Advocacy Group For the Blind Slams Google Apps 287
angry tapir writes "The National Federation of the Blind claims that Google Apps lacks required features for blind people and wants the US government to investigate whether schools that adopt the e-mail and collaboration suite run afoul of civil rights laws. The NFB is asking the US Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division to probe whether New York University and Northwestern University are discriminating against blind employees and students through their use of Google Apps' Education edition."
Re:Disabled people (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Disabled people (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly my first though. The second thought would be is Google taking the basic steps necessary to ensure that their sites are compatible with standard screen-reader browsers for the blind.
I attended a lecture a while back on how to make applications and websites accessible to the blind. The text to speech requirements are on the client side, but they do require adherence to certain standards to work. That includes simple things such as naming all divider (div) tags, providing alt text for all images. There was some mention about certain JS/AJAX techniques being incompatible if not done correctly, though I don't recall the details.
The question then, which TFA does not address, is does Google take these necessary steps? Or is the problem that the current crop of screen readers are unable to process elements created using the JS methods Google employs?
I also wonder whether they actually brought the issue up with Google privately to address these concerns, or if they just jumped straight into the press release.
Re:Disabled people (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, you can pay someone to work on it in that case.
Re:accesibility standard: no javascript (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want applications stop fucking doing them in a web browser. Write a real application. Otherwise use HTML to make a web page. If we could outlaw web 2.0 it would be wonderful.