Owwww on visual accessibility grounds.

 RantWoman is happily holding in the Light numerous Quaker events this week. 

RantWoman is also slightly bummed not to feel called to attend Friends General Conference in person since it has come to OR and definitely falls within RantWoman's "will only attend FGC Gathering west of the Mississippi" rule. Zoom offers the seductive temptation to try to do two geographically dispersed events the same week and RantWoman has a clear call to succumb realistically to that temptation.

Further, RantWoman is enthusiastically celebrating #DisabilityPrideMonth. Did Friends know that #DisabilityPrideMonth is even a thing? RantWoman herself does not know how long it has been a thing. However, the Americans with Disabilities Act #ADA was signed into law in July 1990 and somewhere along the way July has been declared #DisabilityPrideMonth. Chalk one up for Continuing Revelation.

(Digression: religious organizations were originally exempted from the ADA, as if somehow someone who needs a reasonable accommodation in one context such as work or government offices and services or other public accommodations magically would not need the same accommodations in other situations. RantWoman is not interested in suing people: RantWoman IS interested in education, continuing revelation, equitable access. Choose your language. Also the ADA is a minimum and NOTHING should prevent anyone from going beyond what the ADA spells out. RantWoman is not above invoking interstate commerce considerations. too, but the point is RantWoman asks Friends to bear with her inner blowtorch long enough to get to what matters.)

Here RantWoman needs to say a GIANT Ouch about accessibility and the Friends General Conference How to use Zoom handout. RantWoman offers the following comments in sincere "do better next time" consideration for next year. People are not born knowing this stuff and willingness to learn is its own ministry!

The biggest problems:

Everything is a picture with no words or links for people who use screen readers to interact with. 

Not only is everything a picture, some parts of the document have terrible contrast so some people will not be able to read print for example blue or green print against a pink background.

The pictures do not include all the many keyboard shortcuts available to people who, for any number of reasons like the keyboard better than a mouse.

RantWoman will separately clean up and post a non-visual access tips list she just wrote for something else. Maybe RantWoman will also find a satisfactory hints page about nonvisual accessibility of documents. However, RantWoman thinks there are plenty of graphic artist resources out that and is happy to talk further with people interested in learning how to make their efforts more visually accessible.

RantWoman has already posted some zoom accessibility tips on this blog. Hopefully RantWoman will have time to fish them out of history with some combination of search bar and eccentric tagging. Stay tuned.

Thank you all for reading.

In Light and faithfulness

RantWoman.