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Uncovering the Accessibility of Tabs in Google Docs

June 5, 2025 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

Starting all the way back in April of 2024, Google announced a new tabs feature for Google Docs, providing another way of organizing information in documents similar to that already found in spreadsheets. Soon after that, as the new feature rolled out over the next six months, a support article entitled Use document tabs in Google Docs was posted with all the descriptions and instructions necessary for sighted, non-disabled users to avail themselves of the new capabilities. As blind and other disabled people started to encounter documents containing tabs, we wondered how we would be afforded equitable consideration. It turns out that, in large part, we were considered, even if that fact was not documented. If you’re still reading, then, please stay tuned, as the rest of this article will weave together information from several sources to describe how keyboard-only and screen-reader users can choose, create and rename tabs using keyboard shortcuts and menu selections.

Let’s start with listing the useful keyboard shortcuts, then move in to specific, step-by-step instructions for each significant task.

Please Note: These commands assume that a Windows PC is being used with the latest publicly available version of the Google Chrome browser. They may be slightly different on other browsers and operating systems.

  • Choose the previous tab: control+shift+page up. Note: Though the contents of the newly chosen tab will be available, screen readers cannot announce its label.
  • Choose the next tab: control+shift+page down. Note: Though the contents of the newly chosen tab will be available, screen readers cannot announce its label.
  • Show all available document outlines and tabs in a list: control+alt+a immediately followed by control+alt+h. Note: It is absolutely critical that you either hold down both control and alt while typing a and h, or that you enter each separate command rapidly, as control+alt+h by itself enables and disables Braille support. If you hear “Braille support disabled,” simply press control+alt+h again to turn it back on.
  • Create a new tab: shift+f11. Note: Screen readers will announce “tab added.”

Now that we know the available keyboard shortcuts, let’s dive in to some of the most essential tab management tasks.

Choosing A Tab

There are two ways to choose an existing tab: directly using a single keyboard shortcut or selecting an option from a menu.

Choosing A Tab Using a Keyboard Shortcut

  1. Open a Google Doc that contains two or more tabs.
  2. Press control+shift+page down to move to the next tab after the one currently chosen. Note: Although the contents of the new tab will be available, its name is not provided for screen readers to announce.
  3. Press control+shift+page up to move to the previous tab. Note: Once again, its name is not provided for screen readers to announce.

Using Show Tabs & Outlines to Determine the Current Tab or Choose a Different Tab

Although there’s no way to determine the currently chosen tab using a single keyboard shortcut, there is a way to get this information through a menu, which also represents another way to choose tabs.

Determining the Currently Chosen Tab

  1. Open or create a Google Doc that includes two or more tabs.
  2. Press control+alt+a immediately followed by control+alt+h to open the Tabs & outlines menu. Note: Keep in mind that, if you hear “Braille support disabled,” you will want to press control+alt+h by itself to reenable Braille support.
  3. If the screen reader announces the “Show Tabs & Outlines” button followed by the number of tabs, press enter to open the menu. If this button does not appear first, then you will be immediately taken to the menu.
  4. Press Escape to leave everything alone and stay on the currently chosen tab, or see below for choosing another tab using this menu.

Choosing A Tab Using the Show Tabs & Outlines Menu

  1. Open or create a Google Doc that includes two or more tabs.
  2. Press control+alt+a immediately followed by control+alt+h to open the Tabs & outlines menu. Note: Keep in mind that, if you hear “Braille support disabled,” you will want to press control+alt+h by itself to reenable Braille support.
  3. If the screen reader announces the “Show Tabs & Outlines” button followed by the number of tabs, press enter to open the menu. If this button does not appear first, then you will be immediately taken to the menu.
  4. Press the up arrow and down arrow keys to focus and hear all the available tabs.
  5. Press enter on the tab you wish to choose.

