RE: Password role proposal: Freedom Scientific response

From: Richard Schwerdtfeger [mailto:schwer@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: 22 April 2016 19:30
“Following up on Leonie's request to contact ATVs. I contacted Freedom Scientific's CTO regarding the changes we have put in the ARIA password role regarding what ATs should do in response to speaking the actual text rendered.

 

Statement from Glen Gordon at FS:

Freedom Scientific actively embraces ARIA. We recognize that this is an evolving standard and do our best to support newly added items in a timely fashion.”

 

Thanks for following up on this Rich. I understand that FS is reluctant to commit to a particular course of action, and I daresay they wouldn’t be the only ones if we were to reach out to other proprietary screen reader vendors.

 

“They have a policy to not commit to dates or product features publicly so this is as good as it gets.”

 

A commitment to implement the password role is understandably something FS might be reluctant to provide, but a general commitment to protecting consumer security would have been better than this.

 

As things stand we do not have a clear commitment from any screen reader vendor other than Orca, that the password role will be implemented in a secure way. This is troubling.

 

 

Léonie.

 

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@LeonieWatson tink.uk Carpe diem