3. The Committee and the Champion
Identifying Key Areas and People
Having learned about how people with disabilities use digital content and the Web, and knowing about the local and international digital accessibility regulations, you now want to determine what led to the customer’s complaint in the first place.
The person who submitted the complaint has identified that he is blind and uses a technology called a screen reader to access content on the Web. From your research on how people with disabilities use the Web, you know that screen readers read out the text content from web pages.
The complaint mentions two particular issues. First, many images in the shopping area of the company’s website are announced as file names, such as “rt-004.jpg”, rather than something meaningful like “add to shopping cart.” You discover the problem is the result of images in the shopping cart application not having a text description. You know that “alt text” is the way to provide a text description for images on the Web.
Second, the buttons in the shopping cart cannot be activated with a key press; rather, they require a person to click the buttons with a mouse. Since people who are blind typically cannot use a mouse (not being able to see a mouse pointer), you have learned that they usually rely on their keyboard to navigate through content and to press buttons or activate links. When these website elements cannot be accessed or operated with a key press, they are inaccessible to anyone who relies on a keyboard to navigate.
You first approach the content developer who set up the products in the shopping cart application, and ask that she go through the product list and add the missing text descriptions. But, she tells you the shopping cart editor does not have a way to add text descriptions, or alt text, for product images.
You then approach your company’s web developer to see if it is possible to add an alt text field to the editor used to add product images. As it turns out, the shopping cart application is a third-party proprietary application, and, apart from simple changes to brand the shopping cart, there is little that can be done to make changes to the editor without going back to the vendor. You also ask your web developer about the keyboard access problem, and he tells you this cannot be modified either without going back to the vendor.
You wonder how the company ended up purchasing this shopping cart application given its limited accessibility support. The next stop in your investigation is your purchasing department. You ask about the accessibility requirements that were included with the request for proposals (RFP), and discover that no accessibility requirements were outlined in the RFP. The purchasing department did not know about the requirement to purchase accessible technologies when they are available.
Through this investigation, you begin to realize that accessibility knowledge needs to be weaved through many roles in the company. The next a