Renaming A Tab

  1. Open or create a Google Doc that includes two or more tabs.
  2. Press control+alt+a immediately followed by control+alt+h to open the Tabs & outlines menu. Note: Keep in mind that, if you hear “Braille support disabled,” you will want to press control+alt+h by itself to reenable Braille support.
  3. If the screen reader announces the “Show Tabs & Outlines” button followed by the number of tabs, press enter to open the menu. If this button does not appear first, then you will be immediately taken to the menu.
  4. Press the up arrow and down arrow keys to focus and hear all the available tabs.
  5. Once you have found the tab you wish to rename, press the tab key to move to the “Tab options” button menu and press the space bar to open it.
  6. Press down arrow until Rename is selected, then press enter to choose this option.
  7. Enter or edit the tab’s name and press enter to make the change.
  8. Press Escape to close the Tab options menu.

Adding A New Tab

When adding a new tab to a document, it is created at the end of the existing tabs regardless of where you are editing. This means that, if a document already has four tabs, a new tab would be labeled “Tab5” which would be the last option in the Show tabs & outlines menu and the last tab visually displayed.

  1. Create or open a Google Doc that has at least one tab defined. In most cases, this will be true of all documents as of the June 2025 date this article was originally published.
  2. Press shift+f11 (as described on a Windows PC running Google Chrome). Observe that the screen reader will announce “tab added” and you will return to the place where you were editing.

There are other features in the Show tabs & outlines and Tab options menus, such as adding, duplicating and deleting tabs, which work in exactly the same way as everything that has already been documented, so they will not be covered in this article.

While there are accessible ways to manage tabs in Google Docs, it would be very nice to see Google documenting them as they have done many other capabilities, including docs and editors themselves. It would also be very nice if they enabled the screen-reader announcement of the currently chosen tab after the control+shift+page up or control+shift+page down commands were pressed. If you agree, please be sure to Contact the Google Disability Support Team to directly request these critical positive changes.

Citations

Please Note: While I am including the accessibility-specific citations for the sake of completeness, they do not document tabs functionality as of the writing of this article in June 2025.

Categories: accessibility, documentation, guides, technology, tips, web accessibility
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There Should be Compensation and Remediation for the Real Damages Inaccessibility Causes

February 19, 2016 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

I just thought I would respond to Chris Hofstader’s excellent article Stop The ADA Trolls.

While I certainly agree we shouldn’t be supporting these accessibility lawsuit trolls, I also do not feel we should be defending companies that have less-than-stellar
accessibility records. If a company has consistently failed to acknowledge accessibility advocacy and act positively to address accessibility concerns,
why shouldn’t we just leave them to be eaten by the wolves?

You see… I believe there are real damages caused by inaccessibility, and I feel we should, actually, consider a more aggressive approach toward companies
that consistently ignore us.

Blind people lose their jobs due to inaccessible software. Blind children miss out on educational opportunities due to inaccessible educational technology used in the classroom. Inaccessible apps in the new sharing economy result in a complete denial of service, which clearly counts as discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act here in the United States and other similar laws around the world. There are so many other inexcusable ways blind people are excluded because of inaccessibility. How can we put a stop to this discrimination?

Here’s how I see all this working:

  1. Blind people have been consistently advocating with a company for full inclusion / equal accessibility, but the advocacy has been completely or substantively ignored.
  2. A case is opened and documented with an accessibility advocacy clearinghouse that tracks and reports accessibility advocacy efforts and their results, or lack of effective action.
  3. A letter is sent to the company’s CEO outlining the concerns and clearly asking for equal accessibility.
  4. One or more blind persons file a lawsuit against the offending company asking for equal accessibility and for serious monetary damages, including not only the inaccessibility itself, but also for the emotional distress / pain and suffering it has caused.
  5. The lawfirm filing the suit subpoenas evidence, including the documentation from the case filed in step 2 and the letter sent in step 3.
  6. The process continues, on and on, with company after company, in a systematic and transparent manner, until we, possibly, achieve real results!

That’s right! I think the lawsuits should most certainly be filed, because companies are wrong to continue excluding us, but I think it should all be done
in a clear, above-board manner.

