Katherine, I'm a lurker on this list. Not being visually impaired myself, I hadn't thought about people such as yourself having such frustration with the tools we use, as most attention goes to online accessiblity. Perhaps Microsoft and others aren't aware (or aware enough) that blind people do write code. You mention open source so from your point of view how does Eclipse stack up in impaired accessibility compared to Visual Studio?
As for website accessibility, I'm hoping you're better served. When I designed and built the online public litter and illegal dumping reporting system for the Queensland Government there was a strong mandate in the requirements to make it accessible to visually impaired people, at least for all the public-facing components. Alt tags, no flash, caption tags, careful Javascript use, no frames and other strict requirements were set. TO achieve this I found the US government Section 508 Web Accessibility Standards to be very helpful, as well as the Illinois Center for Information Technology and Web Accessibility guidelines. To test accessibility I found browser plug-ins such as the JAWS and WAVE toolbars to be very helpful as these allowed me to see what the page would look like to an e-reader as well as in contrasting large fonts for use by a partially sighted person. If you had a few minutes time I'd be interested in what your e-reader makes of the accessibility of my litter reporting site https://report-littering-dumping.ehp.qld.gov.au (Written in C# / .NET / MVC2 / LINQ to SQL / SQL Server 2008) Steve Malikoff. > Hello guys, > I was just wondering how many of you agree with this. I, who's desire > it is to become an open source .NET Framework programmer, look at all of the > both open source, and not to mention, Microsoft-provided products, and I > can't tell you how much lazy programming I see out there. I'm not calling > you lazy programmers, so please, please don't take it that way. I'm just > saying, that for the masses, and especially for the many blind and visually > impaired users like me who rely on everything being labeled so that screen > readers, or software that converts text on screen to speech, can understand > and provide the right information. Half of the time, I will download a piece > of software whether open source or otherwise, and I will never be able to > utilize it due to nothing being labeled, or some things being labeled and > others not, giving only half the experience to someone hard of seeing like > me. Now, what I am proposing is strong and provocative, but I think that it > could pote! ntially be a good thing if implemented correctly. I think that it would be a good idea for Visual Studio to have a compilation requirement that all elements are labeled, and all UIA properties exposable by a control are implemented. Microsoft themselves are lazy when it comes to that; a lot of their new interface for Windows server 2012 for instance, has so much mislabeled and missing UIA content that either screen readers don't read at all, or they read spurious content, as if they are reading .NET classes, instead of application-generated, administrator-friendly messages. My friend thinks that this would only work if Microsoft themselves built this in, and he may be right. But I definitely think that it should be required on most open source projects and open source frameworks that all elements be labled and exposed that way people of all abilities and disabilities alike can benefit. I don't see how it would work in the commercial sector unless Microsoft implemented ! it. Tell me what you guys think. > >
