Part of the problem is that so many customer service call centers are
manned by foreigners, who have even lower expectations of the disabled
than even those in the US do.
On 10/13/2015 2:29 PM, Merv Keck wrote:
David,
I followed that whole thing on Twitter. That individual has a twitter account
and was very agitated as the events were unfolding. I also follow Lenovo on
twitter since I use Lenovo as my primary machine. So naturally I was interested
in the whole ordeal.
This is a very well-written and informative article. I can still remember
walking into a Blockbuster back in Wayne, Pennsylvania and asking some snot
nosed kid behind the counter for help locating some videos and the kid looked
at me and said no offense but if you are blind why would you want to watch a
movie. That was 20 years ago and it still annoys me. When I told his manager he
needed to educate his employees the manager asked me the same question. If you
are blind how do you watch TV. I just turned around and left.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-philly-comp-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-philly-comp-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Goldfield
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2015 12:32 PM
To: blind-philly-comp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-philly-comp] Article/Why don’t tech companies care more about
customers with disabilities?
This was recently posted to the Media-dis-n-dat blog.
Why don’t tech companies care more about customers with disabilities?
blind%2Bcustomers%2Band%2Btech
From Slate:
It had started as just another call to tech support. Sina Bahram, a Ph.D.
student in computer science at North Carolina State University, had been trying
to convince the Lenovo customer service representative to send out an on-site
repair person to fix the broken audio on his laptop, but the representative was
arguing that the company was no longer doing on-site repairs.* Instead, he
asked Bahram to go through a troubleshooting procedure, beginning with a visual
inspection of the audio port. That presented a problem.
“I can’t see it. I’m blind,” Bahram said plainly, which was why getting the
audio fixed on his computer was such a priority: It was his connection to the
world of written information.
“Oh, you’re blind?” Bahram says the representative replied with skepticism.
“How long have you been blind?”
Finding himself in the position of having to justify his disability to a person
who was intent on questioning its reality, Bahram asked—in terms he admits were
rather pointed—that the call be escalated to a manager.
After a lot of phone calls and engagement on Twitter, Lenovo eventually
apologized and sent a technician to repair Bahram’s laptop, resolving his
personal issue to a moderate level of satisfaction. When I reached out to the
person who helped resolve Bahram’s case at Lenovo, I received a response by
email: “We believe there was a misunderstanding and sincerely regret the
incident. We will take all steps possible to ensure the customer receives
proper experience and everything to which he is entitled. Lenovo is sensitive
to the needs of its customers worldwide and strives to provide a high level of
effective support.”
But accessible technology is more than just a personal issue for Bahram; it’s
his profession. As president of Prime Access Consulting, he helps companies and
institutions align their websites and products with principles of inclusive and
universal design. He was struck by the
contrast: Here he was helping other companies become more accessible, and yet
the company that made his computer did not appear to be taking those lessons to
heart when training its staff. “Tech companies are becoming more accessible in
their product lines, but their social structure is stuck in 1983.” His
unpleasant personal experience got Bahram thinking about the lack of a systemic
approach to accessibility among technology companies. Some have fully
integrated principles of accessible design into their development process,
while others still see accessibility as an add on, or even a burden.
Take Apple, for instance. It may not be perfect on accessibility issues, but
the company has built a text-to-voice screen-reader into just about all of its
products. It’s the only mobile device Bahram will use, “and that’s hard for me
to say, because I am not really an Apple guy.” When it comes to Amazon’s Kindle
line, meanwhile, only the Kindle Fire Tablet and Kindle Keyboard 3G include a
built-in screen-reader, and Amazon has repeatedly petitioned the federal
government for a waiver on the regulations that require it to make its other
Kindle devices accessible.
The larger issue here is that some “tech players are slow to recognize the
incredible impact accessibility has on their customer base,” Bahram says. When
you make a product that’s fully accessible to the blind, you are also making a
product accessible to the elderly, to people with temporary vision problems,
and even to those who might learn better when they listen to a text read aloud
than when reading it themselves. This is the idea of universal design: that
accessible design is just better design.
But universal design and accessibility are hardly new ideas. That’s the
frustrating thing for people like Sandy Plotin, managing director of the Center
for Disability at California State University–Northridge. The center has hosted
the annualInternational Technology and Persons With Disabilities Conference,
which brings people with disabilities, academics, and industry together. The
principle that accommodations should be made to give people with disabilities
equal access to opportunities has been enshrined in law since 1990. “The
[Americans With Disabilities Act] is 25 years old, and we still don’t have
universal design and total accessibility,” she says. “Every year they are
trying to make things laws and it still is not working.”
