Americans With Disabilities Act, Digital Accessibility, and iNaturalist

[spiphany]

@rademacherdan

And if you or others are running into particular blockers that are most important to your use cases (web vs app, search vs post), that kind of concrete feedback is useful to us as we plan our work.

Accessibility topics have come up numerous times in the forum, often with concrete feedback about what people would need changed.

In particular, there are a couple of threads from a blind user about the experience of using iNat with a screen reader:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/blind-iders-and-audio-ids/54576/
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalist-still-inaccessible-to-screen-reader-users/38033
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inat-next-log-in-on-ios-completely-inaccessible-with-voiceover-screen-reader-see-replies-for-updates/61468/

I think a number of us in the forum found it rather disappointing that the reports of major, persistent inaccessibility issues got very little response from staff and that the new app was apparently not designed from the start to handle this better than the existing website and app interfaces.

Note also this recent thread on accessibility of the app from the point of view of people with limited internet access:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalist-and-inaccessibility-my-experience-as-a-homeless-man/82417/

One of the comments in that thread captures my sentiments on the matter:

@astra_the_dragon

It’s harder to add in accessibility after the fact, than to build it directly into the original framework. Generally you guys have been good at mindfulness, so seeing such a bad fumble here was a bit of a shock.