[nfbcs] What is considered accessible?

[Steve Jacobson]

Nicole,

You have put your finger on one of the issues that we really have to resolve in a way that is better than we have so far, in my opinion.  At our recent NFBCS 
meeting at the 
convention in Orlando, the question was asked if accessibility and Usability are separate things.  I have always felt they were separate because there are 
web pages that sighted people use that are not all that usable.  Therefore, I was surprised to find that about half of us said accessibility and usability were 
separate although certainly related.  The rest felt very, very strongly that if the page wasn't usable, it wasn't accessible, regardless of the reason.  I think this 
is the direction that legal cases are leaning.  I worry about it, though, because at some point there is going to have to be a better definition of what usability 
means for blind people.

We're already seeing some interesting trends that make me uneasy.  It is probably safe to say that SharePoint is accessible in the sense that screen 
readers can get the information that is needed to use it.  Many of us have already used SharePoint.  However, few of us would argue that we can use 
SharePoint as efficiently as it can be used visually.  There is now a product called Discover 508 that can be installed on the SharePoint server that makes 
SharePoint far easier to use.  Some companies and some states see this software as necessary to settle accessibility complaints that have been filed.  While 
this is certainly better than having no answer, getting licenses for Discover 508 is very expensive.  At our meeting, a representative said that a license for 
one user was $12,000, and I understand that for the price for larger numbers of licenses can range in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  So the question 
then becomes how can the government, for example, purchase Sharepoint if it is not accessible and requires an expensive add-on.  On the other hand, if it 
is, in effect, accessible but not very usable, should it be the responsibility of screen readers to make it more usable, and if so, with whose funds since this 
isn't simple.  

Is the Microsoft Office Ribbon accessible since many of us have learned to use it or is it not accessible because many of us have not mastered it?  Are 
websites that use ARIA accessible if they follow standards, or are they not accessible because screen readers have implemented ARIA differently or even 
bubby, if they implemented it at all.  If I work for a company which requires that we use Internet Explorer 8 and it doesn't work with a given site but Internet 
Explorer 11 does work with that site, is it considered not accessible to me since it isn't my choice to use IE 8?

In the short run, I don't see what else we can do but to push for the most accessibility and usability that we can achieve, but in my opinion our use of 
software is very 
different in many cases than is the use with vision.  The use of a mouse or or even a touch pad tends to isolate the user from being dependent on tab order 
and control identification to name a couple of things that we depend upon.  

In the long run, we have to find a way to make it simpler for software and web pages to be both accessible and usable.  I do not have a clear vision of what 
that should be, but I do feel it is something that we need to start exploring.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

On Fri, 1 Aug 2014 17:23:35 -0700, Nicole Torcolini via nfbcs wrote:

>What is considered accessible? If you can do something using JAWS, but you
>have to use the JAWS and/or invisible cursor, is that still considered
>accessible? To what standards should companies be held?
> 
>Nicole
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