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Advocacy Group For the Blind Slams Google Apps
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."
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.
Blind people designed Slashdot's look you insensitive clod.
iOS has many features for blind people - apparently it's one of the best machines out there to use.
What I think would be interesting is if a blind person were to put forth the effort to create applications friendly to blind people.
I'm trans, you know, the minority of people who are so small and misunderstood that we're not even allowed to have sob stories the way most minorities have, much less sob stories that high school kids are indoctrinated with (not saying it's a good thing, just stating a fact). Somehow trans people find ways of navigating a cis gendered world, often at great expense to themselves. I'd give up my sight any day to be cis gendered (better be careful what I wish for lol), so I guess I really have no sympathy for blind people despite their enormous hardships.
When you're in my minority, the world looks at you and says, "Figure it out on your own damned time at your own damned expense." When you're blind, the world looks at you and says, "Damn, that sucks. (And it does, having interacted with blind people on the bus, again, not saying it's a cake-walk just stating facts.) Here, have a government check every month. Here, have free care. Here, ride the bus for free. Here, have a free education. And if you don't get a job, don't worry, we'll keep sending you a check so you can eat."
To be fair, blindness is a much more obvious handicap than being trans. In a perfect world, being trans wouldn't be a handicap at all, but I don't see that perfect world happening any time soon.
I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a difference between being handicapped and handi-capable, no matter how cheesy that sounds. We each have our own deficiencies to overcome, so I have a difficult time understand why I should bend over backwards for someone else's deficiency. If health insurance covered any of my expenses related to being trans, I might have a different attitude, but this is a harsh world populated by harsh people. I don't see why the blind or any other group should escape that harshness.
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Its not their fault. Google is still in beta!
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Blind people lack required features for Google Apps.
Here at the college I work at, yes it is outsourced.
Students access it via a single sign on link from within our home grown SIS, and are redirected to gmail.
Students only have their password to the SIS - the pw for the actual gmail account (on a subdomain of my.educationalinstitution.edu) is not known, so even if the students knew they could use POP or IMAP to access it, they don't have a working password to access it with.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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.
Unless you're only into games and Photoshop, for most people computers are primarily a textual medium. The visual bits around it are just there to make the text more accessible, but you can can generally use computers without the eye candy. Most normal software can be easily navigated using only the keyboard, and there's software that reads the captions of windows and the text in controls.
But the web has been a great step backwards for blind people, and for no good reason other than that most of the people behind the web technologies weren't blind. But there is no particular reason why websites should be so terrible to navigate by keyboard - it's still mostly text with a few input fields here and there. But in practice a lot of websites are terrible and Google Apps is one of the worst offenders.
Because I don't want to end on a negative note, I would like to point out that computers haven't made life worse for the blind, quite the contrary. Cheap text-based communication has ruled out a lot of social disconnect. And it is much easier to get an e-book or internet article and have your computer read it to you or present it using a Braille device, then it is to hope that the local library has a heavy clumsy Braille book that happens to interest you.
Maybe one day you will befriend someone who is blind and maybe that will give you new perspective.
Here at the college I work at, yes it is outsourced.
Students access it via a single sign on link from within our home grown SIS, and are redirected to gmail.
Students only have their password to the SIS - the pw for the actual gmail account (on a subdomain of my.educationalinstitution.edu) is not known, so even if the students knew they could use POP or IMAP to access it, they don't have a working password to access it with.
That is the fault of the college of course. There is nothing preventing the school from enabling POP access, and providing some password for login (either the SIS password, or some random password that can be seen in the SIS, and perhaps changes when the SIS password changes).
If the college does not want to put in the effort to do that then it can and should be sued for violating the ADA and/or equivalent state/local laws. Simple as that.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
> I don't see why the blind or any other group should escape that harshness.
They don't escape it.
That society and current law have some compassion for some groups could mean we're on our way to having compassion for more groups. The LG part of the LGBT world seems to be slowly gaining some acceptance, perhaps the T part will also increasingly benefit from societal attitude shifts.
And blind programmers do put forth effort to create applications, for sighted and not.
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.
I have worked with the NFB on projects before, and prior to that when I was contracting at IBM, I was the section 508 guy for my group. I have a decent bit of insight into accessible software development, and push for it's inclusion at my current workplace.
However, realize that the NFB is an advocacy group. They do not care about business needs, or the cost of adding support for screen readers to your application. They could care less that you need to spend 40% of the project costs retooling, or increase the work effort by 20%, in order to support approximately .3% of the population. They simply want it to work for them - as it should be, and the rest is your problem.
So, what's is that problem?
Well, businesses have roadblocks in realizing that providing accessibility standards for your software is a losing proposition - the NBT actively attempts to cloud this viewpoint or strike it down as morally objectionable. However, it is unlikely that the level of effort that goes into producing an accessible application or website will ever show any reasonable return. Additionally, as with all software, the later in the game is is added, the more expensive it is - so retooling an app is worse than the cost of folding it in from the beginning. So we're looking at a big expense with no return - low ROI.
