
Colleges Discriminate Against the Blind With Google Apps, Advocates Say - pitdesi
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/colleges-discriminate-against-the-blind-with-google-apps-advocates-say/30394
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jerrac
The college I work for used to host student email accounts. But it got so
expensive in time and money, that they had to stop. Thus, no student ever gets
an email account from us. One of the options we've considered was using Google
Apps, but if it really isn't accessible, then we likely won't. A good portion
of us are sticklers for making sure the ADA requirements are met.

That said, as a former student of the college, it stinks for most of the
students. One of the primary ways to get education discounts is having an .edu
email address. My colleges students are just out of luck there.

As for the ebook reader stuff, um, were inaccessible readers the only way to
read the material? That would be bad.

If there were other, accessible, ways, then there's no good reason to stop the
students who can use the readers from using them. Or to stop the College from
encouraging their use.

Basically, every effort should be made to make sure those who need
accessibility help, get that help. But if there is a tool that is inaccessible
that would help all the other students, then that tool should be used. The
only time tools like that should be blocked are when they are the only way for
a student to complete a course, or get essential information from the college.

Preventing non-disabled students from using tools that will help them succeed,
just because those tools are inaccessible, is just as bad as not providing
methods for disabled students to succeed.

~~~
roryokane
What if your college provided email accounts that only forwarded mail to a
student-chosen account? Then students could access their mail from any
accessible internet or desktop client they choose, and they could get
discounts requiring .edu accounts. It would require students to sign up for
email on their own, but I wouldn’t think that to be a problem – it’s like
requiring students to buy their own textbooks.

~~~
jerrac
We would still have to deal with the administrative tasks of all those
thousands of forwarding accounts. The only thing that forwarding would save is
storage space. And that's likely a minimal cost.

Though, since that kind of thing isn't what I deal with, I might ask the
people who do what they think of that idea.

~~~
pmorici
It couldn't possibly be that prohibitively expensive to provide simple
forwarding. Purdue University for example offers a life time
@alumni.purdue.edu forwarding address to every graduate.

~~~
jerrac
Really? Like I said, that's not my purview, and I may mention the idea to
those who would be responsible for it.

The main sticking point right now, I think, is that we are short staffed, and
administering the service would be just that much extra. That's also likely
one of the reasons we aren't using Google Apps yet.

~~~
pmorici
Really, <https://gateway.purdue.edu/> once you graduate you go signup through
the alumni website and then you can change your address or the forwarding
address via the web at any time. It's not like some sys admin is sitting there
creating accounts for each graduate that wants a forwarding address.

Sounds like you might need to advocate a healthy does of automation. In my 4
years of school I never had an IT problem and never interacted with anyone
from the University IT department.

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blasdel
The Gmail web interface is going to be a hell of a lot more accessible than
Exchange 2003's Outlook Web Access, which is what nearly all these
universities are ditching when they transition.

If you're an actual screenreader user you're going to be using IMAP anyway.

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gte910h
Gmail supports IMAP, additionally...The basic HTML view quite definitely has
"clear labels to alert users to the type of information that they should put
in each text field, such as the message’s subject or the recipient’s e-mail
address,"

I'm not sure google's in the wrong here.

~~~
steerpike
It might be a little unfair of me but I personally really, really disappointed
at the way a web giant with serious engineering chops like Google has dealt
with the issue of accessibility.

I take an admittedly purist view and say that we as developers should be
striving to maintain the initial principles of the web in allowing _everyone_
equal access to content. As more and more sites act as 'applications' and the
web moves further and further away from static html I think the principle
still holds - it just becomes more difficult. I really would have loved to see
large web companies like Facebook and Google drive the focus on maintaining
accessibility for all users.

Instead we've seen exactly the opposite and for me the most disappointing part
of it has been the way Google handles it - probably because I really have a
soft spot for Google in all other situations.