Categories: accessibility, ADA, advocacy, discrimination, lawsuit, opinion, web accessibility
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Making a Difference by Thrusting Accessibility into the Public Sphere

January 7, 2011 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

On Sunday, Nov. 14, 2010, Karen and I enjoyed a nice dinner meeting with Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Marc Parry in a nearby Applebee’s restaurant for an initial in-person interview as part of a story he was writing about technology accessibility for blind college students. Over the following Monday and Tuesday, Marc and I spent a great deal of time reviewing and testing the accessibility or inaccessibility of a number of college-related websites.

On Dec. 12, 2010, the Chronicle published an article entitled Blind Students Demand Access to Online Course Materials, in which my contributions were prominent.

The article highlighted significant accessibility barriers with ASU on Facebook, an application designed to help Arizona State University students connect in a virtual community. The app, developed by San Francisco-based Inigral, Inc., featured controls that couldn’t be accessed by keyboard navigation and images lacking text descriptions.

An Inigral representative contacted me within a few days of the publication of the article, saying she would be in the Phoenix area and asking if we could meet in person to discuss the situation. I agreed, a lunch meeting was scheduled then postponed that very morning till January due to family circumstances.

On Friday, Marc published After Chronicle Story, a Tech Company Improves Accessibility for Blind Users on the publication’s Wired Campus blog, stating that Inigral representatives met with the university’s Disability Resource Center and work is underway to improve the app’s accessibility.

After briefly reviewing the ASU on Facebook app as of Friday, Jan. 7, I can report that significant improvements have already been achieved. The “Go to App” link can now be followed using keyboard navigation, the website is more usable and I notice fewer images lacking descriptions.

Inigral’s co-founder, Joseph Sofaer, posted an accurate Jan. 4 article about the key elements of good website accessibility on the company’s blog.

The important point I hope readers will take away is that advocating for accessibility does make a difference. One more web-based application is now going to be accessible because a blind person agreed to be part of an article published in a widely-reade higher-education publication. It is critical for us to continue going after what we know is right: the equal accessibility that affords us the full participation we must have in order to learn, live and work in society as productive members alongside our sighted peers. This means we absolutely must pound the pavement. When we encounter an inaccessible app, piece of software or website, we *MUST* contact the company about it right away asking that it be corrected. If we don’t get timely responses, we need to follow up, escalating communications as far and as high in a company’s chain of command as they must go in order to get results. It’s a lot of hard work that can’t be done by one person, so I urge each and every one of you out there, whether you are a blind person or a sighted one who cares about us, to do your part by taking each and every possible opportunity to advocate, kick the ball out of the stadium, score the touchdown and win the game for the pro-accessibility team!

Categories: accessibility, advocacy, technology, web accessibility • Tags: ,
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iPhone App Maker Justifies Charging Blind Customers Extra for VoiceOver Accessibility

December 23, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

A recent version 2.0 update to Awareness!, an iOS app that enables the user of an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch to hear important sounds in their environment while listening through headphones, features six available in-app purchases, including one that enables VoiceOver accessibility for the company’s blind customers.

Awareness! The Headphone App, authored by small developer Essency, costs 99 cents in the iTunes Store. VoiceOver support for the app costs blind customers over five times its original price at $4.99.

Essency co-founder Alex Georgiou said the extra cost comes from the added expense and development time required to make Awareness! Accessible with Apple’s built-in VoiceOver screen reader.

“Awareness! is a pretty unusual App. Version 1.x used a custom interface that did not lend itself very well for VoiceOver,” he said. “Our developers tried relabeling all the controls and applied the VoiceOver tags as per spec but this didn’t improve things much. There were so many taps and swipe gestures involved in changing just one setting that it really was unusable.”

Essency’s developers tackled the accessibility challenge by means of a technique the blind community knows all too well with websites like Amazon and Safeway that offer a separate, incomplete accessibility experience requiring companies to spend additional funds on specialized, unwanted customer-service training and technical maintenance tasks.

“The solution was to create a VoiceOver-specific interface, however, this created another headache for our developers,” Georgiou said. “It meant having the equivalent of a dual interface: one interface with the custom controllers and the other optimized for VoiceOver. It was almost like merging another version of Awareness! in the existing app.”

