KARL BELANGER: Welcome to the Advocating for Accessibility Boutique, where we'll cover strategies for advocating with companies to help improve the accessibility of their products. This video is captioned We also have a reporting inaccessibility self-advocacy Toolkit, which provides the tools and strategies we are discussing in text form. The toolkit also contains a downloadable sample letter that you might send to a company to introduce yourself and describe the issues you are having with their products.
Engaging with the developers of products you use is one of the best ways to raise awareness of accessibility with the brands you care about. We also encourage you to share your experiences with inaccessible products with us through our inaccessibility issues tracking form. You can access the toolkit, the tracking form and our other resources at NFB.ORG/CENA.
Voiceover: National Federation of the Blind, live the life you want.
[Live the life you want song]
[music] Living the life you want. Nobody can stop you. Shoot for some and break on through. So you're blind. You'll be fine. We've got good news. You can live the life you want. [music ends]
ANIL LEWIS: Welcome. The National Federation of the Blind knows that blindness is not the characteristic that defines you or your future. Every day we raise expectations for blind people because we realize it's those low expectations that create obstacles between blind people and our dreams. But in order for blind people to truly live the life we want as fully participating members of society, we must make sure that the technology and services that are being developed are non-visual and accessible to the blind.
The National Federation of the Blind, in addition to its 52 affiliates across the country, focus on Non-visual accessibility through our center of excellence and non-visual accessibility. In addition to housing, the International Braille and Technology Center, which houses over 2 million worth of accessible technology that blind people use to live, work and play in our communities every day. The center also promotes a variety of projects and programs and trainings, much like this one, to make sure that the world is more accessible.
Welcome. Every day, we raise expectations for blind people, because we realize that it's those low expectations that create obstacles between blind people and our dreams. But in order for blind people to truly live the life we want, as fully participating members of society, we must make sure that the technology and services that are being developed are non-visually accessible to the blind. The National Federation of the Blind, in addition to its 52 affiliates across the country focus on nonvisual accessibility through our center of excellence in nonvisual accessibility. In addition housing, the International Braille and Technology Center, which houses over 2 million worth of accessible technology that blind people use to live, work and play in our communities every day, the CENA also promotes a variety of projects, programs and trainings like this, to make sure that the world is more accessible.
We are pleased that the state of Maryland helps support this effort through a nonvisual accessibility initiative grant, administered by the Maryland Department of Disability and in addition to trainings like this, we also host programs and projects that increase the accessibility of education, employment, to make the cities more accessible, we support a portal called the accessibility switchboard, which is all about onboarding people to understanding accessibility. You can visit it by going to accessibilityswitchboard.org, and we also host our accessibility fellows program, which helps community college and university instructors integrate accessibility strategies and techniques into the mainstream curriculums so that their graduates come out with an understanding of accessibility that's acculturated into their professional pursuits. You can find out more by visiting NFB.org/CENA and now to today's presentation.
KARL BELANGER: So why should we report accessibility issues? Thank you. Also, yes, this meeting is being recorded to the cloud. We will at some point, we do not have a firm date or exactly know how -- but we will be working on getting these recordings eventually available. So why report issues to developers and companies? Well, because if -- for many companies, they don't know necessarily that blind people are using their software or product or whatever the case may be.
It can be -- it could be the first time that they have heard of screen readers or magnification or whatever. Also, many of these products are big moving pieces with a lot of different parts and, you know, goals and things and they don't always catch every little bug. Also, it's better to come with reports -- if reports and issues come from users.
Sure, the NFB or other disability organizations can send letters and make phone calls but we don't have skin in the game. We don't buy their product, necessarily, we don't use it, and so when it's coming from, hey, I want to use your product and give you my money but I can't, that carries a lot more weight. So what do you need to include in an accessibility report? There's a number of things.
There's, you know, what you're using, how you're using it, what the problem is, and there's some series of steps, so I will cover all of these in more detail, but I will run them down now, first, how you're accessing their product or service, what operating system, a computer with Windows 10, an iPhone with iso-16, whatever, a Mac with, you know, the latest MacOS, whatever the version is.
If you're using something other than the operating system's built in technology, like NVDA on Windows, state that and its version as well, second, what you're trying to do, are you trying to complete a check out form, purchase a product, whatever the case is, you want to either include the direct web address, or URL of the page if you're on a website, or if you're on a app, give specific steps to how you can get there.
Third, what's happening there. I'm trying to do what? And it isn't working. What's making it difficult? You know, where are you running into roadblocks. Be as specific as you can, you know, but don't worry about -- if you don't know the technical names for controls or things like that. I'll get into more of how you can describe certain aspects of problems a little later on. Fourth, what should be happening, if you're comfortable giving this information, you know, I can think of how it should work, when I tapped this field, it just said "edit," it should tell me what I should put there. That can be simple enough. Potential solutions, if you know them and are somewhat technically inclined and feel comfortable giving potential solutions or recommendations about how something could potentially be fixed, that is another option.
Go through each of those last few steps. What are you trying to do, what's not working, and if you feel comfortable, how could you fix it for each issue you're encountering on their site and lastly, you might recommend giving some accessibility resources. Apple's iOS accessibility link if you are on a iPhone. Similar for Google with Android, the web content accessibility guidelines if you're on a desk stop and there are other accessibility resources out there, you heard in the introductory video, our accessibility switchboard, that's another resource that you might consider including.
