HI, David,
I think it's good that you contaced Wouthwest Airlines' customer no-service
unit regarding your views on their website and the accessibility suit
against them.

However, don't take it for granted that you are the only blind person who
has contacted them about the matter, even if a customer service rep tole you
that.  Unless there is a specific field to fill in on the form where they
log the calls about blindness or disability, there will be no record of it.

Let me give you an example.  If you have been around in the blindness part
of the computer field gling back any time before 1995, you will know that
from at least 1988 until well into, in some cases, 1997 and 1998, the king
of the hill for word processors for just about every English-language
blind-oriented training center on the planet was some version of WordPerfect
for DOS.

In the spring of 1995, I attended the Spring ComDex, in Atlanta, the second
largest exposition for buyers and sellers of the PC industry in the country
after the Las Vegas Fall ComDex.

I had a talk with a leading marketing type from the WordPerfect company and
asked him what I had always asked WP customer service people over the phone
for at least five years before, about the possibility of making the manuals
and other docs for the WP programs available in version-specific WP files or
ASCII text files to be distributed via Email, or on some kind of computer
disk--floppy or CD-ROM.  I reminded this high-up WP person that his company
probably had at least 90 percent of the English-language word processor
market among blind people, and that at least every training facility that
taught blind people to use computers and do word processing used some
version of WordPerfect for DOS almost exclusively.  Remember, Windows 95, at
this point, was still almost four months away from its official release, and
the only two Windows 3.11 screen readers available in English were
SynthaVoice's WindowBridge, and Artic Technologies' WinVision.  JFW,
Window-Eyes, ASAW, and Hal were all still something for the future.

This guy told me that he was not aware that any blind people even could use
a product like WordPerfect, let alone did.  He claimed I was the first blind
person of whom he was aware who had ever asked about the contents of the
printed documentation being made available in a format other than print so a
totally blind person could read it.  I told him that I had been a registered
user of the product for a few years, and had mentioned that every time when
I contacted the company, whether it was about a feature issue, an
improvement suggestion, or to upgrade to the latest and greatest version, or
to order some add-on product for my version.

I'm sure that plenty of blind people have been in regular contact with
customer service people and even with the webmasters at Southwest Airlines.
You'll get the same nonsense about your being the first blind person to
contact the company with your idea whether you are dealing with a credit
card company, a telephone service provider, an internet service provider, an
appliance manufacturer, or just about anybody else who does not specifically
market their products to blind people, or who does not have an actual
official department or service specifically for PWD's.  Even in the cases
where they have special departments or programs or services, don't assume
that many of the customer service types you'll talk to will actually know of
the existance of that program, department or service.

Reply to: [log in to unmask]
Brent Reynolds, Atlanta, GA  USA


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