M12Y



The NFB’s Review of VoiceOver and Its Aftermath

A couple of weeks ago, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) published a "review" of VoiceOver and the Mac OS X operating system. You can read that article here.

The article was inaccurate in the extreme, inspiring many visually impaired Mac users, and even some non-Mac users, to call out the NFB’s poor research. This outcry came in the form of letters, blog posts, tweets, and podcasts, including a lengthy episode of the Screenless Switchers Podcast.

The misinformation, falsehoods, and outright biases of the article were staggering, coming from an organization that claims to represent the best interests of the visually impaired community. I do not intend to retread that ground here, as it has been documented at length elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to offer some commentary on the response given by the NFB to the reaction they received from their "review". That response can be read here.

First, they say they want to open up dialog on the topic of VoiceOver and the Mac, and that their response needs to be part of that dialog. That is fair enough. I offer this editorial in the same spirit, because I feel that the NFB still has quite a lot to answer for.

They say that the article they published was always going to be a controversial one. This is the first statement I take some issue with. I believe that, if the information presented in the article had been accurate in the first place, there would have been no controversy, regardless of the conclusions the author came to in the end. Any product, from any company, is going to have those to whom it appeals, and those to whom it does not. This is as it should be, and fosters competition. There is a world of difference between offering an opinion on how a product works for you, and providing false information in the guise of fact. Examples of plainly false information in the original article include the author’s assertions that characters while navigating through text were reported incorrectly, that iCal was inaccessible, that Safari was the only web browser accessible with VoiceOver, and many more.

The response continues to claim that VoiceOver is not intuitive, and implies that only very skilled technology experts can learn to use it. This is clearly false, given a thriving international community of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of VoiceOver users, only a small percentage of whom could be classified as such. Furthermore, intuitiveness is a subjective concept, not an objective one. What one finds intuitive or otherwise is based in large part on their past experiences.

I should also note that in both the original review, and this response, Apple is being held to a different standard than any of the other access companies. Vast numbers of visually impaired persons attend special training to learn the very complex, and in my opinion, unintuitive Windows screen readers. That is, my opinion, and I will not present that as fact. I was a Windows user for fifteen years, from WIndows 3.1 through Windows Vista. I have used Jaws for WIndows, Window-Eyes, WindowBridge, and even outSpoken for Windows.

Next, they claim that the author utilized the tools and manuals that Apple offers, as well as contacted Apple technical support "at any level" for assistance. The equate this to an appliance from GE. I have to wonder if they contacted accessibility@apple.com, the publicly available address for accessibility-related queries. Many users contact and receive quite helpful responses from that avenue.

However, there is a far more crucial question we should be asking. Why is it that, an organization representing the blind, is not utilizing the single most useful research tool that has ever existed for that group? Today, sighted and visually impaired individuals alike, will far more often look to Google and the Internet for answers to questions they don’t find in manuals because, frankly, it is more efficient and thorough than anything that any company will offer from a call center. This is true from consumer electronics, to household appliances, to computer products. A quick search would have led the author to ScreenlessSwitchers.com, Lioncourt.com, MacVisionaries.com, ICanWorkThisThing.com, and many more.

Why is it acceptable that users should have to purchase scripts, or spend countless hours learning how to write them themselves for Windows access to many popular applications, but doing a simple Google search is too much to expect a user, let alone an objective reviewer, to do? When a vacuum cleaner a friend of mine owned broke down, they didn’t go to the manufacturer to find out what part they needed. They looked it up online.

All of this aside, it seems to me that, if the NFB was truly interested in an open dialog, they would retract their flawed review until they are able to write one with accurate information. Regardless of how the information is obtained, to continue to present false information as fact, even when one knows that the information is false, is disgraceful.

Should we hold others in authority to the same low standard that the NFB is asking us to hold them to? If a politician presents inaccurate information to his or her people, shouldn’t we demand that they retract their previous statements when they discover that the information they are presenting is wrong? I think we should.

The NFB continues to offer their "review", despite its errors, to thousands of visually impaired readers, and claims, in effect, that, since, in their opinion, visually impaired consumers won’t bother to use Google, we shouldn’t expect them too, either.

In the end, this is about ethics, not which operating system or screen reading solution is better than the other. To continue to stand by information that is unquestionably incorrect only fosters the widely held concern that, since much of the funding from the NFB and the other blindness organizations comes from those companies who stand to lose from Apple’s success, their reviews cannot be trusted. I wouldn’t trust a politician’s views on gun control either, once I realized his campaign was funded by the NRA.

I urge the NFB to prove those concerns baseless. I encourage them to retract their inaccurate article and apologize for its misinformation.

I ask the NFB to do what they claim to do. I ask them to act in the best interest of our community.