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Thread: Google Apps for Education - improvements in accessibility reported
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From: John E Brandt
Date: Sat, Sep 17 2011 11:18AM
Subject: Google Apps for Education - improvements in accessibility reported
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You will recall that Google had gotten into some hot water with the National
Federation of the Blind (NFB) last spring. NFB had lodged a formal complaint
to the Department of Justice on concerns it had regarding the accessibility
of the free Google Apps for Education (docs, sites, gmail, etc.). Yesterday
the Google Apps Update blog reported that they had made some accessibility
improvements.
Here's the link to the announcement from Google
http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2011/09/accessibility-improvements-to-
google.html
Here's my blog comments. We will need to check this out further.
http://jebswebs.net/blog/2011/09/google-reports-accessibility-improvements/
~j
John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
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Augusta, Maine, USA
From: Morin, Gary (NIH/OD) [E]
Date: Mon, Sep 19 2011 11:39AM
Subject: Re: Google Apps for Education - improvements in accessibility reported
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Not to be the black cloud about good news, but it is worth noting that their improvements were screen-reader/blind specific - perhaps because of the complaint/law suit - and not about overall accessibility. it does make me wonder if they were responding to the overall accessibility issues in their products (after they're released) or were reacting to the lawsuit in deciding what improvements to make.
* We've recently made some accessibility enhancements to Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. Improvements have been made in keyboard shortcuts and support for screen readers<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader>; among other items.
* http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2011/09/accessibility-improvements-to-google.html
the focus of Google's contributions and responses tend to be very vision/screen-reader centric: http://groups.google.com/group/accessible. For instance, without their concerted testing, it's impossible to say whether their "keyboard shortcuts and support for screen readers<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader>;" will have any effect on speech recognition software applications.
Gary M.