For a while now, the Seattle Fire Department has been hosting a service that shows you real-time calls that are coming in. Well, recently they switched their "latest calls" view to be an image. John Eberly writes up the before and after and talks about the consequences.
"What's the big deal?" you may be wondering. Well, for starters, images are harder to process than text. You can use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to convert the textual information in the image to actual text, but that's a bother and not guaranteed to be 100% accurate.
But there's a worse consequence: images with information, without text alternatives, aren't accessible. In other words, blind or low-vision people can't read this information anymore.
Yes, we have laws and regulations to prevent this. I'm surprised that the SFD decided to ignore these precedents when changing to an image. It's a change that is very easy for someone to workaround who really wants the information in a computer-processable way, but penalizes those that browse with screen readers who are simply after the information.
On John's advice, I've sent mail to the Seattle City Council and the SFD chief. We'll see what their response is.
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