Hearts of Space

This is Chris Foster, initial review of the Hearts of Space (HOS) app. Below, please find my email exchange with the company. I'd appreciate thoughts or ideas. Thanks, Chris Foster Dear Hearts of Space, My name is Chris foster. I grew up in rural northern California about 30 miles outside Sacramento in the 1980s. Every Sunday, I would look forward to tuning HOS on our local public radio station, KXPR. Back then, I just thought the music was really cool. Lately, I've been looking for something to add some calm to my day and I thought of HOS. I live in Colorado now and had no idea whether HOS even existed any more. Well, with a very simple Google search, I found your web site and all of music and listening options that are available there. I should tell you now that I am blind. The reason I mention this is that after I signed up for a 3-day pass just to look around and decide what kind of further access plans I wanted to pay for, I found some real navigation and accessibility problems with your website and my screen reading software. Let me say immediately that I am by no means an expert on all of this, I just know when something doesn’t work. Regarding your website, from what I can tell, you use a fair bit of flash content on the site. This makes many of the buttons which control playback, skipping, voice overs on/off, etc nearly impossible for me. As a starting place, I'd like to direct you to the following link: http://webaim.org/intro/#intro This should be a good starting place to learn more about how to make a web site more accessible. I know that this cite does push its own paid services a lot, but you may well find other free guides with a little more looking. The iPhone Ap Often times, iPhone aps are more accessible then standard web pages. Every Apple iPod, iTouch, iPad, and iPhone comes with a screen reading program called VoiceOver. When I downloaded the HOS ap, I found that some parts of it were accessible, while many others were not. For whatever reason, Voiceover would not activate many of the buttons in the ap to make it do different things. If you have an iPhone handy, go to Settings, general, accessibility, VoiceOver, and then turn it on. Learn a little about VoiceOver and then try it out on the ap. Apple have provided some information as to how VoiceOver works for the end user at www.apple.com/accessibility/iphone/vision.html. Also, Apple have provided a guide for developers on how to make their applications accessible at http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UserExperience/ Additional information for developing apps that are accessible to VoiceOver users can be found on the AppleVis website at http://www.applevis.com/information-app-developers If you are able to try and fix these problems, I would be delighted to help you in any way possible - testing any new versions for example. If you are able to resolve these problems, you can then advertise that you are VoiceOVER ready in your iPhone ap promotional materials. This will immediately catch the attention of iPhone users with disabilities. I'd also be glad to write a glowing review of the application and its accessibility for the Applevis.com cite as well as for other Internet communities related to accessibility of the web and I devices. Please feel free to contact me. I'd love to help however I can. Kind Regards, Chris Foster Dear Chris, Thanks for writing in. I'm glad you were excited to find us again, but I'm afraid we've already run up against this problem and found ourselves unable to do much about it. Another visually impaired person wrote in about a year ago. The estimate we got at that time for incorporating basic accessibility into the Flash player started at $15,000 and went up from there. We simply do not have the resources to do this. We operate at the level of public broadcasting budgets. Fees from stations airing our shows have never covered more than 20% (now down to 15%) of the cost to produce and deliver the shows. The other 80% has to be provided by another business. At present that's our online service. (We had an independent record label in the past, until the record industry self-destructed by MBA and died by file-sharing at the end of the 90s.) The person who wrote in then does use the site. He uses the RADIO CHANNEL and has figured out a way to play it using the controls in the HTML portion of the site, below the main menubar. We call that area below the player and menubar the "content pane." If you click the big html links for the 3 aspects of our service in the content pane -- THE ARCHIVE, THE RADIO CHANNEL, THIS WEEK'S SHOW -- you can navigate using only html. This other person seems to do that pretty well, especially with RADIO CHANNEL. He can start it going and just let it run. See if that works for you. Since we are doing a next version of the iPhone app fairly soon to incorporate more of our full web services (and to comply with Apple's fatwa that they share 30% of our subscription fees for use of the app), I will pass your suggestions to our app designer and developer. I've inquired of our app designer and he says what you ask requires quite a lot of reprogramming, entering of the text to be read by the Voiceover -- a "not trivial" assignment that will add significant costs. We'll do our best if we can.