[Colorado-Talk] Toast Ordering Inaccessible

[tkeenan79 at gmail.com]

Hello, Federationists,

 

It appears that a new accessibility issue has reared its ugly head over the
past few months.

It has to do with Toast!

And I'm not talking about the breakfast staple.

Toast is an extremely popular point-of-sale system for restaurants that's
used almost ubiquitously around the country and here in Colorado.

Recently, they changed their customer ordering screens both on restaurant
websites and in their new app, Local by Toast, such that all the radio
buttons and checkboxes you would use to customize your order are now
completely inaccessible to screen readers without using OCR or screen
recognition. This makes it damn near impossible for anyone using a screen
reader to place an order.

 

Below is a letter I wrote them yesterday. I encourage anyone who has also
had this problem and would like them to expedite a solution to write them as
well at: support at toasttakeout.zendesk.com
<mailto:support at toasttakeout.zendesk.com> 

That's their support system, so it will undoubtedly take some tenacity to
get this issue elevated to someone who can actually do something about it,
but hey, we're Federationists; this is what we do!

Oh, and if anyone out there can still order via Toast, please let me know if
I'm overblowing this. 

 

Here's my letter. Feel free to use it as a template, and let me know if I
missed anything that you feel we should highlight.

 

 

 

Subject: Urgent: Toast Customer Ordering Screens Inaccessible

 

 

Hi there,

 

I'm writing to inform you about a critical accessibility issue with your
item ordering screen. This problem affects both the app and the website.

 

Within the last few months, you made changes to how the controls on this
screen are labeled, specifically the radio buttons and checkboxes which
enable the customer to customize an item. These labels are now completely
unreadable by screen readers for the blind. I've confirmed this on Voiceover
for the iPhone as well as Jaws and NVDA for the PC.

 

What this means in practice is that it is now impossible for blind people to
place orders with any of your client restaurants, and as you may or may not
know, takeout and delivery is very popular within our ever-widening
demographic. 

 

To get a little technical for a sec: Each control anywhere in your
application, (web, IOS, Android and otherwise,) should have a text label or
some sort of alternative attribute, such as an "alt" tag in HTML,) that
enables screen readers to associate an understandable text label with each
control, whether that be the Add button, a quantity edit field, or a
checkbox for a particular pizza topping. When a label solely consists of an
icon, as many now appear to, it's useless to a blind person with a screen
reader. 

 

Your apps worked just fine in the past, so hopefully you can undo whatever
you did to cause this situation. I'm sure the solution will be more complex
than that, but I, along with members of the National Federation of The
Blind, stand ready to assist if your dev team needs anyone to help test any
solution they come up with.

 

So, please, escalate this to the proper team so that we can resolve this in
short order. Thousands of blind people, not to mention your client
restaurants, will appreciate it.

 

Thanks for your time and attention.

 

 

Cheers,

Tim

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/colorado-talk_nfbnet.org/attachments/20241024/6d6854c5/attachment.htm>