Last Updated on: 27th March 2014, 11:11 am
I get a lot of my groceries at Food Basics. A while ago, I wanted to read their flyers. So, I went online, and quickly discovered that their online flyers were nothing but images. Sure it looked like there were words there, but all those words were part of an image. JAWS cannot interpret images. If they’re tagged, then it reads the tags. but it can’t look at the image and process it. So, I couldn’t read the flyers.
I saw a thing where you could receive weekly emails about their flyers. I thought “ooo! These’ll be in text!” Nope. What it was was a link that went back to the image, the same one I couldn’t read.
So I emailed them. I asked them when they were planning on making an accessible version of their flyers. their first response was “We’re working on something new, but it’ll be months down the road.” Not being satisfied with that, I asked what I could do in the meantime. They told me something I never knew before. If you call Customer Care at 1-866-922-7427, someone will read the flyer to you!
I did it, and they were actually pretty nice about it, going over stuff if I needed it repeated. I thanked them profusely, and said I was glad they did this. But I did ask them if there was a chance of the flyer going up on the web in an accessible format. I said they should continue reading the flyer since some blind folks don’t have a computer, but the web version would be a nice choice in case the phones were down or swamped or something and I just wanted to quickly look at it. She said she didn’t know how often that had been requested, but she’d pass the message on.
So there’s a piece of info for anyone else who’s interested. You can call Food Basics Customer Care and they’ll read the flyer to you. If you would also like an accessible web version, either use their contact form, or talk to the customer care person about it when you call and have them read the flyer.
You really do learn something every day.
