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Re: Response To Keyboard accessibility

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From: jp Jamous
Date: Jul 6, 2023 5:45PM

Folks,

Let's look at the big picture rather than just focusing on what a customer service rep responded.
1. Is the company USA based? It seems like it from the quick research I did.
2. How large is this company? That matters tremendously, because business leaders want to penetrate the market and that is economically so difficult with so many social media giants.
3. If a customer service rep, who is not aware of accessibility, replied, was this escalated to the company's legal team?
You might wonder what the heck are you talking about JP? Well, that's a business with a CEO and founder that resides in New York. Here is his profile:
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/bill-ottman
In order to get traction on this, we need to realize that the business might be new and does not have enough developers on hand to add this defect to their sprints. That's why #2 is going to explain to us how to proceed.

We also need to find out if there is a legal department for this business, because the customer service response was not professional at all. Sure the rep responded with full transparency, but that can implicate the company big time and if legal gets a wind of it, it would start a wild fire internally.

So it is important to look into all of that, because Facebook was not accessible when it first launched. AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Adobe and the list goes on and on. Through awareness of people with disabilities, legal risks and other educational matters, we made them realize that yes people with various input and output devices use the computer. Now, look at Facebook. Not only it made its site and mobile app accessible, but it even hired blind engineers.

It is very unfortunate that we have to go through the same drill, but companies do not think of inclusivity when they think business opportunities. If we cannot think like business-oriented leaders, we cannot make them realize how important accessibility is.

I think links to some people with disabilities statistics, WCAG references and cases of companies that fought this and failed in the past, will help get the conversation going. Also, in a startup like this, it would have to be a top to bottom approach and won't work bottom to top. The bottom to top approach is difficult even in well educated companies that have people with disabilities.

Last but not least, business people think money and not accessibility or even technology. They take advantage of technology to make money. Without money, they cannot compete. So if we show them that Accessibility equals more money, then the response would be executed properly. We can then educate them about the right thing to do, people's rights under the law and other topics that mean so much for people with disabilities.