None of their web applications are accessible to any usable degree and they
don't seem to be showing the slightest interest in improving their standard of
offering. A few of their products attempt a half-arsed implementation of WAI-
ARIA but they never seem to actually follow through on anything. It's as if
they launch a new product and then all instantly wander off and start
something new. Accessibility requires a pretty hefty chunk of maintenance and
user feedback but the tools are there if companies invested in it.

~~~
forensic
Sounds like they need a special team specifically devoted to accessible-izing
every app. A taskforce that would work in conjunction with each app team.

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rkudeshi
About 3 years ago, I pushed for my college to adopt Google Apps. We were on an
antiquated system that was falling apart and Google Apps seemed like the best
alternative (not to mention, it was free).

Unfortunately, this beneficial student government iniatiative became a
bureaucratic quagmire. I was the sole student representative on the university
committee that had to ultimately decide the future of our email system and had
to go toe-to-toe with the university's ADA person (don't remember her title,
but that was her main job duty).

While I absolutely sympathize and recognize that email should be accessible to
all, this single feature became the one deciding factor between Google Apps
and Microsoft Live@Edu. The committee literally favored Google Apps on almost
every point of comparison (storage space, mobile access, attachment size, in-
line attachments, search, built-in IM), but Live@Edu won out because of its
accessibility features.

What were these fabled accessibility features, you ask? Just 2 main ones that
I remember: a "low-contrast" mostly-black-and-white version of the main client
and an antiquated static HTML version of Outlook Web Mail (which also happened
to be the primary client in every browser other than IE at the time). Of
course, the committee ignored the fact that Gmail also supported this type of
feature degradation by simply using an IMAP client.

The fact of the matter was that both Google Apps and Microsoft Live@Edu
would've been an improvement over the university's old email system (which
apparently was accessible enough for more than a decade), but the students'
overwhelming preference (90%+), Google Apps, was vetoed because it wasn't "as
good" as Microsoft Live@Edu on the accessibility front.

Going back to the OP, I wonder if NYU and Northwestern are in the same
situation. Is Google Apps still an improvement over whatever they're currently
running or is this more of a Microsoft v. Google proxy war?

~~~
steve-howard
I've never heard anyone complain about Google Apps' accessibility at
Northwestern. The only issue we've had with it is that it became unavailable
with no explanation or information last spring for about a week, and the best
the IT department could tell people (I used to work there) was "Google's aware
of the issue."

I also used to go to the University of Washington, and they were offering the
option of either Microsoft's or Google's software when I left.

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esoteriq
It amazes and shocks me that colleges still don't check the accessibility of
their educational tools. Ever since the ADA and the Rehab Act of 1973 (Rehab
Act only applied to schools getting federal grants), schools have been
required to provide students with disabilities with equal access. But there
are still foul-ups all over the place.

This reminds me of the Kindle debacle last year. Some universities provided
Kindle DXs to students for course reading. Guess what? The text-to-speech
feature is not enabled for all of the kindle books (copyright issues - a whole
seperate story). The universities had to settle with the DOJ and DOE.

Here's a legal opinion letter from the Department of Education Office of Civil
Rights -
[http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-...](http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-20100629.html)
(tl;dr: don't use inaccessible technologies for classroom learning). .

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Having worked in the higher ed vertical, I've interacted with a lot of college
IT groups. The clownish appearance of IT in higher education has much less to
do with the people in the IT (though there is a higher-than-industry-standard
proportion of those, there are also some of the most dedicated and smarted
people I've had the privilege to work with) and much more to do with the
structure of higher education in general.

Every single major IT decision in a campus has to be sold to the faculty
senate, which is the organization that really wields the power of the
organization. Unfortunately, if you don't have IT management who are amazing
sales people, you get decisions that are all about "will this make the grant
I'm proposing tomorrow easier or harder".

There are very few centralized IT projects, because it is such a nightmare to
get approval across campus. Instead, every department solves the problems for
themselves and expects IT to cobble everything together. And almost nobody
gives a flying fart about the students and what they see of this mess. Given
students today were born very shortly before the Internet went "mainstream" is
a major issue and smart schools with strong central control (there are
some...) are using it as a differentiator for student prospects.

~~~
esoteriq
Thanks for that - I shouldn't have said that what I said about IT departments.
You're right - there are a lot of external factors that comes into play
whenever these types of decisions get made.

I'm pretty sympathetic with the need to cut costs - hosting email gets
expensive. I just hope that higher education pushes Google Apps and other
education-based services to abide by Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines (and
the guidelines are not even as sophisticated as they could be). You gotta
start somewhere, yes?

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wtn
My university is one of those in the article. They never should have stopped
hosting their own POP/IMAP servers.

University IT departments seem to be constituted of a mix of brilliance and
idiocy.

~~~
zaidf
_They never should have stopped hosting their own POP/IMAP servers._

Why?

