The Next Generation of Assistive Technology User Feedback is Here
Hello everyone and welcome to this breakout session, which is Vispero. The next generation of assisted technology user testing is here. This is Andy Haines from Sci-Tech Global events team we're waiting two minutes for people to get into this session. Please hang on. I think we can get started. Hello everyone and welcome to this breakout session.
Again, this is Vispero. The next generation of assisted technology user testing is here. Before we begin a couple of housekeeping items. This session is being recorded and will be available post event. You will get an email.
Please remain on mute. If you have a question or comments, please use the Q and A box. And when it comes time for questions, you can raise your hand also, which is a feature found in the participants panel for those using screen readers the keyboard shortcut for raise my hand are option Y on Mac and Alt + Y on PC. And to mute unmute command Shift + A on Mac and Alt + A on Windows. One of our moderators will then call upon you and you can unmute yourself to ask a question. Please enjoy today's programming and now here is Mark Miller of Vispero.
Thank you, Andy. Welcome and thank all of you for being here. We have something very exciting to talk about today. That is a complete paradigm shift and real user feedback on websites from people who use assistive technology.
I'm Mark Miller, your host today, I'm director of emerging accounts and platform at TPGi. Also the host of TPGi's accessibility podcast, real people, real stories. And with me on the panel today to talk about this innovation is Matt Ater, who is Vice President of Software and Corporate Business Development at Freedom Scientific and Dave O'Neill, who is vice president and general manager at TPGi. Dave and Matt welcome, and thank you for joining us to unveil the solution. Matt, would you like to introduce yourself? Sure, thank you, Mark. And it's great to see everybody today.
As mark mentioned, my name is Matt Ater and I'm VP of Software and Corporate Business Development within Freedom Scientific as well as Vispero. And I've been with the company for about eight years and had worn different hats from software to consulting and been in the field for about 25 years. David. Thanks, Matt, Andy, and Mark this is pretty awesome to be here. I'm very excited about this Sci-Tech global conference.
I've been in the field of accessibility for about 30 years, mostly in technology development and consulting. So the theme of this conference is very near and dear to my heart. The last four years, I've been working with what I call a global team of superheros, who day in and day out work with our clients to help build a more accessible future.
And we do that basically through traditional conformance testing, AT usability testing, knowledge and skills development for our clients and programs and platform services. We also use our accessibility platform called ARC for the delivery of most our solutions. And for those who are not familiar with ARC could say, it's a very powerful platform that has a free tier. So anybody in the world can use ARC for free and several other usage based capabilities that are very, very important to accessibility initiatives.
And I look forward to talking more about one of the latest capabilities that we've released with that platform with Matt. So thanks very much for having me. Thanks, David. Thank you, Matt. Great to be here with both of you. We're gonna get into this solution that we're talking about in a bit, but first I understand that this all came about through a collaborative effort between Freedom Scientific, the makers of the JAWS screen reader and TPGi, the leading accessibility solutions for providers.
So Dave, can you tell me a little bit more about the relationship between Freedom and TPGi? Yeah, absolutely. So, and I think also I should probably comment my relationship with Matt. Matt, and I go back a lot of years and terrific person to work with in the field and actually it was one of the reasons why I came to Vispero. But anyway, Matt's division and TPGi are both part of the Vispero.
And so we served together on an executive team and as a regular practice where we continue to kind of operate, strategize and innovate. And so I have the benefit of understanding Matt's customer, the unique needs and challenges that assistive technology users face and I'm able to use that as to inform the solutions that we provide in the products that we provide to our enterprise customers. So it's very, it's something that differentiates us from other participants in the field and something that we are very proud of. Yeah, and I would add to that.
I think the, when I look back when I joined the company in 2014, the intent was to start a consulting practice within Freedom Scientific and eventually we grew to be Vispero which is what is today and acquired companies along the way. And the reason that we did that was because we had a customer base who relied on accessibility and JAWS obviously needed accessible content for it to consume. And so when we started the consulting business and looked at different avenues, whether it's adding additional software components, such as ARC and other things, all of it was driven around a combined customer which is unique to this organization that David just mentioned.
It's rare to find somebody who makes the assistive technology and at the same time consults with organizations to solve accessibility problems that are faced by blind and low vision people. And when in fact, several years ago, when I was leading TPG prior to moving into business development, one of the projects we did with Freedom Scientific was a spinoff of JAWS called JAWS Inspect. And the idea behind this was, hey, there's people who use JAWS software for testing websites, but they may only use it for a couple hours a day or a couple hours a month or several days in a month, but they're not like our traditional users in that they understand all the keystrokes, they use them all day. They have learned to listen to a screen reader over time. And so we created JAWS Inspect with the collaboration between Freedom Scientific and TPG at the time now TPGi to be able to provide reports that are visual output of what JAWS said without having to listen to the screen reader.