So all those pieces are good to have but before you even get to there, you need to have somewhere to send it. And that can be a little bit tricky. So where to send one? You want to start, ideally, you want to find an accessibility page. This can be typing in, you know, the organization or company name and the word "accessibility" into Google. Sometimes that will yield a page, not every organization and especially smaller organizations, say, smaller app developers or local restaurant website is not going to have an accessibility contact.
So then, next up is to look for a webmaster or technical support type e-mail. Those can also get you to the people you need to talk to. And as a last resort, the general info e-mail or contact form on a website is always going to be better than nothing. Once you find your accessibility contact, or just the generic e-mail if it comes to that, just start by writing, you know, "hi, I'm Karl Belanger, I'm trying to use your product, whatever the product name is and I'm running into some difficulties. And then you get into your, I'm using a Windows ten computer with JAWS 2023. When I try to do blah, blah, blah, this happens. Very simple, straightforward. And we will get into kind of how we would formulate a accessibility report. I'll kind of walk through, I have plenty of demos to show you. Go on, describe each of them, at the end, give your resources that you think are relevant and then if you are willing, offer to help.
Hey, if you would like me to test something or if you have more questions, please reach out. I would like to work with you to get this resolved. All of those kinds of things can be great to get a company to respond and I have used them in my personal life and professional to get companies to respond with very good results. And so have many others in the blind community. So next up, all these things are great, but you can sabotage yourself if you do a few things that I want to get into. Here are some of the pitfalls of reporting issues that you really just want to stay away from. First, and the simplest to avoid is just be as specific as you can. Good morning Microsoft, your thing doesn't work. Well, okay. What product, what are you using, what were you trying to do?
That doesn't tell them anything actionable. My screen reader is not reading your site, same thing. What about your screen reader isn't reading it? What about the site isn't it reading? Is there a certain page? So being specific will really go a long way to making sure that they have the information that they need to get the issue resolved.
Second, be professional. I realize if you've been trying to work on filling out this form for the last hour and a half and you've lost the data three times and you have a splitting headache, it may be very cathartic to write a nasty e-mail about how horrible your product is, and your product is blah, blah, blah, and horrible piece of whatever and take a deep breath, step away for a little while.
And write a professional e-mail that you would like to receive. Sadly, companies get far too many nasty e-mails from customers and there's a good chance that your e-mail will just get deleted and not acted on, or you may even get blocked, which is even worse. Third, leave the lawyers out of it at least initially. Threatening lawsuits or, I'm going to sue you if you don't fix this, or I'm going to have an organization like the NFB come after you, any of those kinds of things, well, again, it may feel cathartic, or like you're trying to get somewhere but generally what's going to happen is if a company gets an e-mail threatening a legal action or anything of that nature, it's just going to go straight to their legal department. Any technical advice or anything you may have had will get ignored or just not acted on because a legal threat means it went straight to the lawyers.
Also, any further communicate from you, whether or not you mentioned lawyers or lawsuits or litigation or any such words will still likely go straight to the lawyers because now that you have threatened it, they are saving all communications for any potential legal action.
That said, if you have e-mailed a company and e-mailed and followed up and tried to get somewhere and it's been months and nothing, then maybe just maybe, you may want to -- you may mention the legal aspects. You may want to talk to an organization first or a lawyer if you are wanting to go that route but any definition of lawyers, listing, lawsuits should be a last resort if you use it at all.
And lastly, persistence is good but you can be overpersistent. You know, if you send an e-mail, don't hear back a week or two later, go ahead, follow up. Hey, just wanted to make sure you received my e-mail, do you have any feedback on what may be causing this issue or when you might have it resolved? If you have gotten someone to respond and say thank you, we're looking into it, maybe give it a month, maybe, you know, give it a little bit longer. Don't every day, every couple of days, respond please, have you fixed it yet? That will just get tiring and will likely also result in your e-mails just getting immediately junked and you may or may not ever get any feedback on what to do for the future or on the status of the issue. Before we dive deeper in, that's the general overview of what goes in a report and some things not to do, we will get into more specifics of how to find information and put together a report, how to describe certain things in a bit.
But I will just pause briefly here to see if there are any questions so far. Again, you can ask your questions in the chat, or raise your Anderson, command Y on a Mac, star 9 on a phone. Do we have any questions in the chat?
SPEAKER: No, we have one hand raised.
KARL BELANGER: Okay. If we can -- who do we have?
SPEAKER: Hi, can you hear me, guys?
KARL BELANGER: Yes.
SPEAKER: Hi, this is Misty, just a quick question, a bit of a curve ball but if we see a site using one of those dreaded accessibility overlays, is it appropriate to bring it to their attention and to circulate to them that the fact sheet that's been going around about the downside to overlayers. How do we advocate as far as the overlays go, thanks.
KARL BELANGER: Sure, thank you for the question. You certainly can advocate for them. I would encourage that to look, is the overlay causing problems for you because while it may or may not -- some people may still find certain components of that overlay useful. So I would hesitate just to immediately, you know, all overlays are immediately bad but especially, yes, if causing more problems than it's fixing and you can say, it's making the site worse in XYZ way, by all means go for it.
