Re: I'm seriously concerned
This reminds me of a conversation I was having with someone over Skype chat, as it sort of deals with the whole entitlement thing.
It started with Virtual MIDI Synth. We were talking about how the new beta version's tabs have to be navigated by using OCR on the window. I told the person I was talking to that I had just signed up on their forum and could make them aware of this issue. His was response was basically why bother? If we need to access a control that isn't accessible, we can just OCR the window and it's all good. I told him that I simply wanted to make the developer aware of accessibility issues, nothing more. If the issue isn't resolved, it's no big deal since there is a way around it. His point was that there isn't an accessibility issue because the screen reader can OCR the window and the controls can be accessed. My point was that just because screen readers have a special way to read certain controls, that doesn't mean softw are developers shouldn't worry about accessibility at all.
We then started talking about PdF files and how JAWS has had the ability to OCR PDF files that are just scanned images for a while now. Again, I said that just because JAWS has the ability to do this doesn't give companies an excuse not to produce accessible PDF files. His response was basically it's not their problem now because JAWS can read the images, and taking a scanned document and turning it into text takes a lot longer to do.
I'm sure I'm missing a bit more that was said, but I don't have the conversation history anymore.
Now there's the possibility that to him and other people reading this I probably sounded like your typical entitled blind brat. However, I still stand by my point. In my opinion, just because screen reader developers found ways to adapt to p
roblems doesn't mean companies and developers are completely off the hook. If we don't let people know about accessibility problems and just silently adapt to them, no one will know there are accessibility issues in the first place. That's where being polite and reasonable comes in instead of just complaining. If the companies and developers don't care, fine. We'll find a way to adapt, but I still believe we should try to reach out and make them aware anyway. Eric Damery even said on FSCast that the PDF OCR was a fallback measure and companies should still do their best to produce accessible PDF files. That doesn't automatically make my opinion correct, but I think it's something to consider.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
