[community] is the COVID app accessible (accessibility features)
Mark Weiler
mweiler at alumni.sfu.ca
Thu Aug 13 21:25:26 UTC 2020
I think this raises an important and long overdue question. When designing web content for Canadians, do our governments even know what platforms, browsers, and assistive technologies that web content must be compatible with, if it is to be accessible?
This is the 4th of five conformance requirement of WCAG 2.x (called 'accessibility supported') and the WCAG authors are very clear that this requires broad discussion:
"This is a complex topic and one that varies both by environment and by language. There is a need for an external and international dialogue on this topic.... The [WCAG] Working Group encourages more discussion of this topic in the general forum of society since this lack of generally available yet robust assistive technologies is a problem that affects users, technology developers and authors negatively."
Are we ourselves asking our governments to ask this question?
On Friday, August 7, 2020, 1:07:46 a.m. EDT, Cybele S <cybele.sack at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all:
I found this notice about the accessibility features of the new COVID app
in Mike Gifford's newsletter:
https://digital.canada.ca/2020/07/31/continuously-improving-covid-alert/?utm_source=Accessibility&utm_campaign=003bc4a1c8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_23_01_42_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e836043476-003bc4a1c8-458189301&ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_10_28_2019_13_16_COPY_01)&mc_cid=003bc4a1c8&mc_eid=81f7501ed9
Does this go far enough to address questions about accessibility for the
COVID app?
Are all the accessibility questions about the app as technical as this
document appears to be? Or are some of the questions more political? Or
economic?
For example:
Many (including John Willis and the CCLA) have raised questions about
whether the app is accessible to those who don't have the latest
smartphones and the demographics who are especially under-represented in
that functionality.
There are other outstanding questions about the app. What are yours?
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