In the person of Steve Ford, WB8IMY, QST’s editor, I have received a response to my email from Thursday evening. You can see that email in the previous post.

I forwarded the email I sent originally to Mr. Ford, along with aRRL’s, president, CEO, and first and second vice presidents, and received the below response about 20 minutes ago. Well, I read it about 20 minutes ago, I received it earlier than that.

Needless to say, I am truly angered by his response. SO accessibility was merely an unfortunate casualty of a cost cutting measure? Maybe it will be accessible in the future, because HTML5 is better than flash. Which it is, but HTML5 is not inherently inaccessible. The fact is that accessibility is not, and has never been on ARRL’s radar, in spite of the fact that the issue was brought to its attention.

I’m a lifetime member, but had I not been, I would definitely have to consider keeping my membership, even at the “blind” membership level. As I said before, if I had access to QST, the full QST, when everyone else gts it, I would definitely join at the full membership level and not the “blind” one. But now that I see exactly what my membership organization feels about me, well…

Here’s Steve Ford’s response:

Buddy: We made the transition to the PageSuite platform as a cost saving measure, and also because it offers us the ability to expand and upgrade our e-newsletter offerings, something we have been very eager to do. After careful research, we determined that PageSuite was the best choice to balance cost and features.

Unfortunately, there must always be compromises in a situation such as this. Compatibility with reading software for the visually impaired is just one of them. PageSuite could no doubt create a customized package to address every shortcoming, but the cost would be such that it would eliminate any savings. Unless ARRL wishes to divert the necessary financial resources to create a customized solution, I’m afraid we must work within the capabilities of the standard PageSuite package.

Since PageSuite is based on HTML5 rather than Flash, it is possible that compatible reading software may exist. If that doesn’t prove to be the case, there is still the possibility that such software may eventually be developed. HTML5 is becoming the standard and Flash is in decline, so I suspect we will see increasing software development in this area.

73…

Steve Ford, WB8IMY
ARRL Publications Manager