As an example of the need for a dual-interface approach and a challenge to the stated simplicity of making iOS apps accessible, Georgiou described a portion of the app’s user interface the developers struggled to make accessible with VoiceOver:

“Awareness! features an arched scale marked in percentages in the centre of a landscape screen with a needle that pivots from left to right in correspondence to sound picked up by either the built in mic or inline headphones. You change the mic threshold by moving your finger over the arched scale which uses a red filling to let you know where it’s set. At the same time, a numerical display appears telling you the dBA value of the setting. When the needle hits the red, the mic is switched on and routed to your headphones. To the right you have the mic volume slider, turn the mic volume up or down by sliding your finger over it. Then you have a series of buttons placed around the edges that control things like the vibrate alarm, autoset, mic trigger and the settings page access.”

Georgiou said maintaining two separate user interfaces, one for blind customers and another for sighted, comes at a high price.

“At the predicted uptake of VoiceOver users, we do not expect to break even on the VoiceOver interface for at least 12 to 18 months unless something spectacular happens with sales,” he said. “We would have loved to have made this option free, unfortunately the VoiceOver upgrade required a pretty major investment, representing around 60% of the budget for V2 which could have been used to further refine Awareness and introduce new features aimed at a mass market.”

Georgiou said this dual-interface scheme will continue to represent a significant burden to Essency’s bottom line in spite of the added charge to blind customers.

“Our forecasts show that at best we could expect perhaps an extra 1 or 2 thousand VoiceOver users over the next 12 to 18 months,” he said. “At the current pricing this would barely cover the costs for the VoiceOver interface development.”

Georgiou said payment of the $4.99 accessibility charge does not make the app fully accessible at this time.

“It is our intention that the VoiceOver interface will continue to be developed with new features such as AutoPause and AutoSet Plus being added on for free,” he said. “Lack of time did not allow these features to be included in this update.”

Georgiou said the decision to make Awareness! Accessible had nothing to do with business.

“From a business perspective it really didn’t make sense for us to invest in a VoiceOver version but we decided to go ahead with the VoiceOver version despite the extra costs because we really want to support the blind and visually impaired,” he said. “It was a decision based on heartfelt emotion, not business.”

Georgiou said accessibility should be about gratitude and he would even consider it acceptable for a company to charge his daughter four to five times as much for something she needed if she were to have a disability.

“Honestly, I would be grateful and want to encourage as many parties as possible to consider accessibility in apps and in fact in all areas of life,” he said. “I would not object to any developer charging their expense for adding functionality that allowed my daughter to use an app that improved her life in any way. In this case, better to have than not.”

Georgiou said he wants to make it clear he and his company do not intend to exploit or harm blind people.

“I first came into contact with a blind couple when I was 10 years old through a Christian Sunday school (over 38 years ago),” he said. “They were the kindest couple I ever met and remember being amazed at the things they managed to do without sight. I remember them fondly. I could not imagine myself or my partner doing anything to hurt the blind community.”

A common thread in many of Georgiou’s statements seems to ask how a small company strikes a balance between doing the right thing and running a financially sustainable business that supports their families.

“I don’t think you understand, we’re a tiny company. We’re not a corporate,” he said. “The founders are just two guys who have families with kids, I’ve got seven!”

Georgiou said he understands how accessibility is a human right that ought to be encouraged and protected.

“I recognize that there is a problem here that can be applied to the world in general and it’s important to set an acceptable precedent,” he said. “I think I’ve already made my opinions clear in that I believe civilized society should allow no discrimination whatsoever.”

In spite of accessibility as a human right in the civilized world, Georgiou said he believes this consideration must be balanced with other practical business needs.

“When it comes to private companies, innovation, medicine, technology, etc., It’s ultra-important all are both encouraged and incentivized to use their talents to improve quality of life in all areas,” Georgiou said. “The question is who pays for it? The affected community? The government? The companies involved?”

