RantWoman has among her circles many people who want to mean well but who are slow learners about #disability, electronic accessibility, #a11y and #inclusion. That said, today's exercise in unplanned accessibility testing is doubly disappointing because even when people have the option of taking RantWoman's advice, Things Can Go Wrong. (RantWoman could politely and discretely address the problem institution as described below. However Things Can Go Wrong for all kinds of organizations and RantWoman hopes her comments are instructive and informative.
One consistent RantWoman recommendation to those in the nonprofit and faith community realm who know little about accessibility but are at least a little concerned that RantWoman might turn into a howling puddle of exasperation when an inaccessible option is suggested: check to see whether the resource you are recommending has a page about what accessibility standards the organization strives to meet. A link at least indicates an organization has thought about accessibility. But it does not guarantee accessibility.
Consider the My COVID Risk app from the Brown University Center for Digital Medicine.
There is an accessibility policy. RantWoman guesses that MAYBE the my COVID risk app may have been evaluated with only automated testing
This app is supposed to let users enter some information
about a proposed activity, whether indoors or outdoors, how long, how many people present, percentage of those present wearing masks. The app is supposed to both spit out an estimate of risk and make suggestions about how to lessen risk.
RantWoman made it through enough of the app to observe the above using mostly screen enlargement. This is partly because the app coughed and fizzled with screen enlargement and puked up all kinds of unlabelled buttons and frozen screens when in the presence of a screen reader. The app did this both on RantWoman's phone with talkback on and in Chrome as described above. Thus RantWoman also has complaints: the app does not offer any choice about whether one's indoor activity is 300 people in a room with capacity for 30 or 30 people socially distanced in a room with capacity of 300. .
RantWoman sometimes suspects the problem might be RantWoman. Today all of RantWoman's crack team of adhoc accessibility testers with different accessibility needs than RantWoman all just panned the aopp.
So tomorrow RantWoman will go looking for a more accessible risk assessment app.
And how's your #pandemic going?
Vaccines? Oh that. More to come on that front as well.
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