Colleges Discriminate Against the Blind With Google Apps, Advocates Say | Hacker News Reader

Colleges Discriminate Against the Blind With Google Apps, Advocates Say

chronicle.com

15 pointspitdesi19 comments

The college I work for used to host student email accounts. But it got so expensive in time and money, that they had to stop. Thus, no student ever gets an email account from us. One of the options we've considered was using Google Apps, but if it really isn't accessible, then we likely won't. A good portion of us are sticklers for making sure the ADA requirements are met.

That said, as a former student of the college, it stinks for most of the students. One of the primary ways to get education discounts is having an .edu email address. My colleges students are just out of luck there.

As for the ebook reader stuff, um, were inaccessible readers the only way to read the material? That would be bad.

If there were other, accessible, ways, then there's no good reason to stop the students who can use the readers from using them. Or to stop the College from encouraging their use.

Basically, every effort should be made to make sure those who need accessibility help, get that help. But if there is a tool that is inaccessible that would help all the other students, then that tool should be used. The only time tools like that should be blocked are when they are the only way for a student to complete a course, or get essential information from the college.

Preventing non-disabled students from using tools that will help them succeed, just because those tools are inaccessible, is just as bad as not providing methods for disabled students to succeed.

What if your college provided email accounts that only forwarded mail to a student-chosen account? Then students could access their mail from any accessible internet or desktop client they choose, and they could get discounts requiring .edu accounts. It would require students to sign up for email on their own, but I wouldn’t think that to be a problem – it’s like requiring students to buy their own textbooks.

We would still have to deal with the administrative tasks of all those thousands of forwarding accounts. The only thing that forwarding would save is storage space. And that's likely a minimal cost.

Though, since that kind of thing isn't what I deal with, I might ask the people who do what they think of that idea.

It couldn't possibly be that prohibitively expensive to provide simple forwarding. Purdue University for example offers a life time @alumni.purdue.edu forwarding address to every graduate.

Really? Like I said, that's not my purview, and I may mention the idea to those who would be responsible for it.

The main sticking point right now, I think, is that we are short staffed, and administering the service would be just that much extra. That's also likely one of the reasons we aren't using Google Apps yet.

Really, https://gateway.purdue.edu/ once you graduate you go signup through the alumni website and then you can change your address or the forwarding address via the web at any time. It's not like some sys admin is sitting there creating accounts for each graduate that wants a forwarding address.

Sounds like you might need to advocate a healthy does of automation. In my 4 years of school I never had an IT problem and never interacted with anyone from the University IT department.

The Gmail web interface is going to be a hell of a lot more accessible than Exchange 2003's Outlook Web Access, which is what nearly all these universities are ditching when they transition.

If you're an actual screenreader user you're going to be using IMAP anyway.

Gmail supports IMAP, additionally...The basic HTML view quite definitely has "clear labels to alert users to the type of information that they should put in each text field, such as the message’s subject or the recipient’s e-mail address,"

I'm not sure google's in the wrong here.

It might be a little unfair of me but I personally really, really disappointed at the way a web giant with serious engineering chops like Google has dealt with the issue of accessibility.

I take an admittedly purist view and say that we as developers should be striving to maintain the initial principles of the web in allowing everyone equal access to content. As more and more sites act as 'applications' and the web moves further and further away from static html I think the principle still holds - it just becomes more difficult. I really would have loved to see large web companies like Facebook and Google drive the focus on maintaining accessibility for all users.

Instead we've seen exactly the opposite and for me the most disappointing part of it has been the way Google handles it - probably because I really have a soft spot for Google in all other situations.

None of their web applications are accessible to any usable degree and they don't seem to be showing the slightest interest in improving their standard of offering. A few of their products attempt a half-arsed implementation of WAI-ARIA but they never seem to actually follow through on anything. It's as if they launch a new product and then all instantly wander off and start something new. Accessibility requires a pretty hefty chunk of maintenance and user feedback but the tools are there if companies invested in it.

Sounds like they need a special team specifically devoted to accessible-izing every app. A taskforce that would work in conjunction with each app team.

