[Athen] Accessibility Issues with Virtual Desktop or Thin Client Environments

[Larry Kiser]

Colleagues:

The IT department at our institution is creating a virtual desktop/thin client environment in our math studio computer lab as a pilot project.  Apparently the plan is to expand it to all institution computers in the near future.  A pilot project attempted a couple of years ago was fraught with technical problems and was dropped.  At that time my research indicated such environments were not AT friendly.  This time around the two companies identified as vendors were Vmware and Wyse.  A preliminary scan of their web sites were not encouraging.  Vmware's last posted VPAT was dated 2009 and listed many exceptions to accessibility.  On the Wyse website the following is posted 'Wyse thin clients are "Assistive technology-ready." They can work with any assistive technology that has been configured to work in a multi-user server-based computing environment operating in any of the Windows or legacy server environments that work with Wyse terminals.'  We at the Disabilities Resource Center are concerned about accessibility issues with programs such as Kurzweil 3000, JAWS and Zoomtext.  Our IT department has never been in favor of running such software on our servers.  We are heavily invested in the K3000 web version, usb version of JAWS, and standalone versions of Zoomtext.   What accessibility experiences have any of you had with these two types of environments?  Thank you in advance for your responses.

Larry Kiser, Counseling Specialist Overseeing AT
Disabilities Resource Center
Santa Fe College
Gainesville, FL


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