Thanks for posting the article. But, I say, how is that for doing a lot of talking without saying emuch. Maybe I should read it again. I've certainly yet to learn exactly what substantive enhancements Google has introduced that might benefit the blind community, that is to say, apart from the braille display interface thing.
(What have the romans ever done for us?) *smile* Sincerely, Matthew At 22:42 10/09/2014, you wrote:
From: Josh <joshknnd1982@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 09:59:23 -0400
hey I found this article interesting. seems like the nfb cares about
android and google accessibility after all?
The Federation at Work with Google: Changing the Structure of Expectations
by Eve Andersson
From the Editor: Google is one of the most innovative companies in
the world. It's products are well-known and are found everywhere. Google
makes the world's fastest-growing operating systems, and it is used in
cellular telephones, computers, and even self-driving vehicles. When this
technology is usable by the blind, their opportunities are enhanced; when
the technology is not, those same opportunities are diminished.
Eve Andersson in deeply involved in access at Google, and these are
the moving remarks she made at the convention:
Thank you Dr. Maurer. Hello, everybody. It is a great pleasure and
honor to be here. What an amazing week this has been, getting to meet some
of you here at the convention, learn from your experiences, get feedback on
our products, and give demos of some of them. It's been beautiful.
Before coming here I stopped over in Atlanta, and I was able to
attend the opening ceremony for the National Association of the Deaf
convention. It took place in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. This
is the church that Martin Luther King attended as a young child, and this
is the church where he preached as an adult. To be standing in that spot
where this great man stood was really moving to me, and, of course, the
reason it was so moving is that he preached equality for all. This is
something that I have believed in my whole life. And now, to be able to
work at Google, leading our accessibility engineering efforts, to further
that goal of equality for all, is really important to me.
I'd like to tell you a little bit about what we're doing at Google to
further accessibility. I'm going to do something we don't normally do at
Google which is crack open the door a little bit and give you a peek at
some of the inner workings of what's going on. My goal is to show you that
we are serious about accessibility at Google, and I want to tell you about
structural changes that we've made.
We don't want to launch our products, get feedback about features
being inaccessible, and then apply Band-Aids after the fact. That's not
sustainable, and it's also not fair to the people who use our products. So
we've made these changes with the goal of incorporating accessibility into
the design, the engineering, and the testing of our products. I'd like to
give you a little background. Dr. Maurer alluded to this: Google is made up
of many independent teams. In fact, Google encourages creativity and
experimentation and individual efforts, and that means that putting into
place a cultural change like this is not quick and it's not easy, but it is
something that we're doing. I'm going to tell you a little bit about some
of our efforts.
As I mentioned, I lead our accessibility engineering team. This is a
group that grew organically within Google over time through the passion of
individuals who cared about accessibility in the organization. Over time it
has become more structured and more systematic. This team has people with
expertise in user experience design, engineering, testing, assistive
technology, and user research. We have program managers who work throughout
Google to help put programs into place. We have a writer who's dedicated
full-time to accessibility writing, and we have people who specialize in
education.
Speaking of education, all new engineers who enter Google in our
major engineering centers --that's Mountain View, California, New York, New
York, and Zürich, Switzerland -- they are all now required to go through a
one hour accessibility workshop in their first couple of weeks at Google.
This is a hands-on workshop in which they learn about mobile accessibility
as well as web accessibility, and they actually have to write some code
right there in the workshop to make a web application accessible. We've
also launched over ten other internal courses to teach about web
accessibility, Android accessibility, iOS accessibility, assistive
technology, testing techniques, user experience design, running user
studies for accessibility, and others. We also have a course that we have
developed and released to the public, an online course called "Introduction
to Web Accessibility" free of charge.
In terms of education, there is a huge shortage of women, minorities,
and people with disabilities in the software industry, and we're trying to
address that as well. We are now offering to pay the tuition for anybody
with a disability to take courses in Code School to learn software
engineering techniques. By the way, my team is hiring, so feel free to come
up to me afterwards if you or someone you know is a great engineer.
Another effort we have put into place is releasing guidelines related
to accessibility internally. We have engineering guidelines in place for
engineers to follow as they develop their products. We've also internally
released user experience guidelines to be used in the design of our
products so that they are designed correctly from the beginning.
Every year we hold a conference called I/O -- it's a pretty big
conference in San Francisco -- and this year we launched our design
standards for what's called the Material Design. It describes how each of
our applications should behave, and it's also to be used by external
developers in designing their applications for Android. For the first time,
at the time of release, we included accessibility guidelines in our design
principles. Our goal of course is not just for Google to make more
accessible products, but we want the whole world to make more accessible
products.
