[Cinci-nfb] A victory concerning making a Website accessible

[Christopher Sabine, ONH Consulting]

Hello all. With everything going on in my life and the Chapter, I wasn't
able to mention a success that I experienced earlier this month concerning a
Website that is now accessible thanks to my efforts.

 

About a year and a half ago, I tried to schedule an appointment for a blood
draw through quest Diagnostic's Website, http://www.questdiagnostics.com).
The link to schedule an appointment had a series of radio buttons where you
could select the reason for the appointment (i.e. routine blood test, drug
screen, etc.). However, when I activated the radio button for blood draw in
my browser using JAWS, evidently another edit field would pop up, and I
would be kicked out of forms mode-rendering the form inaccessible. I
encountered the issue on multiple versions of JAWS, System Access to Go, and
both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox-always the same issue.

 

I tracked down the CIO at Quest's corporate office and got the assistant to
let me send her an email with a detailed description of the issue I was
facing. About a week later, I received a call from Mark Yarison, Director of
Customer experience at Quest. I explained the problem and the reason I
needed to use a screen reader to access their site and asked to schedule a
brief phone conference with their Web development team, so I could
demonstrate the problem.

 

They were able to replicate the issue with the form using JAWS in 40 minute
demonstration mode several different times. It turned out the problem was
introduced when they recently upgraded their site and failed to account for
the site's accessibility with screen readers. It took the rest of this time
to resolve the issue, and I had to have staff from Corporate schedule my
appointments for me while the site was being redesigned. 

 

Earlier this month, I received an email that the Website had been updated
and was now accessible. I checked, and indeed , I was able to schedule an
appointment for a blood draw at my nearest Quest Diagnostics location with
the site.

 

I just wanted to pass this along, as I know many of us need to schedule
blood tests and Quest is one of the major providers in the country of lab
testing services.

 

Very Best,

 

Chris.

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