SPEAKER: Now we have a question from Sandy.
SPEAKER: Can you hear me? Sorry about that. A pop-up came on the phone too. To unmute your phone!
Anyway, I have two questions. So like, I just did this yesterday actually, the school that I'm going to is using a specific program, and I asked them, I was like, can you guys fix this so that instead of saying, you know, when you tab over, instead of just saying, button, it would actually have a name for that button.
And I've asked them several times to fix that, and I can't get a hold of the company because it's through the school, so I have to go through the IT department and then the IT department, they are like, well, we can maybe send them an e-mail and ask them to fix this. And I'm like, is there any way I can get a hold of the company that does this website? And I don't know -- and then the other question is, is, when you get on a website because I have to do a lot of research for school, when I get on a website that has so many advertisements it causes the screen to jump all over the place and the screen reader can't jump it. Should I be able to talk to them and say, hey, you guys need to fix your site, because of all of these advertisements, the screen reader can't read it.
KARL BELANGER: As far as the school one, thank you for your question, by the way -- as far as the school one, that's a little bit -- I would say, if you can try to find out the name of the software or company that created the software, Google is your friend in that one.
Trying to Google for names or e-mail addresses at that company or if you put the name of the software into Google, you can likely find the company name and do some delving on there. You can also utilize social media, I don't know if you are on LinkedIn or anything like that, but you may be able to find resources from there.
As far as -- that can cause problems, again, you know, sure, you can always e-mail them and say, the way that your ads are working, when I go on there with my screen reader, I experience blah, blah, blah, I'm using whatever browser and operating system this you are using, that's certainly a viable accessibility report.
SPEAKER: We have a question in the chat, any tips for when you get a response but you get the generic response like, thank you for your message, we will pass it along to the appropriate department, or they just give general steps, they always send people that likely has nothing to do with your actual question. Did you restart your computer?
KARL BELANGER: Good question, I will certainly be discussing smartphone that later, so yes, I do have tips, and hold on a bit, we will get to that.
SPEAKER: And there's one more hand raised from iPhone.
KARL BELANGER: All right. And after this we will move on, iPhone, you may go ahead and unmute.
SPEAKER: Yes, good afternoon, my name is [ inaudible ] I'm doing the listen in. I was wondering, for these PowerPoints to be read, to be sent via e-mail so anyone can read them on a Braille laptop, not just anyone who's interested in them, music, or the accessibility one we are having today. Who do we e-mail to get these PowerPoints e-mailed to us.
KARL BELANGER: For boutiques with power points, you can e-mail, Ken, Ken, this one today won't have a PowerPoint but there is an article that will be posted soon which outlines all the steps that I have discussed here in a lot more detail that should be up fairly soon. I don't have a definitive date yet. That should be up pretty soon.
SPEAKER: Okay. So go to NFB.org/CENA and women see it there and then -- will you be able to read it or just download it?
SPEAKER: It will be there so that you can read it offline or send it to people or whatever you want to do with it. Okay. Thank you very much for the questions. We will have further questions. For now, we will move on. Now, let's get into how we put this whole thing together. Gathering information what do you need to include? Again, it's your computer, your screen reader, your browser on Windows, generally I think many people know that Windows 10, 7, whatever you're using, if not, on Windows ten, least, you can press Windows X on your keyboard, arrow down to system, and press down until the screen reader announces that you are in the windows specification group, and there will be a copy button, enter copy on that, paste it into notepad, word, or the text editor of your choice.
And it will -- really all you will need from that batch of information is just the top line that will say, Windows ten or 11 in whatever edition, and then the build, which is the second line will say, 21H2, 22H 2, you can also include that -- on iPhone or Android you go to settings, in iPhone, it's in general, in Android, it's in about, about this phone, and it will give you the version of the operating system that you're using.
For your screen reader, JAWS and NVDA both in the help menu have an about screen that you can access which will show the current major and minor version number.
So for NVDA, you will see 22.3 or 4, whatever. JAWS, you might see JAWS 2023, build blah, blah, blah, you don't need to necessarily include the whole detail because some, you know, software and browsers especially can have very long version numbers, as long as you clued like 22.4 or whatever the major version is, that's generally sufficient and the fullback if they need specific builds can always ask for that later. Next is browser, chrome, edge, Firefox, well, let me say first, for operating systems that only have one screen reader built in, such as VoiceOver on MacOS, VoiceOver is built into the operating system and interrupts with the operating system.
So you don't really need to include the version for that. Talk back on Android does include a version, so you may want to include it.
But it's not as easy to find. You have to go to the bottom of the settings and it will show the version number.
Browsers, Firefox, chrome, edge, whatever you're using, just go to help menu and then choose "about". It will open up a dialogue, again, it will have the version number that you are trying to access, that you are using, and what information -- what version and such that it has.
Copy all that down. It doesn't need to be any long, I'm using Windows 10 22H2, JAWS 2023 and chrome 109. It can be one simple sentence like that. Doing that, however, will give a company a clear indication of, okay, in order to reproduce this, this is what my customer is using. That way, you know, because sometimes, it can happen where a bug manifests itself in Firefox but not in chrome, or something shows up with NVDA but not JAWS or it shows up on Android but not iOS. And so having that information can help them narrow down exactly what is the, you know -- where and how the bug is happening.
