Hi Kevin,
I have worked formost of this century as an equality adviser, and took
voluntary redundancy earlier this year. I'd really like to earn a bit, but
devote more time to giving advice and guidance to retailers on how to make
their services more inclusive, welcoming and accessible to blind and
partially-sighted people. I would cover other things besides making online
information more user-friendly to us, such as:
* What to put on your printed material to encourage people to ask for the
alternative formats they need
* What to do when the requests come in
* how t5o discern which of your products are usable by blind people, and
which are not - my local Richer Sounds in-store staff did not know that a
blind person would be able to use IPhones/they'd never heard of voiceover
* If you are buying the services of another company to do your work for you,
what do you put in your contracts to make sure the services include all the
customers you hope to reach - it's amazing how a perfectly inclusive service
can implode for disabled customers, because neither the commissioner nor the
contractor know who's responsible for building in the accessibility we need
...and so on.So there could be something in it for me, especially when the
frontline staff are keen to know more, because they've come unstuck when
trying to serve other customers with needs they don;'t come across every
day. BCAB once ran an 'Access Technology Foundation Course' which tackled
some of this stuff.
I once ran a breakout session at a local government conference, in which a
group of eith local government I T managers agreed that: "We know we need to
make our websites and content more accessible. We want to do it. We've seen
loads of information on the subject. The trouble is, most of it is so
jargonistic than neither we nore our staff can make head or tail of the
stuff!"
Best,
Clive
-----Original Message-----
From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Kevin Cussick (Redacted sender "the.big.white.shepherd" for DMARC)
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2016 9:27 PM
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [access-uk] Re: Inaccessible emails about Black Friday deals.
this is very nice of you I don't have any but thanks on behalf of all of us.
On 25/11/2016 14:37, Clive Lever (Redacted sender clive.lever for DMARC)
wrote:
Hi all,** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:-
In the past few days, two of my favourite retailers, Richer Sounds and
HMV, have sent me emails showing details of Black Friday
where the substance of the info about the bargains are conveyed
through unlabelled graphics. In each case, you click on the graphic in
the
email, to be taken to a webpage where, once again, the meat of the
bargain info is unreadable with screenreaders. I've been in touch with
HMV about this, and have met with a very positive response. This
afternoon, I plan to try to get a similar response and a positive
outcome from Richer Sounds.
If any of you have received similar emails, not spam, from shops from
which you often buy, please send them to me off list. I'm quite happy
to contact those companies in the same way, to see if I can achieve
improved communication for us.
If necessary, I can produce MP3's of Jaws reading the contents of the
emails, and post it to the companies concerned, so that they can hear
for themselves the uninformative nature of the message content when
spoken by a screenreader.
Please email:
clive@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:clive@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Best,
Clive
