Google Wave and Accessibility
Google Wave is “totally inaccessible.” According to Web Accessibility in Mind’s (Web AIM) Jared Smith.
Smith’s list of Google Wave’s inaccessible aspects is quite disappointing:
- Alternative text is not provided for any images.
- Background images are used to convey content.
- Roles, states, and other accessibility properties are not defined.
- There is no document or heading structure or semantics. None! Not even a list!
- Form elements do not have labels or titles.
- Keyboard focus indication is hidden, making keyboard navigation nearly impossible.
- Most interactive elements are not in the tab order or do not respond to keyboard activation.
- Keyboard focus is often trapped, requiring the page or browser to be closed to resume keyboard navigation.
- The application becomes unusable and unreadable when text size is increased only slightly.
I concur with Smith’s hope that Google Wave will be made into an accessible product. It’s too bad that accessibility was not part of the initial framework of Google Wave. How many times do we have to experience something built with either brick/mortar or “1′s and 0′s” that is not accessible for all users? Ableism is so pervasive. C’mon Google…you can’t really be “great” if you’re not making great things for everyone to use.
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I don’t know why anyone’s surprised by this. Last time I checked, Gmail, GoogleDocs forms, Google Voice and Analytics (among others, I’m certain) don’t conform to most accessibility standards. Why should Google Wave be any different than the rest of the Google commodities?
I think, in the long run, it would be much easier to start a list of the accessibility standards that Google applications do meet and which apps meet those standards rather than to try to point out all of the standards they don’t.
Curt Grymala
23 Oct 09 at 7:21 am
[...] Google does not always create accessible products (GoogleWave). However, sometimes they do a good job of increasing the accessibility of an existing service. I hope that Vimeo gets the message that accessibility is important. In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site. [Google] combined their automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. Tags: accessibility, Accessibility Usability, captioning, google, Higher Education, Social Justice, subtitles, technology, Vimeo, youtube [...]
Google adds auto-captioning to YouTube » Eric Stoller’s Blog
28 Nov 09 at 8:13 pm