I’m glad you have seen that amount of progress.  I know there has been saignificant improvement but still, when I see things like companies that take an interest in accessibility not following through, it really gets old and it is the case that, along with the improvements far too often, it appears to me the simple principle of ongoing proper follow through by making sure there are blind people who evaluate new developing versions is not done.  I keep seeing, over time, different programs that were accessible becoming less so over time or developing new problems.  II’m not talking about programs where the whole architecture changes, I’m talking about examples such as we see in Thunderbird and such as with programs that release inaccessible versions more than once and fix them perhaps months or more later.

 

It is important in such cases, for users of such programs to let the developers know of the need to actively recruit knowledgeable blind people to try new developmental releases and beta versions and report problems.

 

My previous message was written because I see this common sense practice not being followed and I’m tired of blind people being not consistently dealt with in ways such as this. While its true that a lot of the responsibility needs to be on us because we are a small group, chronically misunderstood and about which most people know little, at the same time, it shouldn’t be almost all our responsibility.  Things are changing and what was considered acceptable forty years ago isn’t now.

 

Gene

----- Original Message -----

From: Gene

Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2020 1:49 PM

To: nvda@nvda.groups.io

Subject: Re: [nvda] Thunderbird talking way too much

 

Which completely misses the point.  Why should blind people be different from other minorities.  Affirmative action has been around since the seventies.  It is expected that when dealing with minorities, institutions will affirmatively take certain actions.  Blind people are a small group, but it is right and proper that there should be an expectation that entities will affirmatively do something rather than we always being in a position to constantly educate and educate and educate. 

 

I’m not saying that blind people shouldn’t educate.  I’m saying that its beyond time for the attitude to change from its all on us to its partly on you.

 

Gene

----- Original Message -----

From: Brian Vogel

Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2020 1:07 PM

To: nvda@nvda.groups.io

Subject: Re: [nvda] Thunderbird talking way too much

 

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 01:52 PM, Sarah k Alawami wrote:

Take mee6. The developers basically ,looked at NvDa said, We can't help you" and just ignored every other bug report I submitted. In fact they only give me sigted instructions like 'drag this to that." Yeah, I've seen all of this before.

And, again, so?   This gives you instant feedback that the developers of this product care not one whit about accessibility.  That, in and of itself, tells you to abandon hope and seek an alternative.

In this world, all of us have been subjected to something like this, though not necessarily specific to accessibility.  You shake the dust from your sandals and move along in the attempt to find a tool that works.

Also, you really do have to understand that many sighted people don't understand that drag and drop is not something that blind people do.  Very often you can end up educating support reps about keyboard shortcuts and how to find them.  There is no logical reason to believe that most of the sighted world does or ever will know nearly what you know about keyboard shortcuts and many other aspects of how blind people use computers.  So it is up to you to make the attempt to educate.

As a seeing person who has been intimately involved with accessibility for some time now, I am finding that the lack of recognition on the accessibility users side about why things are the way they are, much of it due to pure ignorance on the part of the majority of sighted people, mystifying.  Why on earth would you expect your average Joe or Jane sitting at a help desk, who might never have even spoken to an accessibility software user before, to just know this stuff?  That's exactly how and why dedicated help lines have come into existence at major players like Microsoft and Google, to name two.  It's completely unreasonable to believe that most of the sighted world should know one darned thing about screen readers, or that they even exist.  The blind community is very, very small as a proportion of all computer users.  Resources get allocated based on that, and I can only imagine what fraction of a percent of all calls to help desks come from screen reader users.  That matters, and needs to be taken into consideration.
 
--

Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 1909, Build 18363  

Power is being told you're not loved and not being destroyed by it.

       ~ Madonna