About 3 years ago, I pushed for my college to adopt Google Apps. We were on an antiquated system that was falling apart and Google Apps seemed like the best alternative (not to mention, it was free).

Unfortunately, this beneficial student government iniatiative became a bureaucratic quagmire. I was the sole student representative on the university committee that had to ultimately decide the future of our email system and had to go toe-to-toe with the university's ADA person (don't remember her title, but that was her main job duty).

While I absolutely sympathize and recognize that email should be accessible to all, this single feature became the one deciding factor between Google Apps and Microsoft Live@Edu. The committee literally favored Google Apps on almost every point of comparison (storage space, mobile access, attachment size, in-line attachments, search, built-in IM), but Live@Edu won out because of its accessibility features.

What were these fabled accessibility features, you ask? Just 2 main ones that I remember: a "low-contrast" mostly-black-and-white version of the main client and an antiquated static HTML version of Outlook Web Mail (which also happened to be the primary client in every browser other than IE at the time). Of course, the committee ignored the fact that Gmail also supported this type of feature degradation by simply using an IMAP client.

The fact of the matter was that both Google Apps and Microsoft Live@Edu would've been an improvement over the university's old email system (which apparently was accessible enough for more than a decade), but the students' overwhelming preference (90%+), Google Apps, was vetoed because it wasn't "as good" as Microsoft Live@Edu on the accessibility front.

Going back to the OP, I wonder if NYU and Northwestern are in the same situation. Is Google Apps still an improvement over whatever they're currently running or is this more of a Microsoft v. Google proxy war?

I've never heard anyone complain about Google Apps' accessibility at Northwestern. The only issue we've had with it is that it became unavailable with no explanation or information last spring for about a week, and the best the IT department could tell people (I used to work there) was "Google's aware of the issue."

I also used to go to the University of Washington, and they were offering the option of either Microsoft's or Google's software when I left.

It amazes and shocks me that colleges still don't check the accessibility of their educational tools. Ever since the ADA and the Rehab Act of 1973 (Rehab Act only applied to schools getting federal grants), schools have been required to provide students with disabilities with equal access. But there are still foul-ups all over the place.

This reminds me of the Kindle debacle last year. Some universities provided Kindle DXs to students for course reading. Guess what? The text-to-speech feature is not enabled for all of the kindle books (copyright issues - a whole seperate story). The universities had to settle with the DOJ and DOE.

Here's a legal opinion letter from the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights - http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-... (tl;dr: don't use inaccessible technologies for classroom learning). .

Having worked in the higher ed vertical, I've interacted with a lot of college IT groups. The clownish appearance of IT in higher education has much less to do with the people in the IT (though there is a higher-than-industry-standard proportion of those, there are also some of the most dedicated and smarted people I've had the privilege to work with) and much more to do with the structure of higher education in general.

Every single major IT decision in a campus has to be sold to the faculty senate, which is the organization that really wields the power of the organization. Unfortunately, if you don't have IT management who are amazing sales people, you get decisions that are all about "will this make the grant I'm proposing tomorrow easier or harder".

There are very few centralized IT projects, because it is such a nightmare to get approval across campus. Instead, every department solves the problems for themselves and expects IT to cobble everything together. And almost nobody gives a flying fart about the students and what they see of this mess. Given students today were born very shortly before the Internet went "mainstream" is a major issue and smart schools with strong central control (there are some...) are using it as a differentiator for student prospects.

Thanks for that - I shouldn't have said that what I said about IT departments. You're right - there are a lot of external factors that comes into play whenever these types of decisions get made.

I'm pretty sympathetic with the need to cut costs - hosting email gets expensive. I just hope that higher education pushes Google Apps and other education-based services to abide by Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines (and the guidelines are not even as sophisticated as they could be). You gotta start somewhere, yes?

What happens when a professor choses to teach with a text that doesnt have braille or electronic versions? This seems like just another case of people forbidding technology to compete on an even field.

My university is one of those in the article. They never should have stopped hosting their own POP/IMAP servers.

University IT departments seem to be constituted of a mix of brilliance and idiocy.

They never should have stopped hosting their own POP/IMAP servers.

Why?

Gmail is an imap server. It probably is also a pop server. GAFYD is too.

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