Re: Alan Smith's reply to: userway web accessibility widget

Accessibility tools either empower the analyst or try to replace her.  
The only two classes who want the latter are naive website owners and 
the lawyers who sue them.

The fact that we never see such tool vendors defend their tools in 
forums like this is our first clue.  And then we have all the facts 
presented here shooting holes in them.  The disturbing take-away is not 
that the world comes with integrity challenged sales people, but that 
they still must have a responsive audience.  We need to do a better job 
getting the word out about what accessibility is all about.

Cheers,
Peter Shikli
Access2online
www.access2online.com
Prison inmates helping the internet become accessible


Patrick H. Lauke wrote on 9/19/2019 12:08 AM:
> On 19/09/2019 07:09, Sean Murphy (seanmmur) wrote:
>> Steve
>>
>> Is your statement for all code inspection tools?
>
> Userway is not a "code inspection tool". It's a bolt-on self-voicing 
> feature and restyling/user-styles tool. It promises to fix things so 
> that you as a site owner don't have to worry about fixing your actual 
> site - which is rubbish. The tool can paper over some minor things, 
> but garbage-in/garbage-out.
>
> On a site that is already fairly accessible and well made, these tools 
> add a few extra assistive tech functionalities as in-page tools, and 
> have some minor value (for the scenarios where users don't even know 
> they could benefit from features like speech output, or high contrast, 
> or similar, and don't know the tools they already have at OS/browser 
> level; or for situations where the users aren't on their own machine - 
> internet café, library, etc - and can't customise their experience to 
> suit their needs).
>
> But the claims that many of these widgets make (that they will take 
> care of issues for you without you having to even worry about them / 
> consider them) are often FAR removed from reality.
>
> P

Received on Thursday, 19 September 2019 14:31:10 UTC