FreshCo Has An Accessible Flyer, But Good Luck Getting To It And Better Luck Signing Up

Last Updated on: 27th March 2014, 01:54 pm

I’m not sure how long they’ve had one since I’ve only been using it for a little while, but if you’re blind and shop at FreshCo, I’ve got some good news. They, like Food Basics, now have a screenreader accessible version of their weekly flyer.

The implementation needs more than a little work, at least in terms of finding the damn thing. But once you get to it, you’ll find it looks quite like the Food Basics one so you should feel right at home if you’re familiar with it.

As for the getting there, here’s what *should* work for you…maybe:

  • Go to FreshCo.com.
  • A choose a store page should appear. Use the city and location combo boxes there to find your store and then hit the enter site button. All of this works perfectly well, quite possibly because it was not coded by the same person who built what I’m about to do my level best to try to explain.
  • Find the link that says “Weekly Flyer.”
  • Prepare to begin wanting to smash things, because here’s where things become a totally randomized usability shitshow.
  • Just hitting enter on that link won’t work. You’ll need to use some combination of entering, tabbing to it, hitting your applications key, arrowing to open and pressing enter a few times and/or finding the W of Weekly, routing your mouse cursor to it and then finding the magical combination of right clicking or left clicking that will make your screenreader spout some nonsense like “alert ##.”
  • It probably won’t be immediately apparent even after that point that you’re there, but look around. If you find a FreshCo frame, you have arrived…almost.
  • In that frame, right below the link that says “EFlyer Sign Up,” you should find a clickable graphic that says “Accessible Flyer.” Seriously, a clickable graphic. Not a regular link or a button or whatever else might be somewhat sensible. A clickable graphic.
  • Hitting enter on that clickable graphic should, assuming that the universe is in your corner today, open a new window featuring an untitled page. On that untitled page are the weekly specials you’re looking for.

Got all that?

As I said, once you get through that the layout is fine, with headings for each page as there are in Food Basics land. considering the hoops you’ll have to jump through to find them it’s somewhat amazing that they got that part right. Guess they handed the baton back to the guy who set up the front door.

I suggest signing up for the weekly email. It will give you a link to view the weekly flyer, at which point you’re right on the page with the accessible flyer graphic which saves you doing this fucking dick dance every 7 days. I’m afraid you’ll have to do an entirely different dick dance just to sign up though, because clicking that link won’t load a normal page. It pops up silently near the bottom of the page you’re already on similar to the way the original weekly flyer page we discussed does. And just to make sure that everything is as profoundly unhelpful as possible, none of the edit fields where your information is supposed to go are tagged. So to help you out (at least until they go and fuck it up), here’s the field order I determined through a combination of shooting in the dark and finding a list of my mistakes down near the bottom somewhere:

Don’t ask me what that checkbox does.
First edit field: Email address.
Second edit field: Confirm email address.
Third edit field: First name.
Fourth edit field: Last name.
Fifth and sixth edit fields are for each half of your postal code. That one was at least somewhat inferable by the example postal code below the final one, but I still had to figure out by entering more than 3 characters that things were to be split.
The I’d like to receive promotions box is what it looks like, so do with that what you will.

Once you hit submit, you’ll need to look down to see if everything worked.

I appreciate that FreshCo has given us a flyer, but guys, it’s a complete mess getting to it and you really should fix that. It wouldn’t be difficult with a few simple coding techniques that any webmaster worth a crap should either already know or be able to find with a few minutes of Googling.

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