By Katherine Schneider, for the CVPost
Global Accessibility Awareness Day was observed world-wide yesterday (May 19).
Here’s a report on how we’re doing locally.
Sighted folks are accustomed to using colors to denote safety; e.g., green equals go, yellow equals caution and red equals stop. What color would you give these situations?
Wisconsin Department of Health Services and Governor’s Contact Page:
On a recent morning I tried three times to submit the following to the governor’s contact page:
“I’m blind and use a screen reader. When I try to check COVID risk in my county all I find is a map with different colors which screen readers cannot read. Here’s the webpage where the instructions say to see data county by county, go to this visualization (with a link):
“https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov › covid-19 › local
“I would like there to be a list of counties with risks, which is updated as often as the map.”
My screen reader (Jaws) can now solve most captcha. But I don’t think it solved the one on the governor’s page because when I hit “continue,” it kept saying I had to do the captcha, even though the screen reader said “I’m not a robot” was checked.
Someone told me that in the footer of the governor’s contact page there is a phone number, but screen readers don’t read that footer. So, now I have one issue with a DHS webpage and two issues with the governor’s contact page to complain about. But I am unsure how to do so effectively.
A work-around: I figured out a work-around for finding out COVID risk; call 211 and after wading through a couple of menus you get to talk to a human and they will look up the COVID risk for you.
A few days later I sent the following email to what I think is a webmaster (if they still use that word) within the state Department of Health and Human Services:
“May 19 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Any chance we could make something happen by then to make the governor’s comment page or the DHS COVID visualization page more accessible for screen reader users?”
I heard back, with a link to a page with 109 links on it, including many to charts where one could presumably find reams of data. The chart links didn’t tell me enough to know which one to try, so I gave up!
I did reply to the webmaster and suggest a webpage with a search box near the top left corner (where screen readers start reading), where you could fill in your zip code and get text saying “high, medium or low risk.”
After pushing some more, I heard back that my search box solution would be considered “as soon as possible”.
Eau Claire City government:
Eau Claire has set aside $300,000 for city improvement small projects designed by groups of citizens. We get to vote for three weeks on over $700,000 worth of projects that applied. The voting is by paper ballots (available at the library, senior center, Hmong Association, etc.) and online.
But there is nothing for those who do not use computers and who don’t go out much; e.g., no absentee voting. After a phone call and 10 emails, I was given a number to call to get a paper ballot by snail mail or to vote by phone.
I coached staff on how to handle the calls efficiently and effectively and voted for some awesome projects. All this was accomplished in 36 hours. City officials also promised to let the company running the software know about their access issues.
Time spent and ratings
A friend asked me how much time I’ve spent on these projects and I had to admit it has consumed several hours for each one.
So far, I’d say:
Wisconsin Department of Health and Human Services Covid risk info: yellow.
Breaking news! It turned green on May 12, just a week ahead of Global Accessibility Awareness Day with the introduction of a widget on the page where, by using a screen reader, one could easily find the county level of COVID. It only took me two minutes the first time!
Governor’s contact page: red.
Eau Claire voting on city improvement projects: green.