Categories: accessibility, advocacy, human rights, iPhone, stereotypes, technology, thought provoker, web accessibility
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Letter to Cronkite School Dean Christopher Callahan About the Need for Accessibility

September 17, 2010 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

Many of you will note that, recently, I have been posting comments on Twitter about my journalism school’s lack of accessibility. These comments were driven by my frustration with what I perceived to be the school’s lack of interest in improving the accessibility of its websites and other technology resources as evidenced by its ignoring and failing to take seriously previous correspondence I have undertaken with Dean Christopher Callahan.

In response to my tweets, I began receiving direct messages from Dean Callahan expressing concerns and disappointment with my approach to these issues. Haven’t I heard that before?

Stating he had previously invited me to meet with him to discuss solutions, he did so again. I never received that previous invitation. I’m not saying it was not sent, just that I did not, for whatever reason, receive the message.

Those of you who truly know how I approach these matters also know that I never take a fighting stance with anyone who is constructively engaging with me or others to improve accessibility. Doing so would be counterproductive and undeserved. The hammer approach is reserved strictly for those who outright ignore me or who show the bravery to actually make a statement justifying their ongoing discrimination against and exclusion of blind people from full participation through inaccessibility.

Trusting that Dean Callahan previously sent a constructive invitation to engage in discussions, I apologized for the character of my Twitter posts and agreed to an Oct. 5 meeting to discuss how the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication can successfully address accessibility in light of its stated diversity policies.

As part of that correspondence with Dean Callahan, I restated an earlier promise to send him an accessibility assessment of one of the school’s websites along with useful resources for making websites accessible. The following letter, sent to Dean Callahan Friday afternoon, fulfills that promise and serves as my ongoing effort to work with the Cronkite School to become more accessible to faculty, staff and students with disabilities and to educate future online media content creators and editors about the need to make sure their work is accessible to all audience members.

Hello Dean Callahan,

As you have requested, please find two examples of accessible media websites along with some resources that can be useful in making the Web more accessible to people with disabilities.

BBC

The BBC works to make its Web presence accessible. Although it is not perfect in all respects, their efforts are evolving in the right direction.

Here is a link to BBC’s accessibility help page.

The key point to be clearly understood is that BBC publicly states that it cares about accessibility and works to make positive changes in that area so as to include members of its audience who have disabilities.

National Public Radio

NPR also makes the bulk of its Web presence accessible, although it doesn’t state it as loudly as does BBC.

The organization offers a text-only site.

The use of text-only sites is controversial, and I personally disagree with the practice, as the tendency is to update the “graphical” site without providing exactly the same content on the often-forgotten text-only edition. When this oversight is noted, it represents a separate-but-unequal situation which was banned by the Supreme Court in the 1960s as it was being applied in the segregation of African-Americans.

Accessibility Assessment of CronkiteNewsOnline.com

There are a number of unfortunate elements on the Cronkite News website that currently make it difficult to use for blind readers. Further, it seems recent updates to the site are making it even less accessible.

Missing Alt Tags for Graphics

The most obvious accessibility concern with the site is the lack of descriptive alt text tags for images. These HTML tags can provide a text-based description for graphics and they should be used for all important images on a site.

The site’s navigation area sounds like this for a blind screen-reader user:

nav/home
nav/about
nav/stories
nav/newswatch
nav/news21
nav/cronkite
nav/contact

Although this is not a show stopper, the presentation could be easily improved by simply adding appropriate descriptive alt text tags to those graphics.

Other missing alt tags are more serious, as there is no way to determine the content to which they will link unless the user simply follows the link to find out. That’s not right unless a sighted user must play the same guessing game.

For example, a link near the text about downloading mobile apps just says “img/front_cn.” What’s that?

Even the link that says “img/front_azfactcheck” won’t be clear to most readers.

Navigating Stories

Navigating to and reading stories is possible by tabbing to and pressing enter on links, but it could be far better. Consider using headings on the titles for each story. When this is done, as is the case on many blogs and some other media websites, blind and sighted users alike can more easily and quickly move from story to story.

Video Links Next to Stories

A link that happens to be missing its alt text tag, “img/icon-video,” appears next to most stories on the site. Pressing enter on that link seems to do nothing, although it’s clearly meant to allow the viewer to watch a video. What is this link supposed to do once clicked?