And that's just one component it doesn't replace the use of a screen reader for testing, but it puts things right in front of the developer so they understand what the screen reader said, not just that they heard it speak. Which was one of the challenges that we were faced with when listening to the audience of people who were doing testing as they weren't used to using the keyboard and then separately, they weren't used to listening to the screen reader. And it's not enough just to press the tab key, to go through a website and say, okay, it talks so therefore it's working. And so that was a starting point of true collaboration between the organizations.
I think again, what David said, it's, we're uniquely positioned to work together because of having both the consulting and software side of TPGi and then the software expertise and screen reader expertise coming from Freedom Scientific. Yeah, that's a great example, Matt, and a great point. And I'd actually like to stay on JAWS Inspect for just a second longer and ask you Dave, like just obviously being in the business here, I know that we've recently taken that JAWS Inspect concept even a little bit further and there's an integration inside of the ARC Platform under certain circumstances. So can you speak to that a little bit before we move on? Yeah, absolutely.
And yeah, so the JAWS Inspect out but the point of the tool is to make sure that designers and developers of technology have the opportunity to experience the JAWS narrative and what we have found classically when consulting with customers is that when we talk solely about the technical concerns of conformance, we might lose the audience in 10 minutes because they start to glaze over. But the second we put the actual output, what their products sounds like and what that experience feels like, everybody in the room wakes up and is, and wants to learn more and understand more. So what we have done is in addition to our technical conformance service, where we do a technical evaluation of your product, we've expanded that with the option to put the JAWS Inspect output next to the components that we've evaluated for you. What's nice about this is that some customers are not yet at a maturity level where they're willing to license additional tools in their testing group, but they do want that, they do want to see that output.
So now any customer of TPGi that works with us for conformance testing has a very reasonably priced option to include Gi output and it is integrated directly into ARC as all of our deliverables are at TPGi. And I would add to that Mark, if I could. The other benefit is that a lot of dev shops may be running on Macs. And so obviously you can't run without running a windows parallels or a bootcamp or whatever the term is for the Mac without having that and spending the time to do that.
Now, you can gather that data straight through the work that we're doing with inside the ARC Platform, just by asking TPGi to run those reports. Great. So JAWS Inspect was one of the first results of this collaboration that's possible between Freedom Scientific and TPGi. But really we're here today to talk about the latest result of that, which has been sort of hard not to mention up till now, because it's pretty exciting. So, David, what is the latest innovation? What are we talking about here? You know, it's funny because in the top left corner of the screen, there's this JAWS Connect logo that's.
Oh, is that it? So, when we were rehearsing the idea of like revealing it, I thought about this. JAWS Connect is the latest innovation that's being delivered in the combination of Freedom Scientific and TPGi. And I'd like people to think about it as, it's like the next step beyond JAWS Inspect to allow users of assistive technology themselves to be a part of the problem solving process. I always say this, as a software developer at heart, how can you design a system, a product, a piece of software without listening to your user base. That's exactly what the world does today largely. I don't wanna say categorically, but to a large extent, the audience of assistive technology users, but there's no voice.
So what JAWS Connect does is enable that voice in the product life cycle through ARC. And what the idea behind this, is that a user may go somewhere and they wanna provide feedback. And if I've been too, and as a user of JAWS myself and I go to websites and (indistinct) sometimes it's hard to find a ways to provide feedback.
And then on top of that, my feedback's mixed with everybody else's feedback. And so the intent of this is to be able to capture this as direct feedback from a JAWS user so that the people reviewing the content or reviewing the reports will actually get the feedback and they're focused on accessibility, not on just general feedback, which usually ends up in a marketing teams bucket. The reason you're saying, Matt, that when you say it's hard to find the feedback, you mean, it may be easy for a sighted user to find that feedback, but as a user of JAWS, it could be inaccessible or difficult to find.
And then even when you do, it's mixed in with everybody's feedback. Yeah, I mean, the question is which link do you go to? Right, there's contact us. There's feedback. There's about us. There's, you know, it's buried sometimes it's not always easy to find ways to provide feedback to web owners. And what we'll see in the demonstration in just a moment is what we've done, is we've enabled the channel via JAWS.
So the mechanism through which a user can provide feedback is consistent regardless of where they are on the web. So I think that's an important point making it'll be, there'll become clearer in the demonstration. Yeah, let's run that demo in a second, but can you give any more kind of clarity and detail just on how JAWS Connect is working? I mean, right now on from a conceptual level, I think it makes a whole lot of sense, but how is it really working underneath the hood? Matt, do you wanna talk about from a JAWS's perspective first? Yeah, so the JAWS user, obviously running the latest version of JAWS 2022, and anything going forward basically will when they hit a page that supports JAWS Connect and David can talk about that side in a second.
