Today I heavily argued with a Hosting and VPS provider called IONOS; there's the domain ionos.com which brings to American site and there's no accessibility statement in that page. On the Italian though, ionos.it, on its footer I found an accessibility statement claiming this company took care of disability needs. It was very affordable. For 10 euro per month or so, I could obtain the Linux VPS L plan, with something like 4 CPU cores, 16GB RAM and 240 GB storage. I don't remember if it's exactly the amount of the offer but now I'm not talking about service's details.
Attracted by the offer I have subscribed to it and the products presentation and e-commerce procedure was actually accessible for screen reader users; but as soon as I has the service in hand, control panel and especially firewall rules, inaccessibility came. As an example, on a single firewall rule, the edit button was labelled with "y", the add with a "@" sign, the delete with a "]" (closed squared bracket) sign.
First thing I did was going to that accessibility page. There was no specialized e-mail for that kind of support but they linked to a contact form.
Clicked on it, it redirected me to a German-speaking page. Last time I spoke German was 1999.
And what did I find there? Phone numbers and a live-chat with German automated answers but nothing on accessibility.
I called them (Italian support) and warned them about the issue, they've been polite with me. I admit I've been quite unkind though, as I was angry. But I managed to obtain contract cancellation and they'll refund me tomorrow. But this issue must not remain under silence. What I'm asking is to all Ionos customers all over the world, to make them aware of this. It hasn't to pass under silence as this habit of placing a declaration without concretely working on accessibility, is becoming more and more normalized.
They find more convenience in violating the laws and losing customers, than create a real remediation.
And there are many faults for this: companies do their own interests, with no doubt. But our fault as people with disability, not to have stood up too much for the cause, or standing up in the wrong way. Not to have pressured governments about investing on LEARNING more than "tou must create accessible sites". You must create, but how many 30-40 years old developers have the culture of accessibility in mind?
How many companies and school have a real decades-long accessibility learning program?
No one wants to mock disability I'm convinced of this. But this practice is due to lack of basic awareness. We can not pretend of nothing.
I'm not inviting anyone to boycott. But to create awareness.
#accessibility #advocacy #awareness #blind #disability #SelfHost #SelfHosting
Discussion
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@elettrona that sounds like an incredibly frustrating experience.
@amberhinds You can say it loud! On the phone I found a very nice lady who listened to me and followed me verifying the contact form issue in real time. It's not the single operator's fault; Ionos has not to become the symbol of all this violated accessibility laws mess. But their inappropriate strategy is becoming almost normality into European websites, I think. If the law asked companies to provide an accessibility statement within a year, let's say, what could happen? Companies took samples from here and there, let alone in the Chat GPS era, they uploaded, and guess then who falls in the trap? Overlays are the less evil among evils, in the end!
@elettrona does the American accessibility statement have contacts?
@menelion You misunderstood me: in the American page there is no accessibility statement.
@elettrona Oh sorry, I misread indeed.