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Re: Something's amiss with the latest survey

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From: Andrews, David B (DEED)
Date: Sep 1, 2015 3:21PM

Jared:

I probably wasn't clear enough in a couple of my statements -- sorry.

I should have said something like "While the screen reader-like capabilities of Zoomtext and Magic have certainly increased, in my opinion they are not at the point where a totally blind person could use them as a screen reader. While somebody may be doing so, I am not aware of anyone."

Certainly I don't know all blind or visually impaired person, but I do have contact with a wider variety than most.

When I said you shouldn't take the numbers literally, I did mean in terms of generalizing them to the entire population. The numbers themselves are valid, and I know you do everything you can to make them as accurate as you can.

Thanks!

Dave




-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2015 4:06 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Something's amiss with the latest survey

Andrews, David B (DEED) < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Finally, I may be old school in my views, but I separate screen
> readers from "screen enlargers," or "magnification software." Clearly
> the line has blurred somewhat, with Zoomtext and Magic offering more
> screen-reader-like features,

We presume that respondents used the screen reader functionality of their software regardless of their disability type. We'll be more explicit in future surveys to try and better delineate between screen reader only usage and screen reader usage as a supplement to some vision.

> I do not know of any totally blind person using either one as a screen
> reader alone.

I hope that more than anything that the survey is causing us to question statements like this. I'm reminded of someone that told me they didn't know a single person that voted for Romney over Obama.
Well, there were 61 million people (47.2% of voters) that did.
Someone's personal interactions within their limited sphere are easily believed to be the norm when often they are far from it.

> So, lots of good data, and it helps us see trends, but people
> shouldn't take the numbers literally.

Why shouldn't they? It's not like we made them up. You might be (and should be) skeptical about whether the numbers represent the entire screen reader user population, but I can assure you that the numbers we report are "literally" what the 2515 respondents indicated.

Jared