They're gonna be able to find a link inside the list of links, as well as through page summary, to announce that this page allows the user to provide feedback through JAWS Connect. And we'll show that in the demo, but it's really that simple. And then once somebody chooses that link, it loads a page. You fill out the form, you hit submit in a way it goes, and then that content is then collected and after that it goes into the ARC Platform for the site owner who's having their site monitored will be able to view that feedback. Do you wanna add any detail Dave on what that looks like on the ARC side? Sometimes it's best just to review. Just to show the demo.
All right, so I have a, I'm gonna switch over and I'm gonna show you all, what it looks like from this is a demo that Matt's pre done for us, where he's actually using JAWS Connect as a JAWS screen reader user. So I'm gonna share a screen with you and we'll take a look at that. All right, is my screen sharing? Not yet.
All right. There we go. [Instructor] All right, checking out the demo of JAWS Connect. I've opened up a page, we're on tpgi.com and I'll go ahead and check that with insert T.
TPGi the Paciello Group is. Now that I know I'm on that page. If I was on a page and found something that I wanted to report, I can press insert F7 to get a list of links. Links list dialog, links list view, provide feedback on the page using JAWS Connect one of 79. And you can see at the top of the links list is the provide feedback using JAWS Connect. I'll go ahead and press enter on that.
Enter, JAWS user feedback four, JAWS user feedback four, heading level two of JAWS user feedback for wwwtpgi.com, blank. To improve wwwtpgi.com for JAWS users. We would like to collect some feedback. Please answer the following questions.
And I can press the tab key to go ahead and land in the first question. JAWS user feedback for wwwtpgi.com complementary region. Was this your first visit to this page group? Yes, radio button not checked, one of two. And I can press the enter key to turn on forms mode. Enter.
And then I can arrow to my choices. No radio button checked two of two. So I'll leave it on no and I'll hit the tab key. What task were you trying to do? Edit. And I'll go ahead and type in the task. Looking.
Looking for the blog link. And I'll read back with insert up arrow. What task were you trying to do? Edit looking for the blog link.
And I'll press the tab key. Please provide details of what happened and what you expected to happen at it. Now I'll go ahead and type in my answer here.
I was able to find the link, use the JAWS list of T links period. I was able to find the link using the JAWS list of links. All right, its completed then I'll hit the tab key. Were you able to complete your intended task group? Yes, radio button not checked one of two. All right, so I have two choices, yes.
No radio button checked two of two. And no, so I'll go back to yes. Yes, radio button checked one of two. And then I'll hit the tab key.
How would you rate the accessibility of this page group? Very accessible radio button not checked one of four. And I have accessible. Moderately accessible radio button checked two of four. Moderately inaccessible radio button checked three of four. Very inaccessible radio button checked four of four. Very accessible radio button checked one of four.
All right, so I'm on very accessible I'll go ahead and hit the tab key. Feel free to contact me regarding this feedback, checkbox not checked. And I can check the box if I want someone to contact me, it doesn't mean anybody will contact you. It just gives them the notification that you're willing to talk about whatever issues you ran into. So I'll go ahead and check the box. Space checked.
And hit the tab key. Email address edit has pop-up mater@vispero.com submit button. Enter, thank you. Heading level one blank. Our accessibility team has received your report, blank. If you selected the contact option, you may be in touch.
If we have any further questions about the issue, blank. Thank to you again, your efforts will help us make a better web for everyone, blank. You can now close this tab using Control + W. Very good.
So I'll press Control + W to go ahead and close the tab. TPGi the Paciello Group is now TPGi accessibility solutions provider, Google Chrome. And now the form was submitted and is sitting inside the ARC Platform for somebody to review the feedback. Excellent.
So I'm gonna stop this share here and turn it over to you, David. And can you show us what this looks like on the ARC and of things. Absolutely.
Okay, can everybody see my screen? It is too good. Awesome. So ARC, as I mentioned, is our platform for accessibility management and we have over a thousand companies using ARC today.
When you log into ARC, everything is organized by workspaces. And in this case, I'm going to move to the workspace in which we monitor the accessibility and feedback for the TPGi public website. What I've done is simply selected the Vispero webs, I'm sorry, the Vispero sites workspace.
I opened up the monitoring tab and within the monitoring tab, I opened up the dashboard for that website. And there's a lot of information presented here, and this is not an ARC Demo, so I won't go into it. But one of the areas is what we call performance summary. And a performance summary will provide data around your level of compliance from a technical perspective and then if you notice, there is a tab on the performance summary box called usability feedback.
By selecting that tab. I now have a list of all the AT feedback that we've received for this website. And in this case, the list contains the assistive technology that submitted the feedback. In this case, it's JAWS.
