Siri visited family therapy star Dr. Orna Guralnik in a sketch

A two-minute video clip (below) of Siri visiting family therapy star Dr. Orna Guralnik was the basis of an ad for web accessibility company Userway. This marks the second time that Siri voice actress Susan Bennet has appeared in a commercial for the company…

Userway says that while the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires websites to be accessible to everyone, only 2% of a million websites meet the requirements.

The campaign aims to spread awareness about global web accessibility and highlight the importance of digital inclusion. With more than one billion people with disabilities and disabilities around the world, and an increasingly digital world, the need for internet accessibility and inclusion is more urgent than ever.

“Digital accessibility is an integral part of our daily lives, even if we don’t realize it,” said Allon Mason, CEO of UserWay. “It’s great to see accessibility awareness expanding and we felt that covering the issue with both Susan and Orna creates a kind of familiarity and connection that everyone can appreciate. We hope this will inspire all companies to take action to ensure that their websites are inclusive and accessible to people of all abilities or disabilities.” BUT

The UserWay campaign includes therapy sessions between Dr. Orna Guralnik and Susan Bennett as Siri herself, as Siri explores what worries her the most – she loves helping people, but she can’t make all the websites around the world accessible by herself. If everyone knew how easy it is to solve this problem with the UserWay widget, the Internet would be barrier-free for everyone.

“I am honored to be part of such an important project,” said Dr. Orna Guralnik. “As a therapist, I have dedicated my life to helping people and as such, I am intimately involved with UserWay’s mission of empowering people with disabilities.”

Userway aims to automate the process of making an existing website available by detecting problems and automatically fixing them.

However, while both the Couples Therapy star and the voice of Siri say they’re proud to bring attention to the issue, it’s worth noting that many people with disabilities are critical of solutions that rely on creating a partial overlay for visitors with disabilities, and not on the actual correction. main questions. This leads to many problems for website visitors with disabilities.

While it is true that a non-trivial set of accessibility problems can be fixed in this way, the nature, extent, and accuracy of such a fix is ​​limited by a number of important factors:

Automatic application of text alternatives for images is unreliable. Autocorrect field labels, error handling, error handling, and focus management in forms are unreliable. Keyboard access auto-correction is unreliable. ReactJS, Angular, or Vue can change the state of all or part of the underlying page regardless of the overlay, making it impossible to fix these JavaScript-induced content changes. Restoring a page can either slow down page load times or result in unexpected page changes for assistive technology users.

In addition to the above, overlays do not restore content in Flash, Java, Silverlight, PDF, HTML5 Canvas, SVG, or media files.

Others argue that claims by Userway and other overlay companies that they make websites ADA and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliant are untrue.

UserWay is taking advantage of an ongoing misunderstanding of what the ADA covers, what the case law says it covers, and what people who buy these products think it covers.

If we take ADA at face value, it’s like saying that UserWay makes your site FDA compliant. If ADA is considered interchangeable with WCAG, then a quick automatic check will show the opposite.

Bennett said back in 2013 that she had no idea what voice work was for, and she first knew she was the voice of Siri when a friend emailed her to ask. She later revealed more about how the process worked and how she got the gig by accident.

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