[blindkid] Chromebooks

[Steve Jacobson]

Richard,

Depending upon the situation, it is possible that it violates the law to outfit all students with inaccessible equipment in a public school setting.  There may be variables, though, such as how the equipment is 
going to be used.  It might be information that would be useful to pass on to our national office, though, in case it fits a pattern.  Also, I know that there have been on-going discussions with Google, and Anne 
Taylor may be able to provide the latest information.  

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

On Sun, 2 Mar 2014 00:27:42 -0500, Richard Holloway wrote:

>Thanks Debby,

>I suspected there might be issues. I guess the best to hope for is we would be able to access the same information with something more conventional like a PC with JAWS.

>Weve already had some previous bad experiences with some e-textbooks that were supposed to be accessible, only their idea of 
accessible" was the pages would self-read, after getting sighted assistance 
to click about once every paragraph or so. With that situation, we never could get JAWS or VoiceOver to navigate their cute animation-filled web site. 

>Visual appeal is all good and well, but it seems to me that full access for students to the actual text content needs to come first.

>Anyhow, thanks for for your response!



>On Mar 1, 2014, at 10:29 PM, Debby B <bwbddl at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> Last year Winona won (yes, won!) a ChromeBook at school. They were unable to adapt it to be accessible for her, so ended up swapping it out for a regular laptop. 
>> 
>> 
>>  
>> Debby
>> bwbddl at yahoo.com
>> 
>> ~"Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read."~Mark Twain
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Saturday, March 1, 2014 9:47 PM, Richard Holloway <rholloway at gopbc.org> wrote:
>> 
>> A middle school we have been researcing for our daughter is looking at outfitting all the students with Google Chromebooks. She would likely be the only blind student potentially using these. Im very curious 
to know how likely we are to have problems with such a plan, though I assume we might be able to access the same information with a PC or Mac Laptop.
>> 
>> I recall there were some NFB issues addressed relating to Chromebooks a while back. From what I read, they do have some accessibility features, but I don't have any current access to explore any of these 
machines directly.  
>> 
>> Has anyone explored these accessibility features, and can anyone compare them to JAWS on a PC, or VoiceOver on a Mac?
>> 
>> Thanks!
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