Informing re: accessible website

[Cheryl Homiak]

I've been having a conversation with one of my grocery stores here in town 
that has a service for web ordering and delivery (actually the service 
includes this store plus two or three others in different towns). I 
couldn't shop with it at all in lynx the cat or links the chain but did, 
with great effort, make it through an order using freedombox, which means 
that eventually those using gnopernicus and/or orca probably would be able 
to do it with mozzilla. freedombox has a program called C-saw, whereby you 
can put labels on imaged links and then submit them to a repository so 
others on freedombox will see those when they go to the website instead of 
just "link" "link" "link" for a lot of the links. However, the submission 
key mapping for c-saw is alt+s, which the site uses to jump people to the 
recipe search box. I can, however, still use alt+l, which is used in c-saw 
to do the initial labeling, to look at the image url and link url. 
I talked to somebody involved in the grocery deliver department, though 
not a technical person. She seemed genuinely interested in how the website 
could be made accessible. I'm afraid I wasn't very good at explaining to 
her why, if they have a link with a graphic that does have the words for 
the link within the graphic, I don't even get the words displayed. when I 
explained to her that with C-saw I could see the name of the url and 
thereby often deduce what it was but couldn't use the C-saw program 
because they have alt=s (the key mapping used to do c-saw submissions) 
mapped to a recipe search box, she immediately offered to talk to their 
web design person about removing the alt+s keymapping from their site. 
I've frankly never had anybody be so responsive. she also wanted to know 
if I could point her to a website they could use as an example of how to 
do things accessibly. This is where my writing to this list comes in. Can 
anybody point me to a webpage to which I can point her for an example of 
how they can still do their graphics but make the site accessible for 
blind people? Also, is there a webpage that gives information they can 
read 
about how they could implement accessibility on their website with the 
least wear and tear possible. I don't have to be as concerned about 
javascript in freedombox, though I certainly am going to explain that this 
can be an added barrier. If anybody wants to try looking at the website 
with which I am dealing, it's http://www.sentryonthego.com
You'll see that by looking at the url title at the bottom of your page 
when you are at each link, you can often get an idea what the link is but 
not always. And to enter the store they use some kind of button that even 
on  links the chain just gives you an ok at the bottom of the page and 
nothing happens when you try to use the link; you can get into the tour 
and the tips for shopping but that's it. In freedombox i can shop using 
the search box they have, but I haven't yet found the link that helps you 
browse the aisles as they describe so I don't know if I'm missing it or if 
there's some other reason I just can't get there. There are a whole lot of 
inaccessibility issues with this website but I don't want to overwhelm 
them by telling them to change a whole bunch of things at once. If they do 
go ahead and drop the alt+s mapping it would indicate to me that they are 
serious about accommodating blind customers. In that case, I'd like to 
give 
them the tools for educating themselves about what would help with their 
site and give them some space to see how far they take it. I think when 
somebody shows an eagerness to do what needs to be done to make a site 
accessible, we want to encourage that, and sometimes if we point out a 
whole list of things at once we can overwhelm people into feeling they 
can't do what is needed and so they may react by doing absolutely 
nothing. I think I may have a really receptive business here (they are 
also usually very helpful to blind shoppers who come into the store) and i 
would like to make the most of it.
Thanks for any suggestions.


-- 
Cheryl

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."