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Nonprofit Builds Salesforce Cloud For the Blind

Posted by samzenpus on from the build-it-better dept.

Gamoid writes When we talk about "accessibility" in tech, we're usually talking about things like mobile apps and API compatibility. But for the sizable percentage of the world's population with vision impairment or full blindness, "accessibility" means they can use a computer, phone, tablet, or whatever, in a way that's comfortable for them. There have been great strides in that area, but it's still a tremendous challenge. So it's worth pausing to appreciate the work that the 99-year-old Bosma Enterprises, an Indiana-based nonprofit with the mission of reducing the 70 percent unemployment rate among the visually impaired and blind, has put into building out an enterprise cloud -- based primarily on Salesforce, with a handful of other applications built in -- that can be used by people with any level of sightedness across any line of business.

13 comments

  1. wanna bet? by turkeydance · · Score: 2

    "There is no job in this company that couldn't be done by someone who is legally blind," says Quigley-Allen.

    1. Re:wanna bet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Speaking as someone who is legally blind: FUCK YOU

    2. Re:wanna bet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How about art critic?

    3. Re:wanna bet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You missed a spot in the toilet. No, it's more to the left.

  2. test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    test

    1. Re:test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OK, I'll bite...

      Which particle is responsible for carrying away the missing energy and momentum in a nuclear decay process?

  3. The Cloud .... by PPH · · Score: 1

    ... to a blind person.

    Feels kind of dank and muggy, with a slight fetid odor. Yep. We're in The Cloud.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
    1. Re:The Cloud .... by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 1

      ... to a blind person.

      Feels kind of dank and muggy, with a slight fetid odor. Yep. We're in The Cloud.

      Well, that explains the fapping noise that seems to be everywhere...

      --
      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
  4. That had to be expensive as fuck by Chas · · Score: 1

    I've seen "cheap" SF.com customizations before. And going by those benchmarks, I don't even wanna know what the cash outlay was for this.

    And the worst part? At the end of the day, you're still leg-shackled to SalesForce.com with no real control over your data.

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
    1. Re:That had to be expensive as fuck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep, exactly! I have seen business go from a lot of money to very little primarily because they wanted to "Salesforce everything". They wanted dozens of websites hosted through Salesforce and while we got it working, it was costing several times what it would have cost if we just built it normally and used an API for Salesforce.

      That being said, "developing" with Salesforce is a nightmare. I don't see any reason (from a developer's point of view) to use Salesforce over their competition or even running your own stack.

    2. Re:That had to be expensive as fuck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Running your own stack wold allow for much more control, and customization. However, it would also require writing the stack from scratch. Retrofiting a11y is invariably more expensive, and incorporates more unfixable bugs, than writing from scratch.

  5. Re:I thought salesfarce.com was already made for.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I don't know why you were voted down, but force.com (as they angrily tell you their name is now) is a maze. I've watched quite a few people waste hours on that site just to accomplish what should be a simple task. We've found that even simple reports are wrong. The new customer by starting date doesn't show all of the results so we missed hundreds of customers when adding them to billing. force.com has almost put us out of business, and they charged us almost $500k over the six years we've used them.