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A11y Slackers Gitter Channel Archive 14th of September 2016

What fresh hell is THIS now? - Patrick Lauke
  1. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 12:31
    [michiel] thumbsup emoji
  2. [michiel] Afternoon all :)
  3. Job van Achterberg
    @jkva
    Sep 14 12:32
    @michiel Hey buddy
  4. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 12:44
    [michiel] waves at jkva
  5. [fionaholder] Afternoon :)
  6. Job van Achterberg
    @jkva
    Sep 14 12:46
    Hey fionaholder =)
  7. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 12:53
    [fionaholder] Hey, I have a random question! A while back, when I was slightly more naive about accessibility, I did a quick scout around some pretty popular websites in the UK to test out their skip links, as I found most are broken. I sent out a bunch of emails/support tickets etc to the websites to let them know, and even chased a couple and got nothing back.
  8. [fionaholder] Is what I did even remotely helpful and/or are there better ways of going about this kind of thing?
  9. [michiel] I would say that is helpful.
  10. [michiel] Depending on the content :P
  11. Job van Achterberg
    @jkva
    Sep 14 13:27
    paging @pkrautz
  12. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 13:49
    [fionaholder] Yeah in hindsight it just felt like both whining and/or a huge waste of my time
  13. Job van Achterberg
    @jkva
    Sep 14 14:14
    @fionaholder If it would improve the site, you either helped them or pissed them off - you can only win, they might not have been aware
  14. luis garcia
    @garcialo
    Sep 14 14:15
    If they have an avenue for providing such feedback, I think it's totally fine. You never know how someone will take it though, but that's not something you can control.
  15. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 14:16
    [fionaholder] I guess so, I think I may just be feeling like it was pointless because the stuff is NOT FIXED and that makes me angry lol
  16. [fionaholder] But if the general plan is helpful, I can continue to randomly pester sites when I spot things
  17. [fionaholder] Even the BBC didn't fix it -sigh-
  18. [fionaholder] anyone in here responsible for this site: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ ?
  19. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 14:31
    [dean] I’ve been a bit pissy with booking.com for months, and they fixed their date picker a few days ago. I have no doubt that we’ve all had a few curse words directed at us in meetings we’ll never attend, but if the win is greater then I’m perfectly cool with whining.
  20. [fionaholder] Yeah, it's just frustrating when I think oh, I raised bugs with these 5 sites about their skip link about 8 months ago...let's see if anything got fixed... NOPE
  21. [fionaholder] Although with the WAI site, I suspect I just raised a bug report with the wrong people / recipient as I'd imagine they care...
  22. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 15:15
    [garcialo] Are these US sites? Skip links aren’t required in WCAG like they are in Section 508
  23. [garcialo] US Govt* sites
  24. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 15:21
    [fionaholder] No, it's more that it's broken. I wasn't pestering sites that didn't have a skip link, it was more that they have one there and it doesn't work, which they presumably were not aware of.
  25. luis garcia
    @garcialo
    Sep 14 15:23
    Ah gotcha. Definitely an issue in either then
  26. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 15:23
    [fionaholder] The browsers seemingly updated something about setting focus in JS that seems to have caused the vast majority of skip links I've encountered to be totally broken
  27. [fionaholder] Or at least, I would like to believe this, rather than the other option of the vast majority of skip links were never tested after development
  28. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 15:32
    [marcysutton] @fionaholder I am actually surprised the BBC didn't do it, but I know they have a lot of departments
  29. [marcysutton] I got pretty pissed at Virgin America a few years ago when everybody kept saying their site was slick UX but it wasn't accessible at all. But guess what! The ACAA came out and they had to do something about it. Dreams do come true.
  30. [marcysutton] it might take time, but believe me–providing feedback is way better than saying nothing at all.
  31. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 15:38
    [fionaholder] I shall continue on my quest to give feedback then, I suppose it will feel more rewarding when I actually help to cause a fix! :)
  32. [marcysutton] Totally! I sort of went on an arc of frustration myself, where inaccessible things really made me mad earlier in my career. These days I'm able to report feedback without getting so irate about it (usually). Somewhere later on that arc Accessibility Wins was born.
  33. [fionaholder] You're totally right. I just remembered that when sending all this feedback I noticed LinkedIn had a really nice keyboard menu so I emailed their devs to say good job and that one did get a response. I might try to do both kinds of feedback to limit my own frustration!
  34. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 15:59
    [garcialo] Yeah, LinkedIn has some great people working there
  35. [garcialo] they might not get to it immediately, but they would definitely see, prioritize, and try to address issues you found
  36. Mallory
    @StommePoes
    Sep 14 16:20
    Is anyone using Selenium for accessibility testing?
  37. Things like keyboard traps and general keyboarding are dying on Macs because of that stupid need to "turn on normal tabbing functionality" thing
  38. Because we will only make the assumption that those who need to use the keyboard have turned that on. We're not going to write a boatload of special code just to make things somehow work on the Mac out-of-the-box.
  39. Also, I've thrown things like Opera 12 etc out the window. Anyone using anything weird to move between focusables, I can't imagine a good way to deal with those.
  40. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 16:26
    [marcysutton] You mean on remote macs or something? Can't you control that setting on the machine you're running tests on?
  41. Mallory
    @StommePoes
    Sep 14 16:28
    It looks like our setup builds fresh virtual machines each test
  42. and we've had some trouble in the past with settings. So I wonder, are people just writing scripts that change setting in their testing machines/VMs?
  43. We're also using sauce labs separately
  44. I'm still finding out from my QA guy if the sauce stuff is just working ok
  45. I've also run into this several times in the last few weeks-- someone trying out something accessibility related, but everyone now has switched to Macs, and nothing works and I've needed to pass around a bunch of Stackoverflow pages to everyone
  46. although the last time I did that, with this one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11704828/how-to-allow-keyboard-focus-of-links-in-firefox#answer-11713537 another developer told me he didn't even have those options, at least not in that spot
  47. not having a mac, I have no idea where settings may be moved to or if/when they disappear.
  48. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 16:53
    [garcialo] @StommePoes as dirty as this sounds, maybe you could do two passes on each page. One with Tab and one with Option+Tab to account for everything else
  49. [garcialo] …instead of trying to set that setting
  50. Mallory
    @StommePoes
    Sep 14 16:54
    I thought of that too
  51. I'll ask QA if that's an option
  52. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 19:17