Next is, once you get that basic info, it's where you're having the problem. So start with, you know, go to the page if it's a Web page, go to the page in whatever browser on desktop computers, Windows, on all Windows browsers, control L opens the address bar. You can just use control A control C to copy the address and then go to your e-mail or Word doc and paste the address right there. This will make sure that there's no ambiguity. Because it's on the checkout page or registration page, they might have multiple iterations of that page, or there might be multiple things that you can register for on a site, so having the exact address removes any ambiguity, and you can get right to where you're having the issue right at that point. Next up -- well, if you're not using a web browser, if you're accessing it on your app or understand an, give as details information as you can about how to get to that step . Go to the search box, select this term, select the products, here are these options that I selected and then go to the checkout. Add it to cart and go to checkout. I want you there, you experienced these issues. That way, they can try to reproduce as best as possible what the issue is.
Next, once you have that, you're ready to start talking about the problems. Here, again, you want to be specific. So when I tab through this form, I hear "edit" "edit" "edit" which means that my screen reader is not telling me what to fill in. The technical term is that these forms are unlabeled, but just telling me, my screen reader doesn't tell me what I need to fill in" should get the message across. I'm supposed to click the next button but there's just a Word on the page that says next, it doesn't tell me it's a link or a button should give them a good indication there are pictures here but my screen reader just gives some weird numbers and names that don't make sense or it just says graphic.
Again, explanation can be as simple as that. Then what should it do. When I tab, it sure tell me what each feel is and what I should find there. When I -- it should tell me if it's a button or link or whatever. When I move over the graphic, there should be text describing what's in the graphics, straightforward.
The solution part, if you know that it's all day Al context or an unlabeled graphic on a page, then you could say, you need to use the alt text attributes on your site and that will name me know what's in the picture, or you need to put labels on your form field and you could go through each of them.
We could go through a site that we will show -- I could talk through -- how you might do this. So let's start -- we're going to use the web accessibility before and after demonstration. We're going to go through a couple of pages of the site. If anyone cares to follow along, or checkout the inaccessible page. I'm going to put a list to this chair into the chat. All right. So that is there. But before we get to that page, we would need to find somewhere to send our British accessibility initiative. So I will start the screen share. (Screen Reader)
Can you see and hear my -- does everything look and sound good for my screen share? Great. So we're on home page for the accessibility initiative. Here, you could arrow down or page through the page if you go up from the bottom, chances are you might find the contact which I'm just going to do, I'm just looking for the contact page link, a link, or search for contacts, or e-mail, or various things like that. So I will now H to move by heading.
Let me go to the top, web content accessibility. First inquiry is that I don't think that that -- maybe, but let's keep going, approximate feedback on the Y level heading 2. This sounds promising, feedback on the A website. You can submit comments on the overall website, one list.
And that sounds like the link that we would want. We could use that to write our web accessibility report. Again, started off with high, I'm Karl Belanger, and I'm attempting to use that page that you wanted to visit earlier. I'm using Microsoft edge, I'm just -- if -- there's about Microsoft edge.
So you heard 109.0, official bill, 64 bit, all that they really need is this our outstanding -- that is our typical version. Similarly, approximate it, it will show right there. I'll get rid of this because we now have our link So now aware on the inaccessible before and after page.
You can also get to the accessible home page so that you can compare the accessible and inaccessible ones versions with an NVDA, I'm arrowing down these links to get the relevant content. (Screen reader). So for this first graphic here, it has actually the opposite problem, normally when we are on the site, we find paragraphs that have very little description, this, is far too long to post. In many cases, city lights will suffice. We have some unlabeled graphics here, saying that my browser says no description payable. So here we have a dropdown which means quick menu at the top.
So I'm going to open this. Let's choose electricity now. When I tab, it takes us to a page they didn't bother to code for this demo.
But just using this to illustrate the point, you know, you could describe that adds, when I tab out of the dropdown at the top of the page, it jumps me to a new page, this is confusing and can land me somewhere where I don't want to be. There should be a go button, or a way for me to tell it when I want to go to somewhere rather than just taking me there immediately.
(Screen Reader) now we have three news articles, and the links all appear together, the summaries all appear together, which can be very confusing and stating that in an accessibility report, that you need to group the links with an appropriate [ inaudible ] another thing that I noticed is that there are no headings, not everyone having a head structure could make things confusing for anyone using the site.
I'll continue down. Interestingly, the phone number on this page is in a graphic itself which, at least they have the alternative text and things so that the graphic can the phone number can be read but there's no reason that it should be in a graphic itself, it's just text. That's one thing that certainly web developers do is pictures of text, because that can cause other problems. That's a couple of examples of how you would describe some issues on the home page, I'm going to go through a couple more examples on a couple other pages, but before I throw too much at you, again, I will pause for any questions.
