Last Updated on: 14th April 2018, 10:09 am
Remember how I mentioned that whole Google Pacman thing? Well, somebody went and bashed them pretty good for it, from a blind person’s perspective. I can’t say I agree 100%, but I can see some of the points here.
In the case of the Pacman game, I really didn’t know what people were up in arms about. Google has a search field at the top of the page and lots of screenreaders have ways of getting you quickly to the search field. Even when they didn’t, you always landed in Google’s search field. So, search for something, click search, and bye-bye Pacman. The solution was simple.
But, what if they did something that wasn’t so easy to fix? What if they did something that rendered Google unusable, and did so for a longer period of time? The idea that they didn’t think blind folks may have had problems with the barrage of sound is a little concerning.
If that was their only screwup, I could forgive them. But look at Google Chrome. Is it accessible yet? It sure wasn’t for a long time. There are small parts of Blogger that require you to do some pretty fancy footwork to get them to work. Some google forums are super hard to post in because of JAWS not consistently seeing the necessary edit fields.
So, I hope this Tom fellow is proven wrong, and their accessibility statement isn’t just lip service. We’ll see. I guess only time will tell.