The regulations that require Amazon make its Kindles accessible (the Federal
Communications Commission’s 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility
Act of 2010) also require that cable box manufacturers make the devices
accessible to the blind and visually impaired by this year, says Plotin’s
colleague Sean Goggin, technologies manager at the Center for Disability. But
“to my knowledge the only one really out there that is championing that is
Comcast.” Given Comcast’s less than sterling reputation in the art of customer
service, this is saying something about the rest of the field.
So what gives? Goggin thinks at least part of the disconnect is that companies
who primarily focus on selling to other enterprises may not think accessibility
is something they need to pay that much attention.
Plotin thinks some companies are content to focus on the perceived 95 percent
of their customers without disabilities, so “why worry about the other 5
percent until they have to?”
Here’s a reason: People with disabilities actually make up about 15 percent of
world’s population, according to estimates by the World Health Organization, or
about 1 billion people. That’s a potential user base that Bahram says rivals
the largest spoken-language groups.
“Nowadays if you were a company like that, you would just never even consider
hard-coding everything in English. You would write everything as localizable
strings, because you know that the first thing you are going to do is go sell
into 100 other countries.” This is just leaving money on the table. The world’s
roughly 3 million Lithuanian speakers get language support—as they should—yet
accessibility features for the more than 7 million visually impaired people in
the U.S. alone are often tacked on as an afterthought compared with
internationalization.
Microsoft, though generally good at making software accessible, still shipped
its new MS Edge Web browser without it being fully accessible, Bahram says, “so
screen readers are having a hard time accessing it. It wasn’t released with
accessibility baked in.”
That approach, tacking accessible features on retroactively inevitably fails
sooner or later, according to Clara Van Gerven, manager of accessibility
programs for the National Federation of the Blind. The designated accessibility
person moves on, or “it’s a static fix where the next time somebody changes
something, it breaks accessibility.”
So what does work? The National Federation of the Blind (and its Center of
Excellence in Nonvisual Access) bases its outreach around something that Van
Gerven calls “enculturating accessibility.” That means helping companies
understand how integrating universal design principles into their company
culture produces better results—more accessible products, reaching more
customers in more effective ways. But it has to be more than just a change to a
product line, Van Gerven says, the sort of shift that alters the way everything
runs from the company policies to quality insurance.
Not to heap too much praise on Apple, but it seems to understand that
accessible technical support is part and parcel of the accessible design of
their products. When Chris Danielsen, the director of publications at the
National Federation of the Blind, accidentally locked the file vault on his Mac
and disabled voice-over control on the computer, an Apple tech support
representative was able to guide him through a login process using tonal
prompts. “It was a combination of the device having audible cues that I could
use and the tech support rep knowing that it had audible cues that I could use.”
Despite the depth and persistence of the problems with accessibility in the
technology sector, Van Gerven says there has been a lot of improvement, even in
just the past year. Increased interest from Web developers has led the National
Institute of the Blind to schedule a Web Accessibility Training Day at its
Jernigan Institute in Baltimore on Nov. 4, for instance.
Meanwhile, an informal alliance of universities and industry called Teaching
Accessibility is working to make training in accessibility requirements and
accessibility technology a part of the college curriculum for technology
students, perhaps even part of the major requirements for certain programs,
according to Larry Goldberg, director of accessible media at Yahoo. At the same
time, he says, industry will increase demand for those skills, with Yahoo and a
dozen other companies involved in Teaching Accessibility planning to change the
language in their job descriptions to prefer or require experience with
accessible design by the end of the year. Goldberg says it could be “the
beginning of what could be a generational change, except we hope it has an
effect earlier than a generation, like next year.”
Bahram, the accessibility consultant, is hopeful but cautious when it comes to
the Teaching Accessibility initiative: After decades of the industry dragging
its feet when it comes to accessibility, it’s actionable results that matter.
But Goldberg thinks we’re near a tipping point where there’s broader
understanding that “this isn’t a special thing for a special population, it’s
not a check box, it’s just business.”
When I followed up with Lenovo to make sure it did not want to make any larger
statement about its commitment to accessibility in its products and services, I
got a short and simple email in reply which read, “this matter did not involve
product design.”
That’s exactly the problem.
Posted by BA Haller at 11:10 PM Email Post
--
David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology Specialist
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