SPEAKER: We have a few questions in the chat, what do you do when it is a state agency that refuses to even provide large print documents, or software for its consumers? They just say they don't have to, or they say it's digital, that's all we have to do, but they have scanned in the documents that are old, blurry, too small text, or otherwise not accessible, even though it is in, quote, unquote, digital format, big problem with state of New Jersey in federal agencies.
KARL BELANGER: Yeah, when it gets to the government stuff, I would recommend reaching out to the disability rights advocates in your state, or the NFB of New Jersey. They may be able to help put some pressure on these agencies and that is the time when you have tried, when you have pushed for these improvements and when they are unwilling, or actively hindering your ability to get things done, that may be the time that you threaten larger organizations or, you know, discuss potential legal action, because at that point, they are willfully not trying to make things better, just evade or whatever else. So that's probably the best solution for that type of situation.
SPEAKER: Another question in the chat, what about when it's a problem across an industry, for example, many news sites have videos with no narration, just music as words go across the screen during an entire video.
KARL BELANGER: That's a problem. Unfortunately, due to a lot of these sites are just independently managed, you may have to just take it on a company by company basis. If you can find, because a lot of these are owned by parent companies, if you can find the parent company of that website, or news agency, you might try there but there is, unfortunately, no real good option for tackling an industry-wide, other than starting somewhere with some company and trying to work from there.
SPEAKER: And we have a hand raised from Wayne Williams.
KARL BELANGER: Go ahead.
SPEAKER: Hello. Thank you for taking my question. I have a question about providing technical information. I do have a technical background, and I have tried to provide technical information, detailed information and potential solutions, and I have actually been met with, stop trying to do my job with me. We can do those sorts of things. Perhaps I'm overproviding information. I guess my question is, how detailed would you recommend going with providing suggestions towards solutions for an issue. Especially if you know exactly how to fix the issue.
KARL BELANGER: You know, that's going to be a bit of a personal preference, I wouldn't be, like, yes, there is that line of where you're trying to explain their job to them, what I might start with is just a general, to fix this, you might look at ... a general, here's where I feel the issue is in a technical sense, and then say, if you would like more detail, or for me to provide code for a potential solution, let me know, I'm happy to provide it. Something to that effect.
SPEAKER: Okay. Thank you.
KARL BELANGER: Mya, do we have anything else?
SPEAKER: No other questions.
KARL BELANGER: Thank you very much, we will move on. That's the home page, text -- we'll get back up and I'll go by link. (Screen Reader) we will go to the tickets page next. We have the same heading information on the home page that we have already covered in our accessibility report. So I'll skip past those. (Screen Reader).
And so we have a basic table on this page, which doesn't seem too bad although it does lack table headers, I will get into that more in a bit.
But, again, we have references to the music line but no phone number, nothing to know where to purchase tickets. (Screen Reader) we have here what looks like a table of some sort, but it's not coded as one. So a simple accessibility report for this could be, you know, when I go to the tickets page on your site, your table of prices, my screen reader doesn't recognize it as a table. When my screen reader sees it as a table, it lets me more easily navigate between the different columns and know what prices apply to what seating group and age-group.
(Screen Reader) the most unhelpful alt text ever, rather than having the actual phone number for the music line, they just have "music line phone number." Again, you put the words "music line phone number in the graphic instead of the graphic so I can't get to it to begin with. Moving on, we have a layout table for the terms and conditions which is not helpful. Because this is not a true table. We shouldn't be using a layout table for this music -- for this terms and conditions here at the bottom.
So, again, a couple more examples, let's just go to one that's a little bit more complex to talk about a form. This one, we can press -- we have the same dropdown menu. And we have the form controls in a table which is generally just for layout purposes, they're no good reason to have a table here. (Screen Reader) and we have radio buttons that don't tell you what I'm selecting when I arrow through them. We'll tab to them in a minute.
The labels are in a different column of the table which makes it that much more difficult to know which label go together. If I tab through these ... (Screen Reader) which brings us to another -- because of the heavy use of layout tables on this page, if you try to tab through the form fields, you get a whole bunch of -- which get irritating. -- now we are on to the next dropdown. And so we can select the city. I will press tab. (Screen Reader) so it gave us a whole bunch of extra verbiage, and so a report for this part could just be, when I try to tab, it's announcing me a whole bunch of table information that is unnecessary, and this form shouldn't be in a table, and also, it doesn't read the labels properly, or reads them out of order.
So I'm going to get out of the focus mode with NVDA, and just go down, blank, edit, e-mail address, out of table button submit.
And so you have a couple of unlaudable edit fields we talked about earlier, how you could do those. And then this whole form, simply could be stated, none of the fields read properly, and once -- you need to have them properly labeled so that screen readers can understand what's going on so that is the demo of how to find describe arrows on a page. So now you have your list of arrows, your descriptions, and you need to move on.
Like we discussed, resources. These, again, Google is your friend, Googling web content accessibility guidelines, putting the link in there.
If it's an iOS app, your guidelines, if it's Android, your Android guidelines as well. Stating how, okay. I'm interested in helping you making this work, please get back to me with any questions, if you have more, you know, if you need more information, let me know, I would be happy to work with you, et cetera. And move on to, you know, closing your letter. I'll pause again briefly for questions, and next, we will talk about how to handle when you don't get a response. What are your next steps, how can you move the bar?
