[nabs-l] npr: Unfriendly Skies? Blind Passengers Sue United

[Anjelina]

I hope changes are made with airline accessibility as well as other 
inaccessible touch screen inconveniences we have to encounter on a daily 
basis.

Here is the story and link for anyone interested in the NPR story.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130921227

M. Spencer Green/AP
A group of blind passengers is suing United Airlines, claiming that its 
check-in kiosks are inaccessible.

text size A A A
October 31, 2010 from KQED
This week, a group of blind air travelers filed suit against United Airlines 
claiming that the airline's digital kiosks are inaccessible to blind people.

It's not a problem that most travelers think about: How would they get 
through an airport without their eyesight? But something as simple as 
finding out your flight's gate can be a hassle.

Mike May, who lives in Davis, Calif., says he has to ask someone to look for 
flight information on the big digital boards. And checking in using the 
now-ubiquitous electronic kiosks is an even bigger hassle, at least at many 
airlines.

"There's no earphone jack, no audio output, no Braille output," says May, 
who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. So he often has to find a 
stranger with time to help, then hand over his credit card and other private 
information. "It's demeaning to have to ask, it's inconvenient, and it has 
an element of not being safe to have to depend on another person for that," 
he says.

Websites Inaccessible, Too

In fact, the problems start even before they get to the airport, says 
Jonathan Lazar, who teaches computer science at Towson University in 
Maryland. Recently, Lazar took a close look at the websites of 10 leading 
airlines. He found that four of them, including United, are inaccessible to 
blind people; the sites are incompatible with the screen readers that blind 
people use to surf the Web.

 Dec. 14, 2006
Those airlines effectively force blind people to buy tickets by phone, "and 
more than one-third of the time, they ended up overcharging blind people. 
Either charging higher fares, or refusing to waive the call center fee, or 
both," Lazar says.

Lazar says there's an easy solution: Design websites that blind people can 
use. American Airlines and Continental have already done that. So have eBay 
and Target. He says accessible and inaccessible websites look exactly the 
same. The difference is the way that the pages are coded, including labels 
for links and images.

Auditory Guidance

On an inaccessible website, a blind person using a screen reader might hear 
something like this: "Image ... image ... image" or 
"one-four-six-four-six-dot-jpg." Lazar calls it "basically garbled junk."

On an accessible site, on the other hand, blind people hear descriptions 
that make sense to them.

There are similar solutions for touch screens. The iPhone or iPad, for 
instance, can be used by a blind person after a quick change to the device's 
settings. Every time your finger touches something, the device tells you 
what it is. Touch the icon for Facebook, for example, and you hear an 
automated voice saying "Facebook."

May says those examples show that designing devices with accessibility in 
mind is perfectly feasible. And while his lawsuit focuses on airline kiosks, 
they're really just an example of a bigger problem: electronic devices that 
he and others like him cannot use.

"It would be so much easier to build in accessibility from the ground up, 
rather than have to retrofit them after the fact," he says. He says that 
technology can open doors for disabled people, He says that technology can 
open doors for disabled people, but poorly designed technology can also shut 
them out.

Anjelina
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
Albert Einstein

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Corey Cook" <ccook01 at knology.net>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 11:49 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] npr


> Did anyone hear the story on NPR avout accessibility for theBlind?
> I thought it was well done!
>
> Corey Cook
> Email
> ccook01 at knology.net
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> ccook01 at knology.net
> Skype
> coreym821
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