Sign Up to Make Coffee and Wash Dishes

RantWoman has several streams of email needing her attention, so it's time for...the next episode of #disabilityinchurch

Possibly, considering multiple cans of worms already associated with one email, RantWoman should just have held off and NOT OPENED THE EMAIL in the first place.

Or if RantWoman's goal is to get paid for more of the work she does....

Restraint is not always RantWoman's strong suit. Instead today's festive blindness tourism excursion is about how a seemingly simple task that takes many people just a few minutes will now soak up 4 + hours of testing and writing up the tests and email and blog posting. After all that, actually accomplishing the task, assuming no other accessibility issues turn up, will still require RantWoman both to relax a personal requirements about passwords and to cope visually with a task that RantWoman thinks should be doable with a screen reader.

RantWoman received an email responsive to the subject of this post.
http://rantwoman.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-frustration-lab-goes-to-church.html

The basic tasks: create a signin on a resource and then consider signing up to do things that should then go on a calendar. In RantWoman's case the tasks to be signed up for include things like washing dishes and moving furniture, boht of which are more or less doable with some caveats on Planet RantWoman.

The email involves one resource which gets to remain nameless for now due to having issues that probably affect other similar products. This resource markets itself as event planning for schools,  community groups, faith communities. The site calls them churches but for a large number of reasons RantWoman is for now mentally editing to say faith communities; if the site insists on the word churches RantWoman will specifically NOT be recommending it further.

Also big red flag cautions: mediocre handling of accessibility issues. Bear in mind, RantWoman can read enough of the site to have the comments below and some of RantWoman's gripes are probably more general design that specifically accessibility. In RantWoman's experience though design and accessibility work best when they dance to get therefrom the beginning.

From RantWoman's email to the company:
Your About Us Page has no mention of anything to do with accessibility.

What if any accessibility testing have you done?

Given that a lot of faith communities I am familiar with have a lot of seniors and people who might need basic choices like increased font size or different contrast, has your design process involved any consideration of ways to offer people options? I assure you, the average faith community I am familiar with is not going to have the expertise to do this on their own and it would greatly increase my confidence in your company to know you have explicitly thought about accessibility.

[RantWoman in Tell Too Much of The Truth mode:
I am reserving judgment for first pass on the website because I need to go back and try again.

[For a product aimed at faith communities, GOD YOU HAVE A LOT OF legalese in your privacy policy. I think it's probably reasonable to cover the stuff you cover, but I might make it a page with links to different topics.

[Thank you for noting these comments and expect further comments if I have trouble with the CAPTCHA on the Email us page. ]

RantWoman received in response "We follow many best practices but do not claim to be Section 508 compliant."

Facepalm.

RantWoman thought bubble: Okayyy, you have heard of at least one standard but RantWoman would more expect to hear something about WC3 standards.

Furthermore, you say you are marketing your services to schools. RantWoman knows of at least two school districts that have been sued over electronic accessibility issues. If RantWoman were in any way connected with a school and thinking about your tool, minimal due diligence would be to check whether your website talks about accessibility at all (nope, in this case) and preferably whether you also aspire to attain either of the standards mentioned above.

RantWoman has also been known to use the google with name of product and accessibility as a search string. If nothing negative turns up...

Further detail about actual tests RantWomanperformed:
--I tried the site in Windows with my screen reader. I got to enough
of the site to send some pointed questions to the company. I will post
 those on my blog for a few reasons. I got them sent off fine without
 any issues from the CAPTCHA in the automated email form. Maybe the site detected that I was using a screen reader because I checked the I am not a robot box and it did
 not even bother giving me a CAPTCHA. Or maybe the CAPTCHA is not working right. I also got a return email from a live human saying she was forwarding my inquiry to someone up the food chain. Points here just for responsiveness.

--No,I do NOT want to sign up through Facebook. For one thing one of my steps to keep the interwebs from completely taking over my life is not to use Facebook on my phone but only on a laptop or desktop.

 --There is an app. I downloaded it fine through the PlayStore because I have an Android phone. The download went fine and the menus voice fine so far but the app flunked my second accessibility test: it did not autorotate when I wanted to turn my phone on its side which I do to make a bigger keyboard.
  App creators who turn off one accessibility feature also make RantWoman wonder what else they might have turned off.
   Anyway for now the autorotate is a catastrophic fail.

RantWoman came back to the Windows site. RantWoman had no trouble reading most of the pages enough to form the opinions below.

RantWoman did have trouble creating a sign-in. RantWoman read the page fast and did not hear anything except Log In. There were two places that said "Create Sign In" The links took RantWoman took RantWoman to chipper copy about how easy it is to create a sign-in but no actual Sign-in process.

Finally RantWoman went back to the Home page. RantWoman had to do a Links List to find the Login link and only when RantWoman clicked on the Link did RantWoman hear Login / Register. RantWoman had to tab through a sign-in page to find the Register Link. When RantWoman got to the Register window, RantWoman did NOT register.

Why not?

--The fields for First Name, Last Name etc were not labelled in a way that would read automatically with a screen reader

--RantWoman is a clutz. RantWoman is NOT going to trust a login creation process that does not include a password confirmation process so RantWoman is sure of what she typed.

And to the people wanting RantWoman to use said resource:
--The site seems to do fine FOR MOST THINGS except a couple crucial ones with my screen reader but the style you have chosen is not the most visually accessible for me. There are LOTS of places where contrast is very bad. Having a feature that would let
 people see in larger fonts would be nice to have for people who do not
 know multiple ways to make things larger on their devices or in their
 browser.

 --I read the ... privacy policy. It is way full of legalese
 and I am not sure what to make of some of it. I see why the technical
 detail is there  but it would make say my mother's eyes glaze over.
 has anyone else at (RantWoman's faith community) even commented on this?

There. Now hopefully RantWoman will summon enough politeness to write the company and suggest they really need to kick their accessibility up a notch.

But will RantWoman sign up to wash dishes at her faith community? Stay tuned.