[Athen] Deque Amaze

[Karl Groves]

In full disclaimer: I'm co-founder of Tenon and we make a product that
is in a competitive space with Deque's Worldspace product.  I've also
never used and don't know anyone who has used Amaze.  So I'm both
biased and ignorant. ;-)  That being said, I try to be as objective as
possible below.

The idea of being able to automagically fix accessibility issues
without interfering with existing code is pretty compelling. In a
situation where the accessibility issues are egregious and the
organization is under considerable outside pressure (i.e. a visit by
the DOJ) then something like Amaze can offer a quick fix.

There are a few things to consider:

First, Deque aren't the only ones who do such a thing. I know that
both Simply Accessible and The Paciello Group do similar work, they
just haven't "productized" it.   This leads to:

Second, this is really just applying JavaScript to the existing UI to
fix the existing accessibility issues.  In other words, any skilled JS
developer with good accessibility knowledge can do the same thing.
Chances are, Amaze is probably backed by a good library of built-in
utility functions that help make the work easier and more robust.
Deque's Dylan Barrell, in particular, is one of the top 5 JS
developers I've ever met, but fundamentally Amaze is still just JS. As
a consequence, any inordinately high price is probably unwarranted.

Third, Amaze (or any other similar such fix) needs to be regarded as
temporary, for one important reason: if the underlying UI code changes
it will break the "fix". Again, I suspect that Amaze has been
developed to do the best it can to anticipate such a thing, but it
seems scary to think that the more substantially you change the
existing UI, the more likely that the "fix" will break.   To my
knowledge Simply Accessible does a lot of this type of custom
"overlay" work and they state clearly to their customers that it is
meant to be temporary.

Last, as others have said, this fixes the symptom without treating the
disease.   Ultimately this comes down to a business decision. Time
spent fixing bugs costs money and also impacts the availability of
resources that could otherwise be put onto other work. External
pressures, such as deadlines for other projects or legally mandated
deadlines may make something like this a good option. But the existing
inaccessible interface code that this "fixes" will still be there.
Worse still, the development practices and other libraries/
frameworks, etc. that caused the problem will still be there.

So, no matter what you choose WRT using Amaze or something like it,
you should also come up with a plan to actually remediate the
underlying issues and train your developers in accessibility so that
they don't continue creating the same type of inaccessible code that
caused the problem(s) in the first place.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 8:26 AM, Teresa Haven <Teresa.Haven at nau.edu> wrote:

> I had a feeling this was the case. I will let folks know they still need to

> learn to do it right in the first place instead of looking for shortcuts -

> the same thing we are often trying to teach our students.

>

> Thanks,

>

> Teresa

>

> On Dec 18, 2015, at 6:59 AM, Bossley, Pete <bossley.5 at osu.edu> wrote:

>

> Essentially this is javascript injection to make something accessible. It

> would be a last resort kind of move and as mentioned by another poster is

> probably expensive. And, still much effort from a development standpoint.

> Really useful in the context of a 3rd party system that you can’t modify

> yourself but that you need to make it accessible nonetheless and you can’t

> get a vendor to work with you on it.

>

>

>

>

>

> From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On

> Behalf Of Teresa Haven

> Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2015 12:37 PM

> To: Access Technology Higher Education Network (athen-list at u.washington.edu)

> <athen-list at u.washington.edu>

> Subject: [Athen] Deque Amaze

>

>

>

> Does anyone have any direct experience with Deque Amaze? Several of our

> developers have received advertising about the product and love the idea of

> something else “taking care of” accessibility for them – and of course it

> sounds “too good to be true” to me because there’s not much real detail on

> their website. Any info you can share would be appreciated.

>

>

>

> Best,

>

> Teresa

>

>

>

> Teresa Haven, Ph.D.

>

> Accessibility Analyst, Northern Arizona University

>

>

>

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>

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-- 
Karl Groves
www.karlgroves.com
@karlgroves
http://www.linkedin.com/in/karlgroves
Phone: +1 410.541.6829

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