[gui-talk] schools shun Kindle

[James Pepper]

The problems of tagging content for accessibility is a long and tedious
process requiring experts in the field who usually get it wrong.

We have built in features in software for accessibility but they are not
comprehensive.  For instance we have the "Save as Daisy" feature in
Microsoft Word, but if you do not lay out the content correctly before you
press that button, content will be missed or not placed in the proper order
and the only way to notice this is if you actually read the document; all of
it.

In any of these procedures, content is usually missing and it is extremely
rare to get all of the content to be accessible; unless it is a short
document.  Hence in order to fix this situation we must rebuild the process
of making content from the start and then fix it so that content is
inherently accessible to the blind, the illiterate, etc.

And of course for dynamic content things really get complicated!

It is important to make this a procedure where the author is not aware that
they are making their content accessible, that it is built into the system.
If we do this, then the average person can make accessible content without
any expertise!

There is a misconception out there about accessibility.  Right now people
are trying to make their content legally accessible to the blind, following
the Section 508 law and ADA regs, but if you lay out content to that
specification there is no guarantee that it will be actually accessible to
the blind. Actually, most content made to the legal standard is useless.

Take for instance buttons.  Many web design programs provide alt text as
placeholder text in the alt text field.  Just having any content, even if it
says "Button 1" will pass the test for accessibilty using the standard
testing programs that test for section 508 compliance.  But you and I both
know that a page that says "Button 1" all the time will not do!  That it is
completely inaccessible.

So the definition of accessibility needs to be changed to a functional
accessibility which can be tested using free screen readers so that people
who make the content can test it and judges can read the document
immediately in court without any assistance. That the accessibility is
obvious and that you do not need a special program to read the content.

Kindle suffers from the same coding problems that other PDF based formats
have and so there is an inherent inaccessibility which can be overcome, but
not with the current solutions available to the public.  To fix the current
problems using conventional technology is a very editorial intensive
process, not practical in the current business environment. Hence we need a
new solution.

Also there seems to be a bias towards making content accessible to the
latest version of JAWS which is unavailable to the majority of the blind and
disabled because it costs so much!  Backwards compatibility is needed and
making content accessible to the simplest text to speech engines is
necessary if we are truly going to be accessible to the blind. This can be
done.

When I look at the content on the page and then I see what the blind have
access, I have to say that the state of accessibility at this point is just
not good enough.  The blind must insist on a standard of all of the content
must be accessible, not just parts of it.  There must be a "meeting of the
minds," otherwise every document made partially accessible should be
declared null and void because both parties are not communicating.  Is it a
legal contract if only one party has access to the content?

Is it a legal document if the content provided to the blind is different,
even a completely different content than what is presented on the printed
page.  It is perfectly possible to create an accessible document that is
completely different than the content provided on the page.  What asurances
do we have that what we hear in a screen reader is the terms of a contract?


And lastly, we need to make this content accessible in every language in the
world.

This can be done.

James Pepper