Saturday, January 23, 2010

Stop the Evil!

Howdy Comrades!

Recently, the Blind Bloggers group received a question about JAWS friendly Blog hosts.  When I first began this blog, Blogger was totally accessible using a Word plug in, but the situation quickly changed when Google purchased the company.  Each time Google "improves" Blogger for sighted bloggers, it becomes more and more difficult for blind bloggers to use.  Prior to his death last year, Dr. John Slatin of the University of Texas at Austin was able to contact top tier engineers at Google to fix access issues.  Even then, we were always playing catch up.  Now that Dr. Slatin has died, Blogger is harder to use with JAWS, even for advanced JAWS users with the latest updates.  Obviously, one can put out a blog, but we have numerous roadblocks using new features and old features that change.  One would suppose that the agreement between Google and the National Federation of the Blind would put a stop to the discrimination.  Clearly it has not done so thus far.

My question is one that other blind bloggers have raised.  Are there any better blog services that are more JAWS friendly?  I was told that Word Press was more accessible, but recently I've heard of problems with that product as well.  I would be happy to switch blog hosts but would prefer to see a campaign to force Google to live up to its promises to the blind community.  I hope to post on a more regular basis in the near future once I've upgraded my equipment.

Regards,

Chairman Mal

Power to the Peeps!