Used by permission | Photo credit: viperagp

People with disabilities have a lot of spending power.

Yes, on average we may have less disposable income than people without disabilities, but according to DIVERSEAbility Magazine:

Discretionary income for working-age people with disabilities is about $21 billion, which is greater than that of the African-American ($3 billion) and Hispanic ($16 billion) market segments, combined.

My takeaway from those stats is that there are people with disabilities who don’t have a lot of money to spend and people who definitely do. For that reason, if I were designing a website, I’m thinking it would be a good idea to make it accessible to as many people as possible.

A lot of people with disabilities use screen readers, which are software tools allowing one to navigate the Web without being able to see it.

Imagine you’re a person with a disability who has been out of work during the pandemic, and the eviction moratorium is coming up at the end of this month. You might want to apply for public housing.

Or imagine you’re a person with a disability who has been cooped up during the pandemic, and now that you’re fully vaccinated you have the urge to travel. You also have the means to travel in style and want to book a room at the Ritz.

Which do you think would be easier?

I have a hypothesis is that it will be easier to register at the Ritz-Carlton, because such a well-financed business must have money to pay programmers for making their site accessible (which in computer lingo means that it is coded in such a way as to allow easy interface with screen readers … among other things). Also, I’m thinking that surely the owners of the Ritz are aware of compelling business and financial reasons for digital accessibility.

Having said that, I don’t want to leave you thinking accessibility is prohibitively expensive. Planning for accessibility from the beginning is actually quite affordable. It is remediation that is expensive.

I also want to make clear that government websites such as those providing public housing assistance are required by law to be accessible. But that doesn’t mean they are.

To test my hypothesis — that it would be easier to register for a room in a luxury hotel — I attempted first to apply for housing assistance here in Kansas City, MO. Then I attempted to reserve a room at the Ritz-Carlton in New York.

Applying for Housing Assistance

When reading the instructions — before even starting to fill out the form — I noticed a problem:

If you are added to the waiting list, you will be notified by mail when your name comes to the top of the waiting list or if we are updating our files. If you do not respond to our notifications, or your letter is returned undeliverable, your name will be removed from the waiting list.

There is no mention of any alternative notification method for people with visual disabilities. But let’s say I’m persistent and figure I’ll ask someone to read the letter to me when it arrives. After listening to most of the lengthy set of instructions, I’m impatient to begin, so I use my screen reader to skip ahead to the first input element on the form and hear this:

edit slash slash

What the heck am I supposed to enter here? I have no idea. But I do know that it would have been quite easy to programmatically label this element so screen readers could tell users what information is required.

Let’s see what’s next:

Housing Choice Voucher check box not checked

Public Housing check box not checked

Here I’m presented with two check boxes, but there’s no instruction as to whether I can select one or both. Anxious to find a place to live, I take a chance and select both.

At that point I hear two options that weren’t there before when I scanned down the form, so I must have opened something new. What happened? Am I on a different page now?

Housing Choice Voucher: Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) check box not checked
Public Housing: Public Housing Details of public housing check box not checked
Details of public housing link

Those sound similar to the choices I already selected, but now the screen reader says they’re not checked. And there’s a link to more information, but I’m definitely not going to open it, because I’m afraid of losing my progress in this form.

After checking both choices again, I tab ahead to the next input field:

edit slash slash

Am I back up at the top of the form? What’s on the next line?

edit slash slash

How about the next line?

Continue button

Thank goodness. It sounds like I may have reached the end of this page. Perhaps the next one will be more understandable. When I activate the button to continue, though, all I hear is:

edit slash slash

Sigh. I give up.

Visually this is the section of the form I was trying to complete:

Please note that the error messages are visible but inaccessible to screen readers. If the programmers had referred to the W3C’s guidance for accessible error identification, I might have had more success completing this form.

Reserving a Room at the Ritz

At the top of the Ritz-Carlton index page I start tabbing to explore landmarks and hear a link for

Reserve Now

But first I want to check availability for the dates I’ll be traveling, so I keep tabbing. There’s a lot of information, but not what I’m looking for, so I tab back up to the top and find a link announcing:

Skip to Content

I’m thinking that everything on the page is Content, but this is probably their version of a “Skip to Main Content” link. This function is supposed to be the audible form of visually scanning a page, allowing screen reader users to skip to the most important information.

From my point of view, the most important content at this point would allow me to check room availability or reserve a room. Evidently the Ritz thinks the most important content is a slide carousel of images of the hotel that I cannot see.

Persistently I keep tabbing to search for more landmarks.

Ah, here’s something that sounds promising:

Select Dates edit required Select Dates selected Jul 16, 2021 — Jul 17, 2021

Those are the dates for today and tomorrow, and the site tells me an edit is required. How do I edit? I know how easy it would be to programmatically associate instructions, but I’m left on my own to guess.

Nothing happens when I press the ENTER key.

Hmm. Let me think. Based on previous experience, scheduling often involves a calendar in a table format, so let me see what happens when I enter the screen reader code to navigate to the next cell of a table.

Not in a table cell

So this isn’t a table, and I’m stuck. Guess I won’t be able to reserve a room at the Ritz online after all. I could call on the phone during business hours, but I’m frustrated that their website is inaccessible. So I decide to take my business elsewhere.

This is the section of the page I was trying to navigate:

Please note that although people with vision can see the calendar and navigate it with a mouse, it is not easily accessible to people using screen readers. If the programmers had used Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARAI), they could have informed the user that this calendar is a drop-down list that can be navigated using arrow keys.

Who Has the Most Accessible Website?

My hypothesis didn’t pan out. The Ritz-Carlton’s website isn’t accessible, and neither is the site for The Kansas City Housing Authority.

No matter how much money they have, screen reader users are simply out of luck when applying for housing assistance AND when trying to reserve a luxury hotel room.

As far as disability is concerned, the only thing equal opportunity about these sites is their inaccessibility.