Lynn Evans wrote:

"I find your question interesting. I haven't thought of software or web
sites as being more or les accessible. I think of them as either accessible
or not. How about it list? Perhaps parts of a program could be inaccessible
to screen readers."

Speaking as somebody who relies on a high contrast color scheme to make
computing accessible (along with a large monitor and low screen resolution),
I find a lot of software applications fall into a grey area between being
accessible and being inaccessible.

In my case I use white text on black background, and am finding an
increasing number of applications have a real problem with displaying this
correctly. Some simply ignore it, and will only use their own colors (which
may or may not be accessible to me), whilst many applications just make a
total mess of trying to handle my colors. Often this will result in white
text on a white background or black text on a black background. However,
this might only be true for specific menus or areas of an application. For
example, the antivirus software that I use generally displays my colors
fine. However, the one notable exception is the popup window that alerts me
to potential problems. In this case, one has to be very careful to make sure
you don't click 'allow' when you meant to click 'deny'!

Having a quick browse of my Start Menu, I would say that the majority of
software applications I use are 70-90% accessible. They nearly all have some
areas in which they have a problem with my chosen color scheme. However, in
most cases the problems are in areas that don't ultimately prevent me from
using the software.

However, I would say that a good 50% of all the software I have tried is
inaccessible because of problems with my color scheme. There are some very
large software companies whose whole range of applications is inaccessible
to me (this was certainly the case for Norton the last time I checked out
their applications).

Finding out beforehand whether an application will work with my color scheme
isn't ever as simple as you think it should be. On a number of instances,
where no demo version has been available, I have tried asking the software
company. It seems like a simple question to ask, but several companies have
been either unable or unwilling to say. Quite often I have to simply "suck
it and see", which can be both time consuming and costly (ever tried getting
a refund on software once it has been installed?).

In fact, this whole issue has become such a pet peeve, that I recently
launched a website for users of high contrast color schemes. The idea is
that people can submit reports on how specific software applications handle
high contrast color schemes. Others can then browse these submissions to see
what applications might work (or not!) for them. Hopefully this might save
people a lot of wasted time and effort. If anybody is interested, the site
is at www.incontrast.org. The site is totally non-commercial, with no banner
ads or affiliate links, so hopefully nobody will object to my mentioning it
here?

As you can tell from my 'rant', this particular issue is one that I feel
quite strongly about.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant.

Dave


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