Reading and Watching Stories

There are difficulties once a story has been opened for reading or viewing.

Let’s take the Sept. 16 story titled Ranked No. 1 in country for West Nile virus, Arizona is fighting back as an example.

A link at the top of the story is missing its alt text tag. It says “09/16-westnile-video img/tp24.” What does this mean exactly? Clicking the link seems to do nothing.

A text link labeled “watch now” also seems to go nowhere.

It is clear that some sort of video player is being used which doesn’t work on all systems.

What technology is being used to play videos on the site? Is it Flash or Silverlight?

There are some steps that can be taken to make multimedia sites more accessible.

Please see the resources coming right up.

Web Accessibility Resources

These resources are simply examples of sites that provide best practices and other information about making websites accessible.

Accessibility in the Cronkite School Curriculum

Finally, I am deeply concerned about the lack of attention to accessibility in the teaching of classes like JMC 305, JMC 460 and the Saturday online media academies.

Many resources exist for developers to make their sites accessible. Why not include some assignments and good information about accessibility in these courses? After all, creators of online media are going to find themselves confronting organizations and people who advocate staunchly for accessibility and are thus going to find themselves directed by corporate management types who wish to avoid lawsuits, public relations disasters and other similar risks to their bottom lines.

Best regards,

Darrell

After reading the letter, I invite all of you to comment. What did you like? What didn’t you like? What additional resources might help a journalism school make its technology accessible or educate others on accessibility? As always, the door hangs wide open and awaits your constructive feedback.

Categories: accessibility, advocacy, feedback, journalism, opinion, thought provoker, web accessibility
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Opportunity to Ask Google for More Blogger Accessibility

September 18, 2009 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

Though Blogger already has a lot to offer blind and visually impaired audiences and content creators, there continue to be some nagging unresolved accessibility issues, including missing alt tags and unlabeled Flash controls. All blind and visually impaired readers, and those who care about us, are asked to take the Blogger user feedback survey and use the comment fields to ask Google to improve the accessibility of the service for blind and visually impaired people.

Categories: web accessibility
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WordPress Asked to Make Adding and Moving Widgets Accessible to the Blind Once Again

September 1, 2009 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

An accessibility advocate has asked WordPress to restore the ability for blind users to add and move widgets. Fellow blind and sighted WordPress users are urged to add their support to this effort.

Once upon a time, blind WordPress users enjoyed the ability to add and move widgets at will using the keyboard, but this accessibility vanished somewhere along the WordPress development cycle.

“I’m disappointed that WordPress has removed accessibility for widgets. Dragging widgets is the only way to add or rearrange them,” said Monica Willyard, a freelance writer and publisher of The Scanners Guild blog, in a post on Twitter. “They fixed it in version 2.5, and they seem to have broken it again.”

Willyard, like many other blind Internet users, is frustrated when keyboard navigation alternatives and other reasonable accessibility accommodations are not provided.

“At the moment, I’m having very angry and unprintable thoughts about the enventor of the mouse and the drag and drop process,” she said. “I have had four completely unrelated projects today where I can’t do what I need to do because the programmers relied on drag and drop.”

Categories: web accessibility, WordPress
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Newegg Adds Audio CAPTCHA, Demonstrates Ongoing Accessibility Commitment

July 7, 2009 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

Newegg announced Tuesday that it has implemented audio CAPTCHA on its login page as part of its ongoing commitment to accessibility. The audio playback features an easy-to-understand foreground voice reciting the alphanumeric code to be entered with a background sporting an outdoor sound scheme.

“We at Newegg want to make our website accessible for everyone, including our visually challenged visitors. To demonstrate our commitment, just recently Newegg was awarded the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) Nonvisual Accessibility Web Certification for implementing Deque System’s Worldspace product,” said an unnamed Newegg representative. “Newegg voluntarily implemented the CAPTCHA on our website. We always appreciate suggestions that make our site more user-friendly and since becoming aware of your comments we have installed the audio CAPTCHA for your use.”