The task as reported by the user, looking for the blog link, the rating provided by the user, very accessible and the date that this was submitted, which would be, Matt recorded this on December 1st. I can open that and naturally I'll see all of the information that was provided by Matt when he filled out the form. This was his first time on the, first visit to the page, no, this was not his first visit to the page. He was looking for the blog link and was able to find that link using JAWS. And he was able to complete these tasks and found it very accessible, but we can always contact him.
Now, this is really interesting because I debated whether or not we should be submitting a positive feedback or a negative feedback. And the truth is that nothing makes a developer smile more than hearing that what they've done is good. So, and when you provide feedback, it's constructive, whether it is critical or it's positive in its nature, it's still learning constructive. The notice that in addition to the feedback that the users provided, we've also noted the date and some technical information that we often find important when you are investigating a usability issue.
In this case, it's the version of JAWS, the URL, the page that the user was on and the version of the browser. I'm not sure of that, maybe I should do this in the version of the browser. So this information is available for every user of ARC free tier and otherwise. What's nice though, is that in addition to the usability feedback, if I was an enterprise customer using enterprise features, I could zap this to one of my internal incident tracking systems, or if I had a help desk contract, perhaps with TPGi where our usability practice could get involved and help investigate what the issue is and advise on how to address it and even intervene and discuss with the end-user if that was requested. So there's a lot of additional capabilities attached to this very, very simple feature.
But 0.1 last thing out, which is that, since we have the URL of the page, that the user was experiencing problems, we can go to that particular URLs console and take a look at what the technical issues have been with that page historically. And we find this to be very powerful linkage between usability and technical conformance. One last thing is that for our essential tier users, which is a very inexpensive, very modest subscription, we have tons of content around usability available to our customers to investigate. So in this case, Matt was providing some feedback on links, which in our accessible design guidance might be underneath the category of navigation. And within navigation we have about a dozen different articles that deal with that.
So, for example, if the issue had to do with differentiating between links and buttons, we can open up an article and get a very good primer on that subject. So there's a lot of interactivity between the different capabilities of ARC and this feature that I think are quite powerful. Okay, I'll stop sharing.
Thanks, David. So the one question I have is, is it complicated to set up an administer? Nope, it's actually, that's a great question, Mark. So there's absolutely nothing that needs to be done on your part other than to ask a customer service, to turn it on for you. This is a zero code solution. And that means that all you need is a sincere interest in having users of assistive technology provide their feedback to you, and we can turn it on for you provided your monitoring in ARC, of course, which is available even in the free tier. So Matt, on your end of things, I heard you mention that you needed the latest version of JAWS.
Is that any version of JAWS, or is there a special version of JAWS that allows this connect. Any version of JAWS 2022 or fusion 2022 would support this at this point. Great, so you don't have to request anything special if you're a JAWS user. Nope, as long as you're up to date, yeah. Great.
And even the people on home annual licenses, this doesn't, this isn't a pro license requirement. If you're on a home annual, which in the United States, people at home can subscribe to, they would have availability to this and they automatically update with their each year because they're on the annual cycle rather than a, what we call SMA cycle. And David, can you talk to us about how much this costs. It's free.
It's free for everyone who monitors an ARC. I like that that's an easy number for me to remember. So if, so what you're saying is if they have an ARC subscription to begin with, this is something they get without subscription. They're not being, there's not an upcharge or anything like that. That's right, anybody can go and subscribe to ARC in the free tier.
And so the website does need to be monitored, which is a relatively inexpensive proposition, but if it's being monitored by ARC, this capability comes along with it. Great. So lots and lots of talks, talk about ARC here are there other platforms that JAWS Connects works with? Is that to me or to Matt? I can take this one for now. For now this is within the browser. So JAWS is connects, think about it in Chrome, Edge, Firefox.
Will it be available for other applications if other people want this turned on in desktop applications, they just need to reach out to David or I, and we'll can work with you to get it configured for desktop applications. And I can think of many that companies may sell to other organizations that aren't running in a browser that they still may want those applications to provide feedback. Yeah, just keep in mind that ARC since inception was designed and developed as an API first on our platform.
So, and we envision this solution, certainly JAWS is a very important user base to us, but we have other assistant technologies in our company we recognize there are other assistant technologies in the world and there's nothing, technically it's designed to be able to integrate. So if there are providers out there that wanna talk to us about building an integration and or if there are customers who have a non-web applications and they wanna talk to us about integrating JAWS Connect with them, we are well-prepared to do that. Great. Well, thank you. I know that we have questions already coming in from the audience and certainly would welcome any more if anybody else has questions.
I have those in front of me, so I know we have a moderator, but my buddy Bruce Howell jumped in here and he says, I think I heard JAWS Connect from a page announced as an H2 heading instead of a H1. Is there any reason why it isn't using an H1 heading or did I miss that? It's a great catch, I saw it this morning. I don't know if there's an H1 anywhere else on that page, but great catch. This morning I said the same thing to myself I said well, that's interesting why is that an H2 and it's supposed to be a H1, but I didn't have a moment to take a look at it. So it could have been crisscrossing where, you know, it's good feedback to submit by the way.
