(no subject)

[the_rck]

The incoming principal for Cordelia's school sent out an e-mail yesterday that said that there will be after school clubs for sixth graders. I wonder what sort of clubs they'll offer and whether or not they'll open them up to younger students, too. They're more likely to get healthy clubs if they let fifth graders participate, too, at least for next year.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with that e-mail. The mother of one of Cordelia's friends is blind, and she says that her screen reader can't handle the e-mails from the school district. That means that she has no idea what's going on with the school in the fall. She and her husband have decided to keep their daughter at the current school, so she's very interested in knowing what's going on.

Scott says that the problem is that, instead of sending text, the district is sending an image of the text. It looks very pretty, but screen readers can't handle it. I'm trying to figure out if I can somehow take the text and forward it to her without the hinky formatting. Her husband gets the e-mails, too, but he is apparently too busy to figure out a fix for the problem or to tell her in detail what's in the messages.

I have sent an e-mail to the woman who sends out these mass mailings, just so she knows the problem exists. I don't know if she'll do anything about the problem.

Comments

[chomiji]

This is actually something I know a bit about. We have run into it at work from time to time.

Does the school district have any regulations for accessibility (often referred to as "Section 508" requirements, after the federal regulation governing this)? If the school district does, than the text information in the image ought to be provided as "ALT" text for the image, which a screen reader would be able to pick up. (Highly formatted e-mail is usually rendered with HTML, just like Webpages are.)

Some might be able to do an optical character reader scan of the material for her, if the school district can't be held responsible for making this accessible. It's included in the "pro" version of the Adobe Acrobat product, for instance.

[chomiji]

ALSO: if people bellyache that it's too much work to so the right thing and make the material accessible, you can point out that as presented, the material also cannot be word searched and parts of it cannot be extracted by copy-and-paste to be included in other material By using graphics instead of text, they're basically preventing all sorts of functions that people expect to be able to do with text.

[the_rck]

I e-mailed the woman who originates the e-mails. She says the problem comes from Schoolmessenger. I'm not sure if that's a program or a company. She says they've asked to have it changed.

She did say that she'd send this particular woman copies of the messages in plain text. (She suggested attachments, but the other mother told me she couldn't read them.)

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

I suspect the school district is required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, in terms of sending out communications which can be read by software used by the blind. I also suspect the school district hasn't really thought about the issue.

[the_rck]

I e-mailed the person who sends out all of these mailings. She says they're aware of the problem but that it's intrinsic to the program (or company, I'm not sure which) they use for the mailings. She says they've requested a fix for it but haven't yet gotten one. She offered to send my friend plain text copies of everything from here on out. I don't like the fact that a person with visual impairment has to ask for this sort of consideration, and I wonder how many are like my friend and figuring that there's nothing to be done about it.