[OpenID] OpenID Accessibility

[tom calthrop]

Hi Chris,

We did some pretty extensive testing with Swedish Institute of Assistive 
Technology with our free OpenID server. We removed all AX/SREG support 
which was the main issue when testing with blind people (apart from the 
obvious gotchas like captcha).

My view on this is to offload profile exchange to another workflow 
(under OAuth) which can be done separately to authentication

I *fully recommend* that all developers of OpenID solutions take some 
time out to contact their national centre for accessibility. They will 
be very very happy to work with you to ensure that your solutions work 
well with people with all kinds of accessibility issues (including 
blindness).

And if that nice approach did not make you do it then this usually 
works;) ... Back in 2006, Target was sued by the National Federation of 
the Blind because their website was not accessible. It was settled for 
$6 Million USD.

If anyone wants to see what we did you can download "Prairie" from our 
homepage which is a multi-user free (GPL'ed) software OpenID 2.0 server 
-> http://www.barnraiser.org

Tom




Chris Messina wrote:
> I'm reluctant to write about this, because I've been afraid of the
> answer, but I wanted to broach the subject of OpenID Accessibility.
> Google tells me that this issue has only been raised once before [1]
> and it didn't seem to dredge up much of a response.
>
> With IIW coming up, I thought I might put in a request that
> accessibility be considered.
>
> To this end, I'd like to throw out an idea on serving user preferences
> according to accessibility needs... namely through the use of AX. I
> can imagine an AX schema for accessibility that would allow an OP to
> request that a high contrast version of a site be displayed, or that a
> certain stylesheet be used for forms... While I imagine that much of
> these issues should be handled by the user's browser, it seems to me
> that OpenID through AX could make more specific requests of RPs to
> alter themselves to the needs of a given user.
>
> I also wanted to bring up the issue around user flows, language and
> the like... and what the experience is like for blind people when
> they're bounced from one site to another in the OpenID flow... and how
> we could make that flow better.
>
> Interestingly, I'd like to point out (and Derek can attest to this)
> that better and more accessible designs often improve the usability
> for typical users without special needs.
>
> Chris
>
> [1] http://openid.net/pipermail/general/2008-March/004324.html
>
>