He's serious saying you should have submitted that through JAWS Connect. JAWS Connect. (laughs) I think, as any software there could be bugs, but yes, that's been reported. Great. And then Bob wants to know, will there come a time when JAWS Connect, isn't a tied to the ARC Platform.
Can that data be provided elsewhere? And I think you kind of answered that in our last little discussion there, David, but I don't know if there's any expansion you wanna give on that. Yeah, great question, Bob, and I'll just, again, I'll emphasize it. So understand that the product has two pieces to it, right? There's the JAWS piece and then there's the ARC piece and I'm not talking about the user interface in ARC. I'm actually talking about the facilitating the actual grab of the feedback and a capture of that feedback, and then depositing that into ARC. So our approach, this is very simple. If you monitor with ARC, we will capture this feedback for you.
And yes, presented in the user interface however, ARC is API first. We integrate with over 2000 different platforms via Zapier, and we have our own native API, which can be used so that you can actually redirect this data anywhere that you want to. We're very sensitive to enterprises and their internal practices and systems. So if you have a particular need, just ping me, ping one of us, and we can connect with you. And I'll add one thing for anybody who does go out and try this, you can try this on tpgi.com today. One thing that, for those, I mean, most people have internet the minute they turn on their computer, but let's say you're in a place like I am right now, which is a hotel, when my computer starts and JAWS starts, there's no internet connection.
The first thing JAWS does when it loads is go grab that list from ARC. And so it does need an internet connection to do that. So I did to restart JAWS to grab that list because I didn't have internet connection when I connected my computer to the network here at the hotel, when I first started.
Great, thanks both. And then Kim asks, can you explain where a user will find the link to the usability form? Again, Matt, I think that's you. Yeah, sure, so there's two ways today and there'll be a third notification coming out in the next release in two weeks. But the methods are, if you press insert F7 to get a list of links, the very top link in that list will say to provide feedback. It's not in the Dom, so if you're like tabbing through the website, you're not gonna see it. If you arrow to the top and come down, we leave that alone because of the skip NAB and everything like that but it's in the list of links.
Separately, if you do an insert F1, when at the top of the page of the website, you'll get a page summary. So you'll see how many regions, headings, and links, and right after that is a link to provide feedback and that will take you to the same page. Thanks, Matt.
And then Chris asks, we run into issues with JAWS and Citrix when the employer does not have access to the server. Is there a solution for that yet? I don't know. I think we should take that one offline cause we have our support team who can support Citrix discussions. So I would have him reach out to support@vispero.com and set up a call with them regarding Citrix.
Support@vispero.com. Yep. I'm gonna just put that in the chat. And that's for JAWS support. So keep in mind that customer's from TPGi have a separate email for support at TPGi, I'm not sure what that email address is off the top of my head.
I'm remembering it's arcsupport@tpgi but we'll verify that. So Mina has a question and that is, this is a great feature. She says, thank you, appreciate that.
I'm wondering if ARC will do a similar collaboration with VoiceOver for Mac users. David, do you wanna, I can take a little bit of this and the complexity of it. So the way we're doing it, is it's built into JAWS to grab the list of pages and then to do that. So, obviously there needs to be some collaboration with Apple to add that capability, because what we're doing very, and David can go into this wide, but we chose not to put code on pages that we have to manage.
So the customers don't have to do any of the work, we do it on the backend from within ARC. And so I think it's an interesting perspective, but we would definitely need collaboration between Apple and TPGi to make that happen. Yeah, so, just adding to that, when we envisioned this feature, number one, obviously Vispero has a number of assistive technologies, JAWS being the most prominent and perhaps largest user base. And so it was an excellent place for us to begin and it's very complimentary to the other capabilities that we discussed on the call today.
But it is our intention to really view the AT user community as a whole. And so we welcome the opportunity to talk to other providers as assistive technology to hook into this. And that would be, I would say, an ideal state for us to be in. The more conversations we have with other providers, the better. Thanks, David.
So John asks, he says that he lives in the UK. I would like the option for a home annual license, but it is U S only. I'm assuming he's talking about JAWS there. The next best option is a home license, which I would find as an individual too expensive as a private individual. Are there any other payment options available that would be more reasonable? Sorry, Charles' question he said.
Yeah, so I think, you said his name was John. I mean, I'd have him reach out to Sight and Sound, they're our distributor. We do that within the different countries because of the way our businesses run. So I'd recommend that and then if he needs to reach out to me via email and we can provide my email in the chat as well. Great. Chris says, thank you.