Blind customers appreciate this positive move. “The NewEgg audio CAPTCHA works great, simple, fairly straight forward, and not a million characters to remember!” said Tina Ektermanis, a blind college student who experienced difficulties making a purchase on the site in June.

Categories: accessibility, CAPTCHA, Visual Verification, web accessibility
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Newegg Rolls Out Login Page Featuring Inaccessible CAPTCHA, Locks Out Blind and Visually Impaired Customers

June 23, 2009 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

Responding to a report from a blind Newegg customer, an inaccessible CAPTCHA was discovered Tuesday in the company’s login process for all customers.

“Wow, well, until I can get a hold of someone at NewEgg, guess I’m not going to be able to buy stuff there.  They now have a CAPTCHA in order to log in to one’s account!!!!!” said Tina Ektermanis, a blind college student in Colorado who wanted to order two SD memory cards. “It’s interesting that if you submit without filling in the code, it takes you to the old page, without the captcha, but we need to let them know about this before they put it in place for everything requiring a log in.”

A statement on the company’s login page claims “If you are visually impaired and are having difficulty navigating this site, please call our Customer Support line via our toll free number (800) 390-1119.”

Ektermanis said a friend of hers tried to order products from the company shortly before Christmas 2008 but the request was declined despite the stated promise of assistance.

Mia, a customer service representative, confirmed this lack of assistance during an investigative telephone call to the stated number. “I apologize, but we are not able to take orders by phone,” she said after the unusable validation code was explained.

“Our customer service representatives are supposed to help. This help covers everything, including placing orders and processing returns,” said Vincent Agular, Contact Division Manager in Newegg’s customer service department. He said he is requesting follow up from the company’s web team in light of the availability of numerous alternatives that provide both security and reasonable accommodations.

All blind and visually impaired Newegg customers and potential customers, and those who care about us, are asked to submit feedback to the company’s webmasters asking that they make an accessible alternative to their visual CAPTCHA available right away so as to allow everyone to transact business on terms of equality.

Categories: accessibility, CAPTCHA, Visual Verification, web accessibility
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Nevada Blind Childrens’ Foundation Defends Web Site Despite Accessibility Problems

June 16, 2009 • Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

An article posted Sunday on the Accessibility NZ blog reports that the web site of the Nevada Blind Children’s Foundation fails to follow basic web site accessibility guidelines.

“I couldn’t quite believe what I saw,” said Nicolas Steenhout, leader of the web accessibility consulting firm Accessibility NZ. “The entire site is one big Flash object. You don’t get much LESS accessible than that.”

“We are dedicated to providing information and services that enable families, health care professionals, and the community to understand and meet the unique needs of infants and children who are blind or visually impaired,” the foundation claims in its public mission statement.

Lori Moroz-White, the foundation’s executive director, defends the inaccessible web site. “Thank you for being the ‘accessibility police’.  I have been aware that our website is inaccessible, and have been concerned, and when funding becomes available to change this, it will be changed,” said Moroz-White. “For now, in my opinion it is better to have an inaccessible website, than not to have one at all.”  

Moroz-White adds “We offer blind specific technology access, blind specific programs and maintain a Braille, electronic and game library.” But the inaccessible web site may call into question the goals of the foundation’s programs.

“I think it’s a lot more symptomatic of a culture of dependence,” said Steenhout. “Here’s an organisation who is there to assist people with disabilities becoming more independent, yet they miss the boat completely with their website. The message here is ‘we’ll teach someone else to take care of you’.”

Some in the connected online blind community are deeply concerned about the poor example shown to the world. They believe the site should be temporarily shut down until such time as it can be made accessible. “Inaccessible sites that are ran by agencies that work for the blind should be taken offline”, said Michael McCarty on Twitter.

“One might say that a website should be an expression, a representation, of an organisation. And if that’s the case, then either the website fails the Foundation, or the Foundation fails their ultimate ‘clients’ – children with vision impairments,” Steenhout said. “One might also wonder if the Nevada Blind Children’s Foundation receives federal funding, and if so, should they be meeting §508 of the United States Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended.”

Categories: web accessibility
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