Groupware Accessibility Bakeoff

Accessibility is a Civil Right. Accessibility is a Civil Right. Accessibility is a Civil Right....

If you build in accessibility from the beginning, it's better software...

RantWoman absorbed these points at Accessibility Camp Seattle.

Unfortunately, RantWoman is the sort of event attender who absorbs info like that and still grumbles on evaluation forms about concepts like "vendor neutral event." SILLY RantWoman. Here is an example.


It all started innocently enough. An enthusiastic young intern at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing started talking about editting documents in the cloud. The intern began gushing about groupware and uttering paeans to Google docs.

Soon the buzz was building. Several staffpeople thought that editting documents in the cloud sounded like a really cool idea.So in fact does RantWoman! In the cloud means people can edit and share the same files from multiple locations without having to download and upload. This sounds WONDERFUL to RantWoman.

RantWoman remembered the vast troves of quality info (?!?!?)lurking in RantWoman's email archives. RantWoman uses a screen reader. RantWoman knows and is willing to insist, and another Blind User knows that for a tool to become standard at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing, it has to be accessible. It has to operate as fully as possible with the screen readers of choice. RantWoman's email is chock full of comments to the effect tha Google docs is NOT accessible.

The Friendly Neighborhood Center... (RantWoman still feels called to pay at least SLIGHT attention to respectful branding, but...) specializes in assistive technology and serving people with disabilities, no matter how badly we need GroupWare, we CANNOT standardize on a tool that is inaccessible to significant members of our community.

RantWoman's email has been full for months of complaints about how Google docs is inaccessible in various ways someone besides RantWoman darn well should be getting paid big bucks to document. Nevertheless, RantWoman poked out an email of inquiry to one of her email lists. RantWoman got back:

--another link to Google's actually fairly insightful survey about blind users, the kinds of equipment and software people have, and numerous related issues.

--a perky press release from Google about the accessibility initiative du jour supposedly over the current two months. In ohter words, rather than design some standard of accessibility into their product organically as part of every single build, accessibility is still in significant respects vaporware, all hot air and no actual realization.

--various workarounds to achieve partial functionality for various features of Google docs using a screen reader.

In other words, RantWoman had, AGAIN, to put her foot down. Poor Friendly Neighborhood Center...

RantWoman obstinately pointed out, Google docs is at best very partially functional with screen readers. SkyDrive, on the other hand is accessible from first click. How do we know this? We do not know this from some spiffy big-budget software evaluation process, for one thing because we do not HAVE a spiffy, big-budget software evaluation process. Instead we have...Blind Neighbor who clicked on an ad link and liked everything she read with her screen reader.

Soooo, after checking out that we can easily accomplish the file administration we need, guess which groupware tool is now standard at the Friendly Neighborhood Center...


RantWoman could stop here but RantWoman is going to bless her hardy readers with an additional increment of tirade:

The unemployment rate among blind people in the US has hovered resolutely near 80% for decades. RantWoman knows perfectly well that one cannot just say "poof" and "Make it So" and achieve accessibility. HOWEVER, if a mass-market product / service like Google docs is not accessible from the outset, blind organizations and the organizations that would like to hire them are endlessly on a treadmill. Who wants to hire someone whose very presence is going to force one's office to have to ask about accessibility for every single software standard decision? Plenty of small organizations are like the Friendly Neighborhood Center: they have no software evaluation budget and just need things to work! Word!


Still more tirade: RantWoman currently has a job posting in her in-box related to advocating about accessibility at still another gigantic software and media entity. RantWoman is weighing a number of considerations, starting with "Dear Potential Employer, RantWoman thinks you deserved to get sued when one recent initiative did not involve immediately accessibility. RantWoman wonders whether the decisions that got you sued were a calculated risk and RantWoman thinks you should just hire her to help you stay on top of...."