Web site comments (Webaim survey)

[Alex Midence]

Dear Jared,

I thank you for your gracious and comprehensive response below and your courteous invitation to share this with the Orca community at large.   Since I happen to be the driving force behind the "active recruitment" you mentioned on the Orca list, I feel it necessary to inform you that I myself would never have known of your survey had it not been for Window Eyes (my secondary work screenreader) having some sort of built-in pop-up script that directed me to your site each and every single time I launched it.  I finally broke down and took it after the third day so I could get it to go away.  Seeing as how Window Eyes now comes free to anyone who has a license for Microsoft Office 2010 or higher, you wanna talk about active recruitment, that will certainly drive the numbers much higher than they otherwise would've been.  my modest message to the Orca list and a few other Linux lists informing them of its existence on the very last day it could be filled out is hardly indicative of active recruitment.  You are right though to consider the numbers inaccurate since they would've been somewhat higher had I posted my suggestion sooner.  I know this because of a number of respondents tried to take the survey only to find that it had been closed.  I am going to take this opportunity to make a suggestion to the Orca developer and anyone else in the community with the necessary programming skills to add a similar script to Orca so that our user community is better represented in these sorts of things.  

Thanks again for your response and enjoy the rest of your day.
Alex Midence



-----Original Message-----
From: Jared Smith [mailto:jared at webaim.org] 
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2015 1:40 PM
To: Alex Midence
Subject: Re: Web site comments

Yes, I'm familiar with the Orca screen readers. We do not list all possible screen readers in the list of possible choices for simplicity's sake. There are many dozens of different screen readers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screen_readers) and it would be unusable to everyone to try to sort through all of them. We don't, for example, list every possible browser or mobile device out there. We only list the most common options. I can assure you that this is not an effort to actively ignore or dismiss Linux users. In early surveys we did list Orca as an option, but the number of respondents that indicated using it was extremely low, so we removed it from the list - again, not because we don't care about it, but to make things more accessible to respondents.

In taking a quick look at our responses from this survey, only around 1% of respondents were on Linux and only 18 (.6%) indicated using Orca in the comments. And this number is perhaps inaccurately high due to the active recruitment on the Orca mailing lists to get users to complete the survey so that Orca could be better represented. Of note is that despite this usage of both is lower than on previous surveys.
If we had listed Orca as an option to choose from, it would not have provided very useful information anyway - knowing whether Orca is used by a minimum of .6% or a maximum of 1% of respondents would have virtually no impact on development practices.

I appreciate your comments. And you are welcome to share my response with the broader Orca community.

Thanks,

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Alex Midence <alex.midence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sent from the WebAIM website at 6:07 PM, July 27th, 2015:
>
> Hi.
>
> I'm writing this to you in an effort to build awareness of our screen 
> reader community.  I recently took your survey on screen reader accessibility and noticed that the screen reader I use at home was missing from the list of choices.  I have been a user of the Orca screen reader for Linux for five years now.  Recent improvements to the Linux accessibility stack have resulted in a large number of new users to this accessibility solution particularly in the last 2 years.  Distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and Archlinux now come with accessibility built-in out of the box.  All a new user has to do is hold down a hotkey combination prior to installation and the operating system gets put on their machine complete with screen reader right from the get-go without assistance from non-disabled persons.  Couple this with a free price tag and you have a very attractive solution for a segment of the population which is typically unable to afford some of the higher end screen rea  ders out there like Jaws and Window-eyes nor are they often able to afford or willing to pay for Windows or Mac machines since many are on fixed incomes or student salaries.  So, where once it was a viable solution to the extremely technically savvy, Linux has now become a very attractive solution to many screen reader users all around the world.  This is especially true in India, South Africa, Brazil and other parts of latin America, Europe and Asia.  Whould would you need to see in order to justify mentioning the Orca screen reader and screen magnifier in your future surveys? the usual browser of choice for such users  is Firefox although lots of work has been going into making Epiphany,  a webkit-based browser for the Gnome desktop an accessible alternative.  An answer would be immensely appreciated and will be greatly anticipated.
>
> Yours truly,
> Alex Midence
> Orca user
> Alex.Midence at gmail.com
> Orca community member:
> Orca-list at gnome.org
> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list