Prevalent Discrimination by Public Websites

Recently, I have experienced discrimination because of my visual impairment from several websites and I am sick of it. I realize that they are not required to be accessible to screen readers unless they are business or educational related and only in the United States, at least as far as the ADA is concerned but there are more than a few websites available to the public who turn a deaf ear to screen reader accessibility.

My most recent encounters of this nature were on a social networking site, Friendster, and a paid market research site, PineCone Research. Friendster was loaded with flash material that crashed my screen reader and also had no audio CAPTCHA option. In the past, this wasn't always the case as I visited their site frequently a few years ago. I wrote to them to request a disable flash option and audio CAPTCHA and they didn't care. They basically said they'd take my suggestion under advisement but they don't picture anything changing.

The more recent experience with a public website discriminating was a little more serious than that. PineCone Research is a paid market research panel, one which I might add actually does pay, but doesn't accept new members very often. I had taken two surveys from them about products which are not yet on the market but were being considered. In these surveys was a product discrimination in the form of an image with embedded text. I can see some, but it was a struggle to read the text in the image. I wrote to the woman who runs PineCone Research and asked that in the future, they offer a text alternative, either in the form of text tags on the picture, an alternate link to a text only version, that could be made simply with OCR, or a downloadable MS Word document. She responded by saying that if my visual impairment prevented me from seeing the picture, I could not participate in the panel, clearly a discriminatory remark. When I told her that was discrimination and asked her to reconsider, she gave this long winded, technically worded email that basically said they're not changing anything. These surveys do not have anything in them that is reliant on the picture. The questions involve your likes and dislikes about the product, whether or not you would buy it and how much, whether you think it is a good value, and other such questions like that. By excluding people who are blind or visually impaired, they are excluding hundreds of thousands of potential panelists from the blind and a large chunk of the elderly communities. By doing so, they are not only discriminating, but cheating every company who employs them to conduct market research as if a more diverse group of panelists were to take the survey, they may get an entirely different set of results. After all, we are citizens and these products are things that we would use. Most are everyday products.

These and other examples of discrimination have compelled me to create a petition called the ADA Amendment Petition, which states that there should be an amendment to the ADA stating that all public websites in the United States must provide reasonable accommodation within a reasonable time frame from the original request. It doesn't have to be a change to the entire format of the site, just options to disable flash, audio CAPTCHA, image labels with text descriptions, and other things like that.

I am also waiting for the next McDonald's Monopoly game to see if they have taken my complaint seriously regarding their flash game. Blind people cannot play the online flash Monopoly game and therefore couldn't redeem prizes we may have won through the numbers on our pieces. I am not going to ask them to make Braille pieces because that would take up a lot of space but at least have an alternate to the Flash game on the site. I asked them about this a while back ago but since it is seasonal, there is little I can do but wait until the next one comes around.

There are so many other similar instances of situations like these. If I can name three off the top of my head, and know for a fact I have encountered others, and there are hundreds of thousands of other blind and visually impaired individuals in this country alone, just imagine how many websites and separate situations of discrimination that is. It must stop and everyone needs to be treated as equals.