Moreover, the quote does not sound like something a journo would write, but you can easily imagine it coming from a CEO.

I did try to make the point in my post that the Reuters seem to have mis-quoted James Roper and I managed to find the amended quote (thanks for the link, by the way). The problem we have now is that the original article is ‘out there’ - mis-quote and all - so I feel we have to go some way to correct this misconception that there might be a magic bullet to be had.

Please understand that I have no argument against any toolbar of this type. The more the better, in my opinion - providing site owners understand that it cannot be used as an excuse for correcting any existing accessibility issues on their site.

What does concern me is some of the marketing that I have seen. I fully appreciate that I may have not seen all of the marketing but the bits that have come to my attention leave me feeling a little…uncomfortable. Just to reiterate, it’s not the toolbar but the way it is sometimes presented as The Accessibility Solution^tm that I object to.

With regard to Viki, I’d be a lot happier if it wasn’t ‘On’ by default. As someone who is intermittently hearing impaired, I’m very sound sensitive. Unannounced sound on sites can cause me anything from mild irritation to real shock depending on the volume. I’m also conscious of the fact that it could cause problems for users who are already using a screen reader by interfering with their ability to hear their own application’s output. Why not configure it to be off by default and allow users who do want to try it out to turn it on at will?

Just to say that the article was duely corrected on reuters (see below), however we are not in comunication with ITPro, as they took the story automatically from the Reuters first release. Here is the corrected story on Reuters (which has removed the slightly misleading quote you’ve highlighted above) :

Amended Reuters article

Also, I believe you may not yet aware of all the functionality available through the system. For example this is a system that would be of benifit to many of those you mention above. It is not a silver bullet in the sense you have interepted above, nothing is. But I believe you’ll see that this and many of the other features available could be of benefit to the majority of those faceing barriers:

http://81.149.150.32:8080/loband/

I’d be delighted if you might offer feedback on it.

It offers access to most users, on most machines, on most pages. But not all. But what good about it is it does it without needing a screenreader to be installed. It’s in early public beta.

What do you think?