    [karlgroves] A small ranticle: Some tough love: Stop the excuses, already

    http://www.karlgroves.com/2016/09/14/some-tough-love-stop-the-excuses-already/

  53. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 19:28
    [jhausler] interesting.. i’m curious to hear lucy’s take on her employer’s “concerns”. when i was a contractor at the federal govt our 508 coordinator said that “undue burdens” did not exist. for an agency to claim undue burden, the cost to replace an inaccessible system would have to exceed the entire operating cost of the agency. no clue where he got that number, but he was firm on that point.
  54. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 20:49
    [karlgroves] I don’t there’s a specific number or % of budget, but yes the threshold for undue burden is extremely high
  55. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 20:59
    [david_caldwell] @karlgroves: I love that blog. It's completely on point. Are you militant? Maybe a little ... Is that a bad thing? Hell no :)
  56. [karlgroves] :tada:
  57. [karlgroves] Thanks @david_caldwell
  58. [david_caldwell] No worries :)
  59. powrsurg
    @powrsurg
    Sep 14 21:08
    @stevefaulkner posted on Twitter something about an ICT refresh which means that 508 was refreshed. Does anyone have details on that?
  60. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 21:10

    [karlgroves] https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/communications-and-it/about-the-ict-refresh/proposed-rule

    High-level overview: WCAG 2.0 Level AA

  61. [karlgroves] If you need to battle a case of Insomnia:
    https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/communications-and-it/about-the-ict-refresh/proposed-rule/text-of-the-proposed-rule
  62. powrsurg
    @powrsurg
    Sep 14 21:13
    Steve's tweet made me think that it was changed today
  63. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 21:21
    [marcysutton] I love your posts @karlgroves, I'm glad you write about the legal side of accessibility. It was something I initially wanted to ignore as a web dev (and I hear it from others, like just yesterday on Twitter), but frankly I feel it's a naive position to have as an accessibility engineer. Lawsuits aren't puppies and rainbows, but they're a part of how progress is made.
  64. stevefaulkner
    @stevefaulkner
    Sep 14 22:01
    @powrsurg more details http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message?id=32526
  65. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 22:08

    [hhillen] “High-level overview: WCAG 2.0 Level AA”

