[nfbcs] Cisco jabber and politics

[Deborah Armstrong]

I work for a college and a few months ago we were told we would get a new VOIP-based phone system.

I run asterisk at home so I'm familiar with SIP, thank goodness, but when I asked our IT people all they could tell me was that it was a soft phone and they didn't have more information.

I kept pestering them until my supervisor, who isn't technical told me to "stay in my lane" which she's always telling me to do, because I tend to take on projects without getting her permission first.

Anyway, just this morning, about three weeks before implementation, they tell me it's Cisco Jabber and they won't be supporting SIP. So I do some research and find on the blind sysadmins list, linked below, there was quite a bit of ciscussion about Cisco jabber being based on Adobe Air, which made it impossible to script.

Then it looks like Cisco wrote some JAWS scripts which may or may not make the product accessible; in the past, I've found out some of these things were band-aid solutions.

We're a public institution, and if I understand my rights, I should be protected by ADA, and 508 and 504, yet, each year it seems we purchase more technology that nobody checked first to confirm accessibility.

Last year we implemented Clockwork, a management information system for tracking disabled students and the accommodations they receive. It's really frustrating to use with any screen reader, but claims to be fully 508-compliant because it has keyboard shortcuts. The problem, however is screen readers can't always locate the focus, and the keystroke one needs to use most often is TAB, making it necessary to press TAB as many as fifty times to navigate somewhere in the interface.

I'm the alternate media specialist, and as I have been told many times, I'm not responsible for web accessibility or any other technology access issues on campus.
What do others think, technical and political about this issue?

Here's the jabber links:
Here's the link for the scripts:
https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=284324806&softwareid=284006014&release=10.6(2)
Here's Cisco's page on Jabber accessibility:
https://help.webex.com/docs/DOC-2431
Here's a thread on the problems end users had trying to script Jabber, which is probably what caused Cisco to act.
                https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/pipermail/blind-sysadmins/2014-June/004245.html

--Debee