aspects of the system. While I am able to listen to songs, the buttons for doing so are unlabeled and do not play the expected track when selected using the JAWS screen reader. Similarly, and even more serious, selecting the link to add to the playlist does nothing at all. Since it is impossible for us to add music to our playlists as blind users, there really isn’t anything further we can do on PMN.

Please visit http://www.macromedia.com/resources/accessibility/ for information on the potential accessibility of Flash and possibly other Macromedia products you may be using at Podshow. Please also visit http://www.acb.org/accessible-formats.html for some excellent information on how to make web pages and other electronic documents accessible. At the moment, most blind and visually impaired podcasters are not allowed to participate on the Podsafe Music Network due to significant artificially imposed accessibility barriers. We in the blind community would like to work constructively with Podshow, in a spirit of cooperation and meeting each other halfway, to start resolving these issues in the very near future. Audio based media such as music and podcasting represent our most natural domain as blind people. It just would not be right at all if we were left out of even this aspect of life due to accessibility barriers that can be easily relieved with some creative energy, thought and action. I thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Darrell Shandrow

Blind Access Journal

Karen and I visited the Bishop family in Tucson again this Halloween weekend. A great time was had by all! Stay tuned for a possible episode of the podcast with some of the highlights from the trip.

As we live in an apartment complex, we will most likely not have any trick-or-treators. We haven’t had any in the past six years, so there is no reason to believe that pattern will change this time. Nevertheless, we will be watching a scarey movie or listening to a scarey podcast or two before going to bed a bit early tonight, as the 5:00 alarm rings just a tad too soon for us! Have a happy, accessible Halloween!

This is all we in the blind community ask of the technology industry: do your very best to consider our needs of equal participation through accessibility in the development and implementation of your hardware and software products and services. Read Grisoft Announces AVG Anti-virus 7.1: with Improved support for screen reader programs to understand how some companies are deciding to do the right thing.