    In other words, what we already knew 6 years ago

  66. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:02
    [jiatyan] re @karlgroves' blog. I get both sides, but the harsh language raises my blood pressure, because of the implicit assumption that Berkeley hasn't done anything. Just on captioning alone, 15 hour of course lectures costs $5K to caption. That 1 lecturer on 1 subject. Imagine how much Berkeley would have to set aside to caption all their 'free for all' lectures?
  67. [karlgroves] Who’s paying $5k for 900 minutes of captioning? I can get that done for about $1 a minute
  68. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:07
    [jiatyan] You're right, I mispoke. My benchmark was 15 lectures around 37 hours.
  69. [jiatyan] $1/min service doesn't guarantee content accuracy.
  70. [karlgroves] Even at twice that much it is still less than half of what you said
  71. [jiatyan] 3Play runs around $2.20
  72. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:12
    [karlgroves] I understand that captioning, transcription, and audio description costs money. I’ve lost my sympathy for those excuses. These are known requirements that somehow UC Berkeley is pretending are new. Captioning on web content has been a topic going back farther than a decade.
  73. [karlgroves] DoJ and US Dept. of Ed. OCR action on this has been going on for years as well.
  74. [jiatyan] I'm sure they get it. They shouldn't have released those videos without captions. Now they are pulling them off. Everyone loses.
  75. [karlgroves] Are you saying that they should keep them up without captions?
  76. [jiatyan] I'm not saying anything except that I understand their unenviable position. :) Share perfectly or don't share at all. :(
  77. [karlgroves] What I’m saying is that they had the foreknowledge that this content must be accessible.
  78. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:18
    [karlgroves] They willingly chose to put that content up without making it accessible.
  79. [karlgroves] Now for them to complain about what it will cost is preposterous.
  80. [hhillen] Would it be an option for Berkeley to somehow crowd source the captioning? For example spread the work out over students for extra credit or something
  81. [jiatyan] That's a great idea. :) I heard YouTube is working on some kind of crowd-source captioning interface.
  82. [hhillen] It’s pretty much already there isn’t it? They have auto generated captions and the ability for both authors as well as viewers to add captions manually.
  83. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:23
    [hhillen] I can imagine a university to come with clever new ideas for this as well, speeding up the captioning process and making it less expensive for them
  84. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:31
    [caesar] The outcome of the Maguire v SOCOG court case in Australia was particularly scathing on that point. It determined that the "hardship" potentially suffered by the organisation would pale in comparison to the benefit received by the user, especially if they had considered it in the first place instead of fixing it afterwards.
    I understand that captioning, transcription, and audio description costs money. I’ve lost my sympathy for those excuses. These are known requirements that somehow UC Berkeley is pretending are new. Captioning on web content has been a topic going back farther than a decade.
  85. [caesar] V-CAPTCHA? :p
    That's a great idea. :) I heard YouTube is working on some kind of crowd-source captioning interface.
  86. powrsurg
    @powrsurg
    Sep 14 23:43
    I'm sorry for being ignorant of Berkely's content. Were these videos created exclusively to be free, or are they old courses that were recorded for students that they just decided to make available free? Because shouldn't they have added captions/descriptions for the students that attended when they were new?
  87. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:45
    [alacker] when I was in school if you needed assistance there were student helpers who would go to class with you and caption visual content/ annotate auditory content. If there wasn't anyone in class who needed it, there wouldn't have been additional information
  88. [alacker] that could be another solution though, if it were easy to do I definitely would have live-captioned lectures
  89. powrsurg
    @powrsurg
    Sep 14 23:46
    Also, from what I've seen, Chrome's Speech Recognition functionality is pretty good. Someone should be able to write a script to automate the creation of webvtt captions at the very least.
  90. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:48
    [alacker] the more difficult thing to automate is auditory descriptions of visual content
  91. powrsurg
    @powrsurg
    Sep 14 23:48
    my best friend is a math teacher at a community college that said she had a blind student this year and because of that she needed to get her work done a week ahead of time to get it to the college so that they could do something for the student.
  92. yeah, I have no idea how you would automate that
  93. The nerd in me is curious enough to see what would be involved in the automatic webvtt creation
  94. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:52
    [karlgroves] You can automate captions with an unacceptably low degree of accuracy and then clean them up.
  95. [karlgroves] Even with great audio quality, clear speaking, very little background noise, and a generic American accent, the accuracy won’t be perfect, but pretty close. Diverge from any of those criteria and quality suffers very significantly
  96. [jiatyan] @powrsurg some were just recorded class lectures put up for free - I presume there were no student in the actual classes needing accommodation. Some were deliberate online courses (videos, pdf, ppt).
  97. powrsurg
    @powrsurg
    Sep 14 23:57
    common cartidge?
  98. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:58
    [jiatyan] @karlgroves Agreed, and worse when the subject contains jargons.
  99. [caesar] I think there are entire Youtube channels dedicated to funny autocaption fails
  100. powrsurg
    @powrsurg
    Sep 14 23:59
    and yeah, I imagine it wouldn't be perfect, but it would at the very least get you started. It'd cut down on costs and decrease time. "And reduce burden"
  101. zakim-robot
    @zakim-robot
    Sep 14 23:59
    [caesar] We did testing for Qantas as part of the US DoT requirements, and Qantas came out as "can't ass" more than once.