I bought a sander

I am a woodwork hobbyist and decided to upgrade my random orbital sander. The upgrade was arguably (especially if asking my wife) over-capitalising, but I deemed (rationalised) it to be justifiable. But what on earth does that have to do with web accessibility?

Some background

Being blind, I use a screen reader to access online material. I also have a working knowledge of how web pages are (or should be) constructed. The relevance of this will become clear below.

The sander purchase

I could have made the purchase online or over the phone. But I chose to visit the supplier and take advantage of instruction on use of the tool. The trip was a bit complicated, involving a couple of trains and an Uber. As a bytheway, for me Uber is an extraordinarily liberating option for getting to out of the way places, but that’s a story for another time. The decision to make the trip was well justified and I came away confident in use of the sander.

Following a thorough run through of the tool and providing the legal tender, the very knowledgeable and helpful rep encouraged me to register it. And here comes the crunch. “(paraphrasing) You may have to get someone to help you. “I don’t know that the site will work with your assistive technology.” I found it interesting that he seemed aware of the concept of web accessibility and wondered why he anticipated problems.

The registration process

And he was right. By and large, the registration form was usable but not perfect. As is so often the case, one component broke it. What should have been a regular combobox for selecting country required a real mouse click to make the selection.

Comments

There are laws that forbid discrimination and there are specific requirements around online accessibility. But failure to comply with the various regulations is widespread. As demonstrated by the above example, vendors so often do not recognise the importance of compliance. Let’s hope that the revised Disability Discrimination Act has more teeth than the current arrangement. There are currently no consequences unless, at the very least, someone lodges a complaint.

As a postscript, while contemplating this rant, a very well-known parcel delivery organisation took my parcel to the wrong address. Guess what? The form for reporting the missing parcel was inaccessible.

But the sander, it is brilliant. They just need to apply the same level of attention to their software as their hardware.