Thank you, Chris. And John just adds that he says I'm having conversations with my employer, reason purchasing but they are taking time. And that is, John says many thanks. That's all the questions that I have right now so if anybody else has a question, feel free to pop it in the Q and A, or if you would like to do it live, I believe we can support that as well. I think the idea came from this is that there's, right now we're talking about user feedback, David, and I have talked about also that there's opportunities for us to be doing user studies with folks. Let's say a company is designing some new widgets and they'd like to have JAWS users participate in some testing of those widgets on the pages or whatever, I use widgets in generic terms.
And they wanna have some people test it and try it out and provide them feedback. Well, we can implement something like this with a more custom form for feedback. And I think this is the next evolution of it, which is usability studies and things of that nature. Yeah, there's a rich roadmap behind this capability, simply because there's a lot of value that comes from listening to the user and incorporating the user into the product life cycle. We have a team of people dedicated to use a research usability studies.
And we typically call them, the expression we would use is that there are moderated studies and then there are unmoderated studies and both are valuable. So, JAWS Connect natively supports a kind of an unmoderated feedback loop, but our teams are able to configure a more structured moderated session with the user community. So I encourage people to inquire about that and we'll connect you with the right people at TPGi. Great. And we have a question from a anonymous user person attending here. What are the government use limitations on this they're using Telerik and would like to expand T-E-L-E-R-I-K and would like to expand.
I don't know what Telerik is. Can a government agency use this feature 100%? So I'm not sure how to answer the question regarding Telerik though. Maybe another, something to reach out and chat with us about if there's something. Yeah, and they can reach us to info@tpgi.com
would be a good spot for that. I did wanna if I could, we talked earlier about JAWS Inspect is one of the platforms that we collaborate and the other one that's that's been going really well lately is JAWS Kiosk. And one of the places you'll see that, especially in the United States in the beginning, but the rest of the world at some other point is McDonald's. And so if you haven't tried one out or found it at a McDonald's local to you, make sure you bring a set of headphones, just like you would with an ATM and plug them in.
And in a way you go now, not all of them are done, but they're continuing to roll out across the United States to start with. Great. Thanks, Matt. Another great collaboration with TPGi. And David, Alyssa asks, what is the cost to be an ARC subscriber? Yeah, so everybody can begin using ARC for free, and there's a free tier, which will provide a preliminary technical conformance report. And then the most popular option for most users is our, what we call our essentials tier, which is $29 per month per seat, which is very affordable.
And our usage, we do a usage based model for monitoring. So monitoring is the process of scheduling scans of your website so that we can plot a history of your progress relative to conformance. And so for every hundred pages that we analyze, I believe it's $5. So it's a very affordable service. And then there at enterprise there's an enterprise tier, which is really intended for organizations that have maturing accessibility programs and team requirements, where they might have multiple teams that have, and they wanna separate workspaces based on the teams and therefore the products that those teams manage.
And I believe that is a $59 per month per seat subscription. And again, with similar same usage fees, which are quite amongst or relative to of the value that's generated, so. Thanks, David. We have quite a few questions that have come up in the Q and A chat, but we also have Tony with his hand raised here. So I'm gonna unmute Tony and Tony go ahead and ask your question.
I think you have to unmute. How are you guys doing? All right, Tony. Doing great. Good, good, fantastic. I've been enjoying the conference Had a question about using this platform, the JAWS Connect with Outlook or Google Docs or Google Sheets, or any of those programs out there, because I teach as well as do IT. So if I had a student, for example, who ran across an error in something, or in a Microsoft app, could they use this JAWS Connect feature to report that problem to Microsoft or you guys or whoever it needs to be reported to? I hope (indistinct) If Microsoft or Google is here, we would love to chat with them about it.
These are good examples of cases where they have feedback in all of those applications, but users don't always know where to go. And then, you know, does the problem that they reported get mixed in with everybody else's stuff. Yeah, that's what I'm speaking about.
So I think I would love for you to reach out to both Microsoft and Google and encourage the use of something like this. Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks Tony, anybody else has a, wants to jump in live with us, please just raise your hand and I'll find you. Appreciate that Tony.
So moving on to the questions that are in the chat, Todd asks, where can I review the transcript recording to go over this with my work, other interested groups. So I think that is a administrative question for the conference where this recording will be available afterwards. All these sessions are being recorded and will be made available post event. You will get an email, all registered people will get an email announcing where it is and when it is, it should be quite soon probably by this weekend.
So that's what you can expect. Thank you, Andy appreciate that. And Todd also, I'd encourage you to contact us. We can help you. We can discuss this further with you.
We can Demo ARC fully. We can help you have those conversations internally. So any way that we can be helpful for you to get the ball rolling on your end, please let us know what I'll make sure along with Matt's email that you have my email as well.