One amazing thing that I've witnessed in this role over the past year
is that in the early days we used to have to push accessibility on product
teams and try to force them to commit to making accessible products, and
now the relationship has changed. People are coming to us for advice. It's
becoming a pull relationship, and we have trouble keeping up!
We've been holding user experience studies with people with
disabilities so that we can learn how people really use our products. In
the past few months we've had studies going in Zürich, New York, and
Mountain View, and I got to attend some myself. These user studies are so
important for us so that we can learn, and we caught so many things just
going through those studies. I'd like to invite any of you who would like
to participate in user studies to sign up. We have an email address that
we've created especially for this convention, and if you would like to
participate just send a message -- it doesn't have to say anything -- to
<NFB2014@xxxxxxxxxx>. That is all you have to do. You will then receive an
email reply, and at a later date you will be asked to sign up for a user
study in your area of the world.
We are also sponsoring research by universities as well as doing
research ourselves. We have faculty research awards that we give out, and
we have now started giving out awards specifically for research into
accessibility.
Another very important thing we're doing is engaging in the community
by being here and by meeting as many people as we can. I want to say that
the NFB has been such an important partner to us. The amazing Anne Taylor
and team have given us so much feedback; they are an absolute pleasure to
work with, and I am extremely grateful.
Let's move on to some of the tangible improvements. It's great that
we are making the structural improvements, but I also want to show that
they are leading to changes that are visible in our products. I'll just
focus on one right now, which is a really important suite of products for
education and the workplace. That is Google Drive, which is our file
sharing system as well as documents, spreadsheets, slides, and forms. We
have been working to increase accessibility support when these products are
used within JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and ChromeVox. We've done comprehensive
testing to make sure that everything is keyboard accessible, and we've also
put in refreshable Braille display support in Docs and Slides.
One of the big advantages to using these tools over traditional
desktop productivity applications, at least for me, is the ability to
collaborate easily with other people, and we have recently put in support
so that, if you are editing a document and somebody else is editing the
same paragraph, then the screen reader will announce that to you so that
you can collaborate in real time. We have also made revision history
completely accessible so that, if one of the collaborators messes up your
document, you can go back and fix it.
The latest version of Drive was built with accessibility from the
ground up. This was one of our case studies for this new model of working,
and our team, the core Accessibility Engineering Team, worked very closely
with Drive engineers, some of whom specialize in accessibility themselves,
to correctly design, build, test the product, run user studies, etc. It is
being rolled out gradually, as many of our products are. Over the next few
weeks people will start getting access to the new Drive in their accounts.
So I hope you like it!
The University of Michigan is a university we've been working with
very closely, and the chief information officer, Laura M. Patterson, said,
"The latest improvements in Google Drive and Docs for users of assistive
technology are a major step forward and exemplify Google's commitment to
making their products available to all members of our community."
So we've been working across the board on many different products,
and I just wanted to give you that one example. I think a very important
message though for me to leave you with is that we acknowledge that there
is still a long way to go. This is a lot of work, but it is hugely
important, and we'll keep striving for it. Google believes -- and I believe
-- that everybody in the world has a right to education and to jobs that
are relevant in the information age. We also think they have a right to
education and entertainment, and we're not going to stop until we get there
with Google's products. We want to be part of the solution.
Thank you to all of you for your feedback, your support, and thank
you to the NFB and Dr. Maurer for inviting me to come and speak.
From: "gary melconian" <garymel11@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 09:07:17 -0700
Oh no that three letter organization. Can they do any good with Google and
Android with accessibility. I am afraid to ask. I will hold my breath if the
three letter organization starts suing google and all that bs that they have
done in the past to companies who need time to figure things out. Law suits
and their way of thinking is not how things are done and negative articles
about Android dont do any good either. We all now need to start publishing
good useability articles on Android and good ones to ccontradict the few
bad critics of Android on the other side of the aisle who have only had time
with android on a limited basis and think they are experts on android
accessibility. Granted being an advanced user of Android its taken time with
android and accessibility and things are going to improve from here on out.
While I could not understand the I phone 6 with the big screen, I kind of
get it ,they are trying to lure Samsung customer back who left apple for
Android. Those that have left they have left for customization. Appple is a
day late and a dollar short to the large screen device party actually 3
years to late . AT the prices that they will be charging for devices on
contract or off contract I dont see the masses updating or upgrading any
time soon. this is my point of view on thee matter. I will change my view
if the three letter organization actually does good this time instead of
harm with lawsuits.
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