WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Windows 10 screen reader info

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Aug 2, 2015 12:14PM

Access tech is less fattening than restaurant work, or so I am told ..
and it is probably true if you let Lucy loose in the kitchen.
Also most access tech shops allow guide dogs .. not all restaurants do
(to be fair, I have been able to take my cane into any restaurant I
have gone to so far and no one has tried to pet it.
Ok, off-topic bantering aside, we face a lot of frustrations in our
every-day lives, not only at the developer or OS level, our assistive
technology vendors are often slow to catch up with accessibility
standards and techniques (ARIA has been a struggle, at least until
around the beginning of last year). Accessibility support for basic
html techniques, such as tables and fieldsets is still woefully
inadequate on some mobile screen readers.

Accesibility to books and mathematics is still far from where we need
it to be. The reason I got into accessibility was because I was not
able to get accessible materials for my Certified Financial Analyst
(CFA) certification, and that held me back in my former life as an
investment banking analyst .. (also it did not help that two of my
finance industry employers filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy).
I still do not think I can get the accessible materials I need for
this certification, but I am having too much fun in the accessibility
business to care at the moment.

In the short time (it has really only been 4 or 5 years) I have been
in this field I feel we have made a lot of progress, especially in the
attitude of U.S.companies towards accessibility (just look at all the
job postings), we are also making progress (albeit painfully slow) on
the legal front (evidenced by mostly helpful DOJ decisions, the
Section 508 update will take place only 3 days after the end of the
world).

On the a.t. front,NVDA has revolutionized screen reader availability,
not only in terms of pricing (free), but also allowing users to review
and file issues, responding to those issues and often including fixes
with a very quick turn-around.

Apple made touch-screen device screen readers not only accessible but
also highly usable (certain grumbles about support for some html
features aside), it seems that Android is headed down the same path.

I think 8 years ago we would have said something like that was a mad
blind scientist's dream.

What makes it rewarding for me personally is the elite group of
awesome and super smart people who have dedicated themselves to this
field, both my co-workers as well as my industry colleagues. I would
know nothing about accessibility if I had not joined this list years
ago and snatched up knowledge from the regulars.

With this amount of collective talent I feel confident we will
continue to make progress happen, though our every-day frustration
level is bound to stay high for years to come.
Cheers
-B



On 7/31/15, <EMAIL REMOVED> < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Bevi Chagnon wrote:
>
>> The concept of accessibility isn't even known in those overseas
>> countries—there are no curb cuts, wheelchair ramps or other basic
>> accessible features in their built environment, let alone in their
>> software. And their western corporate bosses haven't told the programming
>> teams that accessibility is required.
>
> To be fair, the only country-specific accessibility community groups
> affiliated with the W3C are for India and China.
>
> https://www.w3.org/community/accessibilityinindia/
> https://www.w3.org/community/cnwa/
>
> From the Indian site's blog, I learned that
>
> * the government websites are supposed to become accessible,
> * the government has launched ""Accessible India Campaign (Sugamya Bharat
> Abhiyan)" as a nation-wide flagship campaign for achieving universal
> accessibility for PwDs"
> * The theme of Techshare India 2016 is "Towards Digital Inclusion"
> * There's a monthly Inclusive Design & Accessibility Meetup in Hyderabad
>
> Which is not the same thing as the concept not even being known.
>
> My company currently explictly outsources a fair amount of accessibility
> testing to a huge Indian shop which does accesibility testing, as well as
> web development and QA, for small-to-huge companies around the world.
>
> Sure, accessibility is more integrated in the richer nations; that's only
> logical. But outsourced devs and designers who are thoroughly ignorant or
> apathetic about accessibility are exactly the same in richer as in poorer
> nations; hold them and their managers acountable, not their countries or
> cultures.
>
>
> Deborah Kaplan
> > > > >


--
Work hard. Have fun. Make history.