On Jan 13, 2007, at 23:46 , Access Curmudgeon wrote:
Ah but it is a hard hard nosed business factor it keeps you form
getting sued.
I am a big fan of legally requiring accessibility. But statistically,
the odds of financial damages are minute. Section 508 really turned
the corner in the Federal space, but I do not know of a single
lawsuit. Can you name one? Not ADA, 508. The ADA related court
cases, like the current one with Target, are such an aberration that
each and every one becomes a news story.
These kind of actions cost money both in defense and in PR. Even if
you win these cases you loose, the PR damage of fighting a bunch of
blind, deaf or otherwise disabled people is far worse than any money
you might be saving.
An Accessibility Evangelist would be most useful and helpful in
preaching the gospel to third party developers, but such a person has
no credibility until iTunes and iWork get their houses in order. An
internal Accessibility Evangelist could only be Jobs.
I don't think it has to be Jobs, Steve Jobs is best at setting the
big picture not having to deal daily with something like
accessibility. He just need to delegate that to the evangelist and
let the word out that groups within Apple need to pay heed to the
issues at hand. Here is my list of Apple software that needs to be
dealt with in order of importance.
1. iTunes. A premiere Apple product and one with a very high risk of
legal liability for not being accessible. A store is a store and it
matters not if it is online or in the physical world. I don't think
an accessibility evangelist is the one to push this I think Apple's
legal department should. If the NFB wins the Target case the first
place they are going to look is to iTunes. Let get this fixed before
that day comes.
2. Accessible iPods, This is so simple I can't believe it hasn't been
done. The iPod can be made accessible by simply adding text-to-speech
to its interface. When you first buy an iPod it would ask like MacOSX
does now, if you need a spoken interface if you answer yes then it
will speak each item in a menu as you roll over the top of it. This
option could be turned off of course. Not only will this make the
iPod accessible it will aso make it safer for people who use the iPod
while driving, running and so on.
3. iWork, iLife. Lets help out those educational sales people out
there shall we? Now I'm the first to say taht I have now real desire
to sit thought a Keynote presentation put together by a blind person
but schools are, believe it or not, expecting their blind students to
create these so we need to make sure these basic productivity apps
work. While we're at it could we get iPhoto to deal the IPTC captions
that way when a blind user does select a picture he would get
meaningful information. This would make iPhoto more useful for
newspapers as well. These applications need to be accessible so that
third party developer don't say that Apple is hypocritical, nagging
them to make programs accessible while not doing so with their own
software.
4. Soundtrack Pro. Boy this is going to be a job to make accessible.
The pro applications use some odd ball GUI that breaks just about
every GUI rule Apple ever wrote. I'm not so worried about the vidio
editing stuff, how many blind file editors are there, but the audio
editing is clearly a field where the blind do work in and so
Soundtrack Pro should be accessible. I don't envy the programmers who
are going to have to work on it.
I agree with Panarese about Kearney being a one man army!
Well thank you, I think.
Greg Kearney, an army of one.
