Colleges Discriminate Against the Blind With Google Apps, Advocates Say

Article Overview & My Reaction to the Article From the Chronicle of Higher Education
     Colleges are impressed by Google's free e-mail and word-processing services, but blind students and faculty have found them to be inaccessible.  In March of this year, a civil-rights complaint was filed against New York University and Northwestern University, both of which recently began using the free software services known as Google Apps for Education.  The National Federation of the Blind has asked the Justice Department to investigate both universities for discrimination that violates the Americans With Disabilities Act. 
     The advocacy group, in a series of online videos, shares the problems that occur when blind users access Google's products with assistive software that reads web pages aloud.  For example, Gmail lacks clear labels to alert users to the type of information that they should put in each text field, like the message’s subject or the recipient’s e-mail address
     Inaccessible learning materials continue to present a problem in higher education.  Google told the Associated Press that they had a productive conversation with Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind.  Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president for engineering and research, said that the meeting convened with Google's commitment to improving their products, but did not further elaborate on the details. 
     The accessibility issue comes at the same time that Google has been trying to push even deeper into the academic arena by recently launching an education-focused section of its Google Apps Marketplace
     The article mentioned that nearly 60% of colleges use outside vendors for their student e-mail. 
Nearly 60 percent of colleges turn to outside companies for their student e-mail, and Google and Microsoft are the leading providers, with more than half of colleges using Google and slightly more than 40 percent of colleges that outsource choosing Microsoft. 
     I initially found it interesting that schools would continue to contract with Google knowing that the product is inaccessible to students with visual impairments and then I wondered if schools ever just simply turn their heads to issues like this and wait until they surface as a public problem.  Because such a small percentage of students on college campuses are visually impaired, is it possible that the problem gets pushed aside until a student or advocacy group similar to the one described in the article files a complaint and raises public awareness of the issue?  How do matters like this affect a student like Drake?  Does a white male with visual impairments advocate for his rights in the face of discrimination or does he prefer to sit back and wait patiently?  It has to be frustrating for something to be inaccessible when every other college student on campus has access to the same thing with no issues or problems.  This article highlights only one small issue of accessibility on a college campus, but it makes me wonder just how many times a day or week a student with visual impairments encounters frustration with accessibility.  I wonder what Google's plans are for dealing with the accessibility of the free e-mail and word-processing services.  How quickly will they be able to fix or address the issue?

Parry, M. (2011, March 15). Colleges discriminate against the blind with Google apps, advocates say. The Chronicle of Higher Education, Retrieved from http://chronicle.com