this message is to report on the accessibility of [paytrust.com, an online billing web site that presents your bills through its site and allows you to pay them electronically. I had sent out mail on this some time back, and reported reasonable success with the site and the company, but upon some coworkers frustrations and some farther investigation, we have discovered some thing that could be improved and wanted to alert the readers to this potential problem. the screen readers involved were Jaws for Windows 3.31.35 and WindowEyes version 3.1. Everything seems to work in the signup screen. When you finally get a user id and passwrod, and you intend to sign in, make sure you select the second link after the passwrod prompt. This is a low resolution link with fewer graphics. If you have msaa mode on in both programs, you will hear this. Make sure in wineyes that you turn msaa mode back on with control shift a otherwise you will not be able to distinuish the two graphics. It seems that msaa mode gives more info about graphical links. This page seems to use javascript, but the text descriptions gave me the clues as towhat to do on the sign in page. It seems easy enough to look at due bills and see your bill outbox, but potential confusion came in when we went to actually add a payee. The form to fill out is being interpretted wrong by msaa, or badly formateted by the web site authors. what we hear in msaa mode are two edit fields. the labels for these fields follow the two edit fields, so you will hear something like this when arrowing down the page. edit edit friendly name bill category edit edit address 1 address 2 . . . The field names ar not being associatd properly. When you leave the confines of msaa mode, things go from bad to worse. JFW just reads edit with nothing associated. WindowEyes reads straight across the page, for instance, I hear edit the edit button to proceed to the next screen. edit friendly name edit bill category so you can see that the first two edit firelds are associated with the third and fourth lines, but an unenlightened user would think that those two edit fields are something else and fill in the wrong information, evidently putting the friendly name field in to what would actually be an edit field two fields down and thus completely messing up the entry. I have also experienced some lockups with both JFW and Wineyes on this web site but am not entirely sure if that is because of the javascript thing or just a random lockup. I know JFW 3.31 has some problems with sites with certain javascript elements, such as windows update. Windoweyes is known to work with Windows Update so I am just going to assume the lockup was a random one on fwin98's part. My test computer was a Gateway solo 9100xl pentium II 300 mhz with 128 mb ram, 7.6 gb hard drive running software speech and using a trident cyber something video card. The fact that this page behaves the same in msaa mode in two different screen readers tells me that there is either a problem in interpretation on MSAA'spart or that the site is just not effeciently designed for accessoibility issues. The paytrust company is based out of Princeton NJ and I would encourage people to check this site out and write tand call the company with access issues. We have been looking for ways to pay our bills online and indpendently for years and here is our solution. Let's work to make it accessible. Sidebar; I have said before on mailing lists that there are other sites. www.paymybills.com is a paytrust.com competitor but I haven't tested it for accessibility yet. The site I am using is www.billpaynet.com. Thee is no monthly fee for it and they only charge you 33 cents per bill you pay. The site works with Home Page Reader, something these other sites don't do, so it would be a breeze with windoweyes or jfw. The billpaynet service does NOT do bill presentment, meaning that they won't scan in your bills and present them to you for review on the site. In addition, these companies that do scan your bills for web site upload, are they just graphical images of the bills or are they really converted to html directly? If they are graphics then it is useless to even try this. If they are conveted to html then we can read our bills with the aid of our screen readers. This I haven't tried yet, haven't gotten very far with the rest of the stuff, but I intend to keep everybody posted on the continuing research here. If you have any comments or questions, please email me at the tech center or give me a call. -- Damon Fibraio, -- Associate for Technical Support, De Witt and Associates Norma Krajczar Technology Resource & Development Center Open to the general public, call with questions or to make an appointment 130 Livingston Ave. new Brunswick, NJ 08901 phone: 732-937-6394, fax 732-729-6561 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], aol instant messenger name: dfibraio, icq 51387233 - Visit the jfw ml web page: http://jfw.cjb.net
