“For too many people, using popular search engines is a frustrating and fruitless experience,” Shir Ekerling, CEO of accessiBe, said in the press release.
“With the understanding of the web accessibility gap, the decision to put our resources into accessFind was an easy one. With accessFind, internet users
with disabilities finally have a search engine that provides them with results of readily accessible websites, working to bridge the existing digital divide.”
$100 says this attempt at a new ghetto for people with disabilities is merely an aggregator for sites loading their script.
Another $100 says that, if they actually approached any people with disabilities to inquire about any problems we might have with using search engines, the Chief Vision Officer is the only person with a disability they asked.
I suppose it’s easy to say you’ll make the web accessible by 2025 when you can just build yourself a safe space and then pretend it’s the web. But AccessiBe’s self-constructed safe space isn’t the web any more than Facebook is.
I’ll stick with the open web, thanks.
In an email, Ekerling said people who criticize the company online are largely stirred by “thought leaders” who are rallying blind people in a “huge campaign”
against the company with few specific critiques.
“Almost no one gives any specifics to actual websites that really don’t work for them,” Ekerling wrote in an email. “This is because they don’t really
test us, nor have really used us. At most, they went on a website out of anger and didn’t even try to understand.”
No really, I promise, we’re not just “stirred by thought leaders”. I can state with complete confidence that neither Karl Groves nor Adrian Roselli have gotten in touch with me in any manner to offer beers in exchange for negative comments about AccessiBe. 😛 And really, that’s all it would take, that is, if we must mix in some stirring by thought leaders.
I could be this easily bribed to slam AccessiBe because the product doesn’t solve even half the problems it claims to solve, hell will freeze over before they manage to make the entire web accessible, and Ekerling, at least, is a lying liar who lies.
There. I said it. Publicly. The AccessiBe hashtag on Twitter is overflowing with examples of websites that don’t work, complete with videos of users experiencing them not working. Ekerling knows this. So we’re well past ignorance and well into lying territory.
Update on #AccessiBe’s insistence that its screen reader mode alert is no longer on by default.
As of Friday 30 April 2021 at 09:25 Eastern, it is in fact still there and still as annoying as ever. I’m logged into Namecheap on a computer accessing a network that doesn’t have AccessiBe’s domains blocked.
So if this hasn’t been added already, add another outright AccessiBe lie to the list. Man, you guys are really racking these up.
I think I’ve officially gotten to the point where, if a podcast doesn’t have a transcript, I’m skipping it.
First, because actual accessibility. Second, because it’s a whole lot easier for me to quickly scroll through a transcript to find the thing I was interested in.