New idea for a project - assistance to blind genealogists

Question

Recently, a new member joined a project I coordinate for.  I sent the standard welcome message and asked if I could be of assistance.  The new member told me that he was blind and needed some help here and there.  I did my best to help him out and told him that my door was always open.

I began to wonder if there are other blind genealogists who might need help.  I wonder if Wikitree is accessible to them?  If it is accessible to them, would they need help here and there?  I can think of many ways that a blind person could use some help - indexing the data off of a jpg or pdf record comes first to mind.

We have the Adoption Angels project wherein someone who is looking for birth parents and folks from that project help them out.  If they post a G2G question and tag it with that projects tag, the members see it and can answer questions and/or volunteer to help out.

So I am envisioning a similar project where project members would volunteer to assist blind genealogists with transcriptions, records checks - any number of things that a blind person might have trouble accessing.  The project would have a tag and when a person posts a G2G question or asks for help, if they used the new project's tag, project volunteers will see it and can jump in to assist.

And for help that is more than just a single instance of a G2G question - several members might be linked to a person seeking assistance - much like our mentor program for new members - and the project members can provide ongoing assistance as the blind genealogists build their research.

I read up on the challenges that blind people face on the internet and it turns out that websites can do a lot to make their pages more friendly to people who are blind.  The project could also identify and try to improve Wikitree's access for blind people.

And so I am wondering if anyone thinks this is a good idea and would be a viable project?

And moreover, would be interested in helping to set up a project like this with me?

Answer 1

What a great idea!

Answer 2

I think this is a very worthy project indeed, SJ. What a great idea.

Answer 3

I think this is a great idea. I have assisted this new Wiki-treer, since I am familiar with the screen readers that are used.

The help needed might be related to how to navigate a page from top to bottom, since that is the way some screen readers work.

I believe there is a website that "evaluates" how easy a website is to navigate by people who have a disability. This might be something Wikitree might want to look into doing. I will check it out to get more specifics.

Answer 4

Hello SJ, that's a great idea.  As a partially sighted genealogist, it's something I might find helpful in the future (although fingers crossed my eyes won't deteriorate any more).

There is lots of information here https://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility - including what the levels are that we might aim for.  This sub-page gives you the first checks: https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/

I'm not sure if we could apply for grants or set up donations or something, but if we could afford to, I'd recommend using a professional evaluation service which employs people with disabilities to do the assessments - in the UK, for example, the Charity the Shaw Trust is very well respected: https://www.shaw-trust.org.uk/

Best wishes,

Pat

Answer 5

A recent SCOTUS lawsuit answered that question. A person sued a Company because of the lack of accessibility based on their blindness. The Company lost. Now, companies (as well as Non-Profits, etc.) can be sued over the lack of accessibility and the ADA. So, I would suggest WikiTree start looking into this for everyone.

Comments

George, your ears must be ringing - I was thinking about this over the weekend.  I've since picked up a leader badge since I floated this idea; I'll iniquire a bit about how we can best start up an effort to improve our inclusion for blind genealogists.  At a minimum, a free space page that lists volunteers who can do pull requests and text transcriptions could be very useful to someone who can't access a particular document.

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There is also the question of accessibility for visually impaired genealogists. (subject mentioned by Pat above). I wonder if a team capable of evaluating the present styles and their accessibility, and how to improve them? I remember hearing that for instance the G2G tags (white on green) are extremely hard to read, even for people with minor impairments.