Beyond all this, non-sighted or otherwise impaired individuals are already coping with non-accessible interfaces on a daily basis. They have specialty software that helps them cope with this, and in other cases, there are learned workarounds. Just like a Microsoft product user, they are conditioned to accept the failures, and while aggravating, they can usually accomplish their goals regardless.
So, what are my points?
1) Never agree to retool an existing app (though you can accept submissions)
2) While in the planning stages decide what level of accessibility support you're going to aim for. It's increasingly expensive, especially the QA side where there's a severe demand for accessibility testers. Make a rational cost-based analysis. Some things you get for free just by adhering to strict HTML standards (like providing alt text for your images AND LINKS, or properly labeling your tables with a summary attribute, and column descriptions) for webapps.
3) Don't ever sweat the compliance if it's hard to do at any one point - it's simply not financially worth it. Go for as much as you can. All the rich "web 2.0" features which make the difference between a sale or a miss don't translate well in the accessibility world. It won't help your product if it's accessible if no one is going to use it. Remember - unless the laws change, compliance is usually a 'good to have feature' - not a 'must have'. Prioritize it well.
4) Harsh though it may seem, you can rely on your disabled users to provide their own solutions. Your software is unlikely to be a required resource - worse comes to worse, they can always use something else willing to lose money by supporting specialty groups.
Let's say you came to work one day and all the stairs and elevators had been replaced with climbing ropes. You'd still be a perfectly competent WHATEVER_YOU_DO_FOR_A_LIVING, but you'd never be able to reach your third-floor office, and all because you can't climb thirty-foot ropes--boo hoo, you whiner!
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Read the laws yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADA_Amendments_Act_of_2008
It doesn't say "shouldn't expect limitations", it does say "can't be discriminated against", saying "I know this sounds very un-PC but damn, when you have a disability, deal with it, there are going to be some things closed off to you. You'll just have to do what you can." That's discrimination. Replace "you have a disability, deal with it with "you are black, deal with it" and you'll understand.
A display device sure should have the option to display it. This is interpreted by a device you do not own, or do you think things like greasemonkey are evil?
I don't see why the blind or any other group should escape that harshness.
they don't. I've worked for blind people, I've worked for deaf people. I'm disabled as well and we all get no end of crap from tabs (temporarily able-bodied).
I lost roughly 30% of my hand function because I was busting my ass working normal IT programmer hours in a hostile work environment. I was fired from my job, I was denied workers compensation because "it wasn't workplace injury", I've been denied employment because "you can't have any technical knowledge because your hands don't work". I really understand now the discrimination that some women are told they're no longer qualified for the job just because they became pregnant.
I've even been discriminated against by geeks. I need to use proprietary package for speech recognition in order to be able to write and do some command-and-control. there were a few of us that wants to bridge NaturallySpeaking to Emacs but the Breaking with alarming frequency. After explaining the problem to Stallman and a few other fsf types, I was told that the official position of the free software foundation is that the needs of free software come before the needs of disabled people. If that meant that the free software equivalent wasn't going to arrive for a decade, disabled people would have to sit on their hands and wait till arrived or, do without free software that worked with speech recognition. Rather shortsighted, and rather harsh.
As I sometimes say, geeks don't give a crap about accessibility until they become injured and then they can't do anything about it because their hands don't work. They spend a couple of years reinventing and failing with the same solutions that failed for decades in the past and then either they give up and change careers or they fall off the economic ladder.
If we had greater accessibility for all types of disabilities, allow rsi injured, blind and tab programmers to compete on a level playing field by raising us up, not tearing others down, it would be okay for us to succeed or fail because it would be on our merits, not on our disabilities. We still have to deal with the bigotry of hiring managers but that's true for all of us.
The sad thing is, from the work I've been doing with speech user interfaces, I'm coming to believe that it's possible to build a common API to accommodate both text-to-speech and speech recognition user interfaces. With a bit more work, the interface can be expanded to also include a graphical user interface and once you have partition the application into everything else and the user interface, then accessibility becomes cheap, dirt cheap.
It's open source, meaning you -yes you- can add code to it to help the blind. The blind can even help themselves if they know how to code, and I bet some already do.
This is what I hate about people who view themselves as victims. Blind people are not stupid people, just get off your lazy asses and create the code yourself, or get someone to help you do it.
Complaining about it doesn't help, and you're just making yourselves look stupid and naive.
That is the true power of open source, you don't have to beg someone else to do the work for you, you don't even have to ask, you just get the thing done yourself if that's what you want, and guess what, that's the normal procedure whether you're disabled or not. If you're interested in adding features to an open source project, add them yourself, whether you're disabled or not has nothing to do with it.