MYA TAYLOR: There are no questions at this moment.
KARL BELANGER: I'll give it 30 seconds just in case. Okay. So you've written your nice accessibility report, a nice, detailed thing and you get nothing, or you get a generic, you know, please try these troubleshooting tips to fix the problem. If you get a generic or unhelpful message, you can reply and say, I'm sorry, these do not apply.
My computer is working fine, I use a screen reader, blah, blah, blah, if they don't seem to know what a screen reader is, send them a link, explain to them what it is. If you hear nothing, a week or two later, good morning, good afternoon, I'm writing to follow up on your inquiry from a couple of weeks ago, I would very much like to get this resolved. Please, let me know if I can be of any assistance to make sure that this get resolves. Again, try a couple of weeks later, possibly try a phone call if you're not getting anywhere. But sometimes, no matter how much you send, no matter how polite and persistent you are, that doesn't get anywhere.
Then there are other methods, you could try to go on LinkedIn to find a better e-mail address that you could send to to send the process again, maybe you're using generic info, but if you looked deeper on the site, you could find an IT director, e-mail posts publicly, or some other e-mail, maybe if you used LinkedIn, maybe you can find, you know, someone at the company who's a little higher up. That's a possibility.
Maybe -- but another option, is to go to social media. Companies listen to their customers, and the more customers who is there's a problem, the more likely it is that they will respond. So social media can be great for that front. It can also be great -- companies do not like we are received, at least, bad publicity. So if you go to a social media page and, again, professionally post, hey, I'm trying to get this accessibility issue resolved, here's what I'm experiencing, can we work together, especially -- some companies now do handle tech support and other issues on their social media.
If you notice them doing that, sending them a message through social media can be a great way to get their attention, for example, on Twitter just a simple, hi, I would like to report an accessibility issue I'm having. Is this something that you can take, or can you give me the e-mail address of someone I can give more information to? That may get you somewhere where e-mail didn't. If not, simply posting, they have an accessibility issue where I can't access some component of their site, and I have attempted to reach out by e-mail and not gotten a response, that's not a good look if people are saying on their social media channels that they haven't gotten a response to an issue they're having, if they're paying attention to their social media, that may get them to respond, and they may ask you to e-mail them at an e-mail address that they can work with you to resolve the issue. Also with social media, if you are part of communities, Facebook groups your Twitter followers, has anyone else experienced the issue on such-and-such.
Have you let them know about it. Getting a critical mass of people together who can answer these questions and get at smartphone this information can sometimes get companies to respond and take note when one singular e-mail didn't. That can -- and then once you do that, that gets the word out there, that, hey, people are trying to work with company X to resolve the issue, and to move things forward, and that may get them to react, and to engage with the community, once it's more than just one person who had this problem that the company may have been trying to brush off as, hey, it's just a unique one-off, or things like that.
Lastly, in this space, if that still doesn't work, if you have tried to e-mail them and gotten nowhere, if you have reached out on social media and gotten nothing, if you have gotten your friends or other social media contacts to reach out with the issues that they're having, and nothing is working, the company will just not respond, or is brushing you off, then it may be necessary to consider reaching out to an organization like NFB or disability rights advocates, and exploring potential legal options.
Because at the end of the day, there are, unfortunately, some companies who only pay attention to, you know, threatening their bottom line through litigation, which is unfortunate, and as we discussed earlier, should really be a last resort of get these things fixed by any means possible, short of legal threats, because legal is confrontational, expensive, time-consuming and you really everyone would prefer to avoid that if we can. So because we are a little ahead of schedule, I will go in and show you a couple of quick -- I talked over briefly before doing the -- getting the information but I will show you that really quick.
(Screen Reader). On Windows ten, if I hit Windows X. We have -- I will press enter on system, (Screen Reader) and my thing is being useless. But either bay, on this screen, it could show, as I was describing, your device details, your Windows information, and today, it's just not doing this. It worked just before. If I close out of this, and I go -- insert N with NVDA. (Screen Reader)
Speech synthesizer is trying to be overhelpful. Similarly, with JAWS, (Screen Reader) Up arrow to the help option. And actually, we don't need to go all the way up to help. (Screen Reader) up arrow to about, or it would be in the help menu. (Screen Reader) So we have just with speech, 2023 et cetera, et cetera, 2023 is probably going to be sufficient if you want to include the point 2210 or whatever your number says, that can't hurt, they can ask you if you want more of this information in Google Chrome, again, we would open the menu.
And then the first thing is about Google Chrome, hit enter. Let me slow down my speech, I apologize. (Screen Reader) Mya, if you could please launch the post-boutique poll. First, where should we send this? Find an accessibility contact if you can, a web or tech support e-mail. Otherwise, any generic contact, or e-mail address will suffice. Any e-mail address is better than none. Second, what are you using, Windows ten with -- Mac OS, Android 13 with talk back, whatever the case is, and your browser, Google Chrome, Firefox, edge, whatever the case may be.
Third, what's wrong? The graphics don't tell me what they are. When I press enter, nothing happens. Fourth, what should be happening? When I tab through the fields, the screen reader should read out exactly what I'm saying or doing to, you know, make -- the screen reader should read out the fields as I tab through them, or the button should say it's a button or link, or when I press enter, the thing should activate.