So anonymous asks, is the URL required to be unique to capture a page or is there support for URLs that don't change. Example, simple page, single page applications where something else is grabbed as the unique identifier for a page. And David just went into his thinking mode.
Yeah, so single-page applications, obviously, (indistinct) depending on how they treat their URL. Sometimes they do pass parameterization to the URL. Sometimes they don't, most times they don't. So the URL that's captured with that would be, would just be the URL of the SPA. And I don't wanna talk any further right now, other than to say that ARC (indistinct), we support something, we call them components.
And we have a variety of capabilities that are designed to work with single page applications. We do that through something called a user flow. So there's some contextual kind of recording of actions that take place that bring you through a use case.
And along the way, you're able to target specific elements on a page. So we can get, we already have the technology to be super granular about how we attach insights in ARC. And from our perspective, a user's feedback is simply an insight. It's a type of insights, the important one. So, but where we balance between being useful and sensitive to our JAWS users and other level of kind of data we're pulling out of JAWS to attach the user feedback form.
Thanks, David. So I've got another question here. I just wanna remind people to pop your questions into Q and A, we still have a little bit more time, I think for a couple more questions, and you can always raise your hand and talk to us live if you'd like as well.
Bruce Howell is back with another question. I hope you're doing well, Bruce. It's been a while. Just went on TPG and did not find the JAWS Connect link when I brought it up, when I brought up the links list using F7.
We took it down for Bruce. Bruce, the quick question is to make sure you're running JAWS 2022. I will, while we're talking go there. It was working this morning so I'd be surprised it went away, but I'm on the page and I'll press the insert of seven.
And it is definitely well, oh, I didn't restart JAWS since I went into no internet. So just one second. You can't share your audio while you do that, can you Matt? I could. Just got to get the, make sure I can. Thought I could share my audio.
Okay. All right. I probably need.
That's all right, that wouldn't take too much time. In the meantime I'm paying our (indistinct) fast to make sure that we haven't disabled it for any bizarre reason. And Bruce that kind of feedback would have been perfect to submit through JAWS Connect.
I guess there's a logical, a logic issue with that. Yeah, I'm not seeing it on the page. So I don't know if something changed on that and they may have just done an update. So we'll check on that.
Good catch. Thanks, Bruce. Bruce.
All right, anonymous says, we'll do thank you. John, very interesting to hear about the connection with JAWS Connect and our committee. Thanks for this.
Patrick sort of unrelated question, but would it be possible to get that list of links with a web request? Someone could, for example, make an NVDA add-on that would inform you, you could provide feedback. It is implemented as a secured web request. So that's, so every assistive tech, we have ways of validating different assistive technology so that's exactly what we would like to see.
So something we're working, set up to do working towards. Set up to do and this is our global launch, and we're excited about it. And we'll take it one step at a time, but yes, it's in our vision to support multiple assistant technologies. Perfect. All right.
A different Patrick says we are a custom e-learning provider. We then are far from a webpage because we're either developing custom or using storyline 360 Captive, et cetera. Does JAWS Inspect, could JAWS Inspect help us fast track our accessibility QA. I would like to meet a super user on your side to do a, conclude on the right software to use, JAWS or JAWS Inspect.
Yeah, I think, the answer there would be for you to reach out, to Mark, to set up a demo and talk through that. And I did just verify that JAWS Connect is working on tpgi.com at this point. So I don't know what changed. They disabled it.
So it's being, I think it's enabled now. Sorry, guys. We'd always wanna do that during a demo. Yeah, I wanted to make sure something went wrong. Yeah.
So it was a planned error. So the real errors didn't show up. So Patrick, I just popped my email into the everyone chat. You're welcome to reach out to me and we can talk about JAWS Inspect and I can show it to you and we can discuss how it might fit into your overall strategy there. So thanks for the question, appreciate it.
Oh, and he says, so I hope I did okay reading it. He apologized for the roughness. He's a native French speaker.
So Todd says, if I am working at a university developing classes with faculty, would my using the monitoring service conflict with student privacy, et cetera? My using of the monitoring service. So we have relationships with other, with non-for-profits and other educational groups that want to use ARC as a way to help educate their students on accessibility testing, et cetera. I would recommend you contact Mark and let's talk about that because again, one of our goals is to promote education in this space and make sure that people are able to help make products accessible and if ARC can be a part of that, I'd be very interested in that. And in fact, we have feeder programs we'd love to do where if you have good candidates that are learning and want to enter this field, that's a great opportunity for us as well.
So, Mark let's maybe take a follow-up with this individual. Okay, great. Yeah, and Todd too, just ARC is looking at what's public facing to begin with in a typical scenario. So it's unlikely you would have privacy conflicts, but that's something we could explore with your team.
I'm sure your tech team has some specific questions and things you'd like to look at. So I'm happy to dive deep with you on all that. We definitely do not store any personal confidential information in our work so.
