I am talking about Amy here – not any fictional character.
She likes to call herself a blind chick because she is young and
blind. She is actually getting married in a week to Dave who is also visually
impaired. Amy is funny, full of life, always
smiling and talks with lot of passion about her online retail experience which
is definitely not great.
Online Shopping gives her privacy, dignity and makes her
feel more independent. The Online retail
experience is a very broken experience for her today but she remains hopeful.
There is just no bitterness in her about it. Amy was
recently stuck in Boston during a snowstorm for many days and wanted to do most
of her wedding shopping online but had a hard time doing it. According to her,
“Most of the time it is almost like going to a car dealership when you don’t
know how to drive.” Unfortunately, many
times she is forced to talk to customer service representatives! Sometimes she is
asked if she could find someone else to do her online shopping! How fair is
that?
Amy also gives examples of websites like lush.com and
jetblue.com who provide a great experience to people with disabilities.
There are millions of people in USA and all over the world
who have blindness or very low vision; are hearing impaired; have mobility-dexterity
challenges; have speech difficulties or have various cognitive disorders.
Due to modern miracles of medicines impacting longevity, we
have an aging population who are likely to develop many of these symptoms. The Web
is almost 25 years old and there is a whole generation of us, including
millions of people with disabilities, who grew up with World Wide Web. Sir Tim
Berner Lee, the inventor of the web, always envisioned a web that is truly for
EVERYONE and is accessible to all and one that empowers all of us to achieve
our dignity, rights and potential as humans. He also felt that it was very
important to keep the balance between commercial and social needs of the web.
So where did we go wrong? How could we have such a big miss?
Web accessibility is an area that needs serious work by all
of us. The laws like Section 508, American Disability Act, Section 255 and
others are not very clear and are interpreted differently by companies. Government/Federal,
Non-profit and University websites are more compliant than the commercial organizations
because they have to be section 508 compliant in order to exist – basically
they have no choice. Many people consider WCAG 2.0 standard by W3C very hard to implement and also very blind centric. Some of the commercial companies have begun becoming
accessible but most have a long way to go. Lawsuits in the web accessibility
space have increasingly become more prevalent. But in addition to legal
concerns, the focus on user experience is equally important from accessibility
perspective.
The ecosystem for web accessibility has developed in last
decade but we are just not there yet. Today, you have screen readers like JAWS, NVDA
and Apple voiceover to help out visually impaired people. Wordspace from Deque Systems can help you in auditing your
website. Accessibility management tools like SSB Bart, Audioeye, Amaze Deque
and IBM Browse Out Loud help in management aspects of web accessibility. According to web accessibility practitioners,
eighty percent of the responsibility still lies with website operators even if
you buy any of the assistive technologies or related tools. Website owners need
to create environment that is more conducive to their content authors,
developers, designers, testers, project managers as well as agencies.
Most of the online retailers are unaware about the number of
disabled people visiting their website or the type of disability they have. Besides
the impact to their conscience, they may be missing financial opportunities. People
with disabilities have increasingly become very web savvy, and they love their
smart devices like all of us. According to Webaim.org, iphones are more popular
than Androids devices among people who describe themselves as disabled. If you are interested in more survey results
then please go to http://webaim.org/projects/practitionersurvey/.
Companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, IBM and Salesforce.com
have taken web accessibility very seriously and are ahead of the curve than
others. BBC is considered a gold standard in the web accessibility area. IBM
has even appointed a Chief Accessibility Officer recently. Over the last few years, AT&T increased focus in the web accessibility and
are leading in the telecom space. Target, after settling an accessibility
lawsuit, has the most interesting turnaround in this area. They have ramped up
their team and are very proud of what they have achieved so
far. In the end, it is not that hard and like any successful initiative in any
organization, it needs executive sponsorship and commitment at all levels.
If you are an online retailer then the first step is to
recognize your shortcomings in this area and make a very serious and focused
effort to fix web accessibility. Enabling accessibility on your website is not
about building a feature but is more about right processes, culture, training, tools
and discipline.
To be successful, you will need to build a team and culture
to embrace accessibility. You will have to increase awareness and do training to make it part of your processes. Automation
is key to accessibility so you will have to start thinking in terms of
accessible components and issue automatic test failures where possible.
Winston Churchill, rightly said, "We make a living by
what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
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