Fifth, if you are comfortable, give technical information, these graphics need alt text, these form controls need labels. You're misusing Aria, which is a whole other topic. Sixth, if you have more than one report, state for each one what is happening, what should happen, and if you're comfortable we need how to fix it, and lastly, any resources that are applicable, Apple, Android, web content accessibility guidelines, go through and discuss those, finally, thank you for your time, please, let me know if I can be of any assistance. If you don't hear anything back, say, hi, what's going on, please, give me some status, is there any way I can be of assistance, if you are still not getting anywhere, keep that up for a couple of times, try another e-mail address or phone number.
Go to social media. That may get a faster response. Also over social media, find other users who are trying to use the same product, and running into the same issue. Get them all to report again, professionally and critical mass may get you through where a single report was rug swept earlier, and through all of this, remember that be professional.
It's not it's almost certain that this is not through any sort of malice or dismissiveness about the blind community or not wanting to have, you know, their product be accessible. Unfortunately, I still get in my work here with the NFB, I still get variations on the theme of, wait, blind people use computers, from time to time.
So having those types of, you know, outreach and contact in a polite, professional manner really do go a long way to making sure that you get done what you want to get done, and the companies are willing to work with you. At this point, I will ask that you please complete our post boutique survey and poll about what has happened, I will take any questions, we have plenty of time left, so your questions, your frustrations, your anything to do with reporting, accessibility issues that you would like input on, anything that was unclear, by all means, ask away. Again, you can post in the chat raise your hand, however you would like to reach out, and we are happy to answer your questions.
MYA TAYLOR: We have a comment from Jesse A, one thing that I like to do, which developers seem to find helpful is I write an e-mail but I also record a quick video demonstrating the problem, and me talking through what's not working. I then upload this as an unlisted video to my YouTube channel, where only people I give the link to can see it, developer like a live demo because they can actually see the problem in action, recording with something like OBS or iOS screen recording can work well.
KARL BELANGER: That's a very good point. And I will mention, you know, you're all using Zoom, so you are already have a tool that can record. You don't need a paid Zoom account or anything. You can go on to your computer, start a Zoom meeting, it can be just a basic account, and you can be the only one in it, and slow your screen reader speech down if you use it fast so that anyone who is listening to the recording in the future can understand it, and start a Zoom recording and have it record locally to your computer, then, once that's done, go through and just start talking about and demonstrating the issue. Again, make sure that you speak clearly, you enunciate what's going on, you describe the problem in as much detail as you can, and show it.
And once it's done, you can save the recording to your computer, and as the person mentioned, you can upload it to YouTube, save it to your file sharing tool of choice, Dropbox, one drive, Google drive, whatever you may have, et cetera, and that may be useful. If it's something low vision-related, like a contrast issue, or other thing that have a visual component and you have sufficient vision to do this, a screenshot is also a viable option.
MYA TAYLOR: We have a question from Donna.
SPEAKER: Hi, I have a question that doesn't have anything to do with reporting can I ask it, or should I --
KARL BELANGER: If it's still somewhat related to what we're discussing today, I'm happy to entertain it, otherwise you can e-mail us at [email protected] or call the number and choose option five and we can entertain it offline.
SPEAKER: Okay. Thank you.
KARL BELANGER: Yeah. Any other questions on reporting accessibility -- has anyone had this work for them. Has anyone reported an issue, and had it be resolved. Wayne?
SPEAKER: Yes, there's an app that I use on my phone, a fitness app, and it wasn't visually very accessible to me, and I reached out to the creator of the app, and he had mentioned that he knew of accessibility but he wasn't certain exactly how to go about doing it, and we collaborated together, and made a more accessible version over the next few months, so I had this process work for me.
KARL BELANGER: Great.
MYA TAYLOR: Steven?
SPEAKER: All right, yeah, this is Steven. I think you can hear me, is that correct? Last year, I had a difficulty with a bank, where their automated telephone service was not reading out certain information when you did account inquiries. So I requested some investigation from the bank and they sat on it for a couple of months and didn't do anything. In the meantime, I couldn't get access to information on my bank account using their telephone access system so what I wound up doing was filing a report with the Better Business Bureau, I made a complaint and in about six weeks, they had fixed the problem.
KARL BELANGER: Indeed. That type of entity can be another avenue for reporting issues when, you know, things arise. Anything else? Happy to entertain anything else people may have.
SPEAKER: We have a question in the chat, how do you reach members of NFB nationally? I'm sure that the state agencies adversely affect New Jersey state members, and I'm also sure that federal members have difficulties with federal websites and forms which are microscopic and are probably not accessible to screen readers like at HUD, who last did a Section 504 assessment in 2005.
KARL BELANGER: That's something that I would encourage you to reach out, if you have specific issues, again, reaching out to the agency yourself is never a bad idea. You can reach out to us at the headquarters, to our advocacy and policy team, things like that
SPEAKER: I have a question, my name is Shelly. So I am the president of the NFB writers division, and one of our goals is to contact sorry, I had to stop the speech. We want to contact the self-publishing websites to let them know that they need to be more accessible to the writing community, and one of the things that has happened, excuse me, has happened, is that in conversation with somebody that's a user of, I don't know if you can tell you which website or not, one of many --
SPEAKER: If you want to, there's no reason you can't.
