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Re: Adobe Connect & accessibility

for

From: Pratik Patel
Date: Oct 1, 2010 7:33AM

Andrew et al,

I look forward to a day when I can not only personally use but recommend to
clients a heavily-used, commercial, cross-platform solution. I do hope it
comes soon.

Regards,

Pratik


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Andrew
Kirkpatrick
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 9:19 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Adobe Connect & accessibility

Deborah,
Two years ago your assessment was probably on target, although we did have
the captioning support at that time. In the meantime, we've improved the
keyboard support in one of the releases, and committed to improving on the
keyboard support (it is limited at present) and making the UI work with
assistive technologies.

I'm not going to make excuses for the product - it isn't as accessible as it
should be - but that said it can be used as one component of an accessible
online meeting. In future versions we will make the experience much simpler
for conducting such accessible meetings and have been working to turn
Everett's thumbs up.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of
<EMAIL REMOVED>
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 9:05 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Adobe Connect & accessibility

When I tested the keyboard/voice control accessibility of Adobe
connect for my employers two years ago, my report to them said,
"Adobe connect: no accessibility at all. This is somewhat
surprising, since Adobe tries hard to be decent with
accessibility, so I wonder if further communication with the
company would reveal more information. But the help files say
nothing."

This obviously isn't helpful -- I don't know what it is about
Adobe connect that I couldn't use. My guess is that I probably
couldn't get into the base controls by voice at all, which
meant that I couldn't test to see if anything beyond that initial
startup was accessible. I know that my employers did some
outreach to Adobe about accessibility, and I'm pretty sure they
didn't hear anything.

On the other hand, this was two years ago. I would be willing to
believe things have changed.

-deborah