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Advocacy Group For the Blind Slams Google Apps

Posted by samzenpus on from the we're-not-going-to-take-it dept.

angry tapir writes "The National Federation of the Blind claims that Google Apps lacks required features for blind people and wants the US government to investigate whether schools that adopt the e-mail and collaboration suite run afoul of civil rights laws. The NFB is asking the US Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division to probe whether New York University and Northwestern University are discriminating against blind employees and students through their use of Google Apps' Education edition."

6 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Disabled people by viablos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is also problem with so many open source projects. They all forget about disabilities and blind people. I've tried to get them to support them, but no one is interested adding such features. That's what proprietary software has done a lot better - they actually do account for disabled and blind people too. It's a major obstacle with open source software, but for example Microsoft and other big companies have generally supported such features.

    1. Re:Disabled people by oliverthered · · Score: 2, Interesting

      well it says it's Gmail etc... are they saying that sighted people are not allowed to use a superior product even though, last time I checked, you can use a pop or imap client with Gmail as I do.
      I've been told their are even free ones and text only ones like elm or cat /var/spool/mail/myemail > /dev/espeak
      or what-have you.. (I seem to remember festival or espeak or something along those lines producing a device for the job)

      festival /var/spool/mail/myemail (with some args) may also work!

      --
      thank God the internet isn't a human right.
    2. Re:Disabled people by h4rr4r · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Or maybe your an astroturfer, since these are you only two comments.

      Gmail supports imap, and their other products support many other standards. All of these standards are inter-operable with normal software the disabled use.

    3. Re:Disabled people by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Google docs can surely be used with a browser designed for the blind. Calendar uses caldav, that again surely has client software that is blind friendly.

  2. Re:GMail HTML version by isorox · · Score: 3, Interesting

    At least gmail have an HTML mode. But I think the problem is that we need better screenreaders more suitable to modern Internet.

    Yes, we use Jaws at work. The accessability team came round last week to see how our video editing system was progressing with accessibility. We got critisised for a variety of reasons, the chief ones being:

    1) it didn't work with IE7
    2) The screen reader software (Jaws), presented hidden divs to the user

    If I have a div with "style=display: hidden;", a display device should not display it.

  3. accesibility standard: no javascript by PJ6 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm currently working on a couple of government projects that must adhere to the latest accessibility standards, and they include this little doozy: no javascript.

    Think about that. No javascript.

    HTML was never designed for applications. We have javascript to get around this. No matter how sophisticated the "toolkit" or "framework", it's all still a stupid, ugly hack. But it works.

    HTML alone though? Someone needs to pull these people aside and tell them that they've gone batshit insane.