[nfbcs] Cisco jabber and politics

[Vincent Martin]

You are protected by all the statutes, but many institution still just don't
get it.
I am a PhD student at a public university as well.  We have been through two
mediated agreements with the Office of Civil Rights for the Department of
Education over all types of violations.  After they signed the second
agreement in March, they broke it within two weeks!  I immediately filed a
third one and will be finally just filing a civil lawsuit.




-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Deborah Armstrong
via nfbcs
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2016 11:09 AM
To: nfbcs at nfbnet.org
Cc: Deborah Armstrong <armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu>
Subject: [nfbcs] Cisco jabber and politics

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.h
tml

--Debee

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