SPEAKER: Okay. No, that's super, okay. I had to turn off the speech, so, all right. One of the websites that has recently merged together is draft to digital and smash words, and if anyone has self-published or knows anything about buying online ebooks, that's one of the big one. And I told him, this user, this gentleman that we have been wanting to contact him, and he sent an e-mail to me from one of the people from draft to digital that says that as soon as they finish the merger with smash words, that they want to work the accessibility issue because it has been brought to their attention more than once.
So I feel like for us, that's a good opening for me to put in a letter the ideas that we are trying to get across to them. Because that's what we are working on now, is putting together a letter letting the websites know that we are interested in having those sites more accessible. So I've been attending the boutiques, which I'm glad you've been using, because it gives me ideas on what resources to recommend, and how to actually do the reporting, so I wanted to let you know that there's a little bit of a positive thing here.
KARL BELANGER: Certainly, thank you, and we appreciate that. Again, having these concise explanations of what and where things are going wrong can help these companies understand, because most of them have no or very little clue what a screen reader is, and why these things are important. So the more specifics that you can give, it's always good.
SPEAKER: And I do have one follow-up question, is there a way to get a -- I guess it would be a form to upload work, because the biggest part of the inaccessibility of the websites is, if I'm sitting up at midnight and I want to upload my own work, I can't do that, I have to have someone do that. Is there a way, or an accessible form for them to upload, so that I can submit my text, and pictures to the website, is there a bay to make pictures part of that accessibility process.
KARL BELANGER: As far as uploading goes, there are different controls that you can use from a coding standpoint to make uploading documents and things accessible. As far as uploading pictures, I mean, if you are -- yes, you can always just use the file upload thing to upload the picture that you are talking about, making sure that they are a certain size, or positioning them, that is a little harder. And there may be ways to do it, or you may need sighted assistance, unfortunately. But, yeah, that's my thoughts on that
SPEAKER: It's a start in the right direction, right? Thank you.
KARL BELANGER: You're welcome. Anyone else.
SPEAKER: My name is Mary. Can you hear me?
KARL BELANGER: Yes.
SPEAKER: My name is Mary and I'm calling from next job. I sent the first part of December, I had the latest version of JAWS, 2023, I now have Windows 11, I'm using outlook now, where before I was using Gmail sunset all this has been going on, I have to write reports for work, using word documents the computer just after the first [ inaudible ] it kept getting stuck on the documents, JAWS would only read the top line. Long story short, my husband programs and he is very awesome in working with me but every time I ask him, can you look at this, he says, Mary, it's something going on with JAWS, and I thought, there's no way it's JAWS. It's got to be these other programs.
Long story short, we called JAWS together yesterday, and the guy started talking to my husband instead of me and I could have corrected that as a mature adult, I could have said, sir, I'm your customer, but my husband is into programming, so they were kind of talking the programming language together, and it was JAWS. There is a kink going on in JAWS where when I go into JAWS using the browser to look for past documents that I have written, again, it wasn't recent enough, and you can go into documents, but we were using the browse, and my understanding is that in the iCloud or through the web, I don't know all for sure that stuff, but it was sticking, and it was due to JAWS, and so he took a report down from what I was saying.
I thought it was outlook, I thought it was Word, and when my husband looked at it, he said no, it's not Microsoft. And this is the first time that JAWS said okay to me but he said it okay to my husband, and I was very thankful my husband was here. He had not this language. I was wondering if others had this problem.
KARL BELANGER: This is beyond the scope of this presentation. It's possible others are having issues with JAWS.
But, yes, good example of that, even blindness technology, JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver on iPhone, they're not immune from having issues either. So it's possible the fault may be with them in certain circumstances.
SPEAKER: So he has [ inaudible ] he still wrote a note hitting windows E, is that edge, is that a browser?
SPEAKER: Windows E is to get into your file explorer to access documents, I would suggest, if you have other questions, not related to reporting, again, you can reach us at [email protected], or call the main number and choose option five.
SPEAKER: All right. Thanks so much.
KARL BELANGER: Yeah. Any more questions. Or discussions on reporting issue?
SPEAKER: Just a comment, JAWS issues are eligible for free IRS services.
KARL BELANGER: Good to know. I will give it a second in case someone comes up with something, if you haven't already, complete that survey, it does help us out.
MYA TAYLOR: Laura wants to know what are AIRA services.
SPEAKER: Very briefly, AIRA is a tool that is available mostly it's paid, there are some circumstances where it's free that you can use either your computer, or iPhone or Android app to connect to trained agents who can help you with visual tasks, like dealing with computer issues, or reading documents, or navigating outdoors, or anything like that. All right, hearing no more questions, I want to say thank you all very much for attending today, I hope this was useful to you, and if you have questions or concerns, not addressed here, please, go ahead and e-mail us. Again, [email protected] or you can choose option five from NFB's main number which is 410-659-9314, again, option five from the main menu.
Thank you for coming, and stay tuned for the information presented in this boutique in web page form as well as future upcoming seminars that we will be holding. Have a great rest of your day.