New Member Intro

[jazzyjj]

Hi everyone. I just came across this comm and joined it. Hopefully I can bring it back from the dead, lol! I just signed up on Dreamwidth at the end of April this year, and love the site. I have been a screen reader user since the mid-90's, and just got my first Mac computer as a Christmas present last year. I wanted to point you to another nonprofit organization that has a review website geared towards people with disabilities. Full disclosure: I volunteer for the organization, so I hope that's okay with y'all for me to post a link to our website here. So without further adieu, here it is: http://www.jjslist.com . This organization is based here in Illinois in the United States, and we recently merged with an employment organization. I was going to help out with site administration, but our back end is not screen reader friendly. A former co-worker sent me a link to a half-built starting page for what was to be our new site. That page ended up being very accessible with the Windows-based screen readers I was using at the time, but I couldn't get it to read at all on my Mac. She did this at the beginning of last year, and still no improvements have been made to our back end. But the front end is very accessible with all screen readers I've used to date, and hopefully it is with the other screen readers in existence. Please pardon the spelling and grammar mistakes; those are not mine.

Comments

[jadelennox]

Oy, the number of conversations I have had with vendors who insist that their product is accessible because the user facing end has decent accessibility, even while the back office is completely unusable!

[jazzyjj]

You're not kidding! I have repeatedly tried to point my co-workers to various resources dealing specifically with accessibility and usability. But I don't think they've looked at the resources much. Perhaps somewhat, but I seriously doubt it since nothing has been done. A couple years ago we had even spoken to some people about helping us out, and each was glad to do it. But the momentum just seems to have vanished into thin air. Funny thing is, our mission is accessibility of businesses and their respective websites. When I have asked about doing more for the website, the answer has always been no because of funding. Yet I know of at least 2 other Illinois nonprofits that have managed to overhaul their websites, and another that is just now embarking on that same journey. One of the nonprofits I know of who overhauled their site is Second Sense, which used to be The Guild for the Blind. The other is The Hadley School for the Blind. Both of these websites were great in terms of accessibility and usability to begin with.