Yep, and we're used to working around those privacy questions so we can help you out. We can help you navigate that internally. All right, anonymous again, similar to the VoiceOver platform another popular screen reading program is NVDA, which is open source HAS'ARC considered working has or has, sorry. HAS'ARC considered working with that screen reader.
So I think we kind of answered that, but I don't know if you wanna clarify around that David or Matt. David, probably. Yeah so priority will be obviously the products that we have the most. Our responsibilities lie with our user base so naturally we'll be working through our Vispero product line, but architectually technically we want to make this available to all assistive technologies.
And so our implementations internally are designed like that. So, and again, it's early, it's our launch, it's exciting launch. And, we're just happy that we're able to take care of our community with this capability today. So Bob says, this may seem silly, but how would I know the feedback link is there if I don't go into links lists since it's not in the DOM. Yeah, so in the beginning, that's where we put it for the first round come the next release of JAWS.
It will actually give it in the page summary report. So when it notifies you of how many links, regions, and headings, when the page loads, it would do it at that point. It's like a balance, you want the user experience not to be painful, right? You want, but you want it to be clear that the site has its capability, but you don't want it to be pounded in all the time. So (indistinct) announcement was subject of our discussion. Yeah, and we're willing to, based on customer feedback, we'll make adjustments. So, as you get using it and find that it's hard to find, and we just need to hear from folks.
I would hope that the organizations that choose to turn this on, will also take the time to publicize that and inform the user in their own way, in a way that's consistent with their user flows. So we're rounding the corner here. We only have a few minutes left in the session, although we've been given permission to continue if questions keep coming in. So let's tackle at least one more question here before we part ways. And that is from Alyssa.
She asks is Freedom Scientific going to ensure that JAWS users know about this new feature, that they can possibly submit accessibility issues on sites that have subscribed. So we're gonna announce the feature, obviously as a press release. So we'll do it that way. We will also do demonstrations of it. We're gonna leave it to the website owner to determine whether or not they want to publicize the feature outside of JAWS, meaning, if some website out there added this feature, it's not my responsibility to tell everybody all the list of sites that have enabled it, because there may be customers who just go there to (indistinct) they don't use that company.
So we wanna be sensitive and then others may say, hey, I want you to publicize it and if we get those companies, we're gonna definitely do a press releases just for those. Thanks, Matt. Victoria and George both say, thank you, David was reporting that link not being found issue again. So hopefully you see it now, David.
Todd says, cool, thanks. And then one last question here from anonymous. So is this only available for websites that have opted in, or is it on every website in JAWS? How does a website opt-in? Contact, any of our subscriber can contact customer success.
There's a standard email for that and just ask us to turn it on for them. The reason why we do that at this point in time is we'll be implementing a mechanism to validate that the user owns their domain via DNS entry. And it's not a complicated process, but it is a process.
So in the world launch we're asking folks who wants to be turned on to notify us and then we'll turn it on for them Yeah, I think the challenge is what partially the technical that David just mentioned, which is the easy part, the other is that it doesn't gain us any, it doesn't do any benefit to get feedback on sites that aren't being supported or that the customer's willing to do something about it. And so one of the benefits of collaboration with TPGi is that we have customers who are interested in solving these accessibility problems. So if I turn it on for a site that, all sites and you start filling out feedback, all we're doing is gathering feedback and hoping those people are paying attention to if we send it to them.
So I think it's probably best that we stick with the sites that are being monitored, cause we know these people actually care about their accessibility issues. Great. And that brings us to the end of the list of questions, and also the end of our time, very perfectly timed. You guys did a good job asking questions and somehow paying attention to the clock too. So David and Matt I first wanna thank both of you for being here and helping announce this and answering all the questions. Obviously it's a really, it's very new and innovative and really addresses an important aspect of accessibility.
And that is as I think one of you put in the beginning really soliciting that real-world user feedback and incorporating that into your efforts to make your website accessible. So thank you both for being here. And of course, thank everyone, thanks to everyone who joined us today.
We really appreciate the great questions. We really appreciate you listening, and you are welcome. I have put all the different emails you can get ahold of us via in the group chat. So you guys are always welcome to reach out to us we can explain things further, look into anything that you're interested in from an accessibility standpoint. So thanks everyone.
Thank you, Mark. Thank you, David. Happy holidays everyone. Okay, thank you very much. This is the end of our breakout session.
Thanks Mark, Matt and David for the great content. So this sessions recording will be made available to everyone, you'll see email on this, and this is our last breakout session for the day. And also I believe the main stage is just wrapped up. So thanks everyone for attending this conference.
See you next year. Andy, thank you and thanks to Sci-Tech Global. We appreciate the opportunity. You're welcome.
2021-12-14 22:22
