All About Access

I just discovered that Microsoft has an Accessibility Evangelist: Daniel Hubbell who blogs at Dan’s Ease of Access Blog. Dan even had a constructive answer to the rhetorical question I asked the other day, namely: “Where do you even begin” when attempting to get to the bottom of an accessibility regression in the Windows environment? He responded:

… you can start with me. My email is dhubbell@microsoft.com.

This is wonderful! Thanks Dan!! I wish I had known about you and your blog sooner. If nothing else, we could have chatted about ribbons. At CSUN perhaps?

We certainly need more Dans in the world. Especially given that the majority of us — myself included, I’m afraid — are not all that “connected” to the mainstream tech industry and truly do not know whom to contact when a problem arises. As Dan said, there are indeed “many dedicated individuals” — not just at Microsoft, I might add — who “have spent a good portion of thier(sic) lives championing accessibility in technology and computing.” Unfortunately, it is too often the case that we don’t know who these individuals are or how to reach them. That’s why I really appreciate Dan’s willingness to publicly step up to the plate on behalf of Microsoft.

I hope other companies and their evangelists follow suit. After all, there are a lot of different mainstream and assistive products being used in tandem in the “Windows environment,” only some of which were created by Microsoft. Because nearly all of those products are closed-source, we are prevented from looking “under the hood” as it were to determine if we need to get a hold of Microsoft, or Adobe, or Corel, or Symantec, or Google, or Skype, or Freedom Scientific, or Ai Squared, or someone else, or some combination thereof. All we know is that something somewhere is failing. That is a very unsatisfactory position in which to find oneself. The more Dans we have to contact, the more likely we are to find solutions to accessibility problems. Or perhaps more accurately, the more likely we are to have someone else find and implement solutions on our behalf which will hopefully meet our needs. But that is still a vast improvement over not even knowing where to begin and not having any solutions!