The current owner of #VoiceDreamReader is the Applause group, who offer #accessibility auditing and testing services to many high-profile clients. When Applause are paid to evaluate the accessibility of a product, they are expected to point out some of the exact issues that have been raised in relation to their work on #VoiceDream, such as controls that have no labels or accessible role information, images without alt text, etc.
This hints at a wider problem in the industry, where companies are "cashing in" on the market for accessibility-related services without actually being that invested or incentivised to do good work. Do Applause work with #disabled testers? Was anybody there tasked with testing the application with a #screenReader and other #assistiveTechnology? If not, it raises questions about whether their accessibility services are a force for good, or are actually causing harm.
It's been brought to my attention that the current owner of #VoiceDream Reader is the app acquisition company Applause (https://applause.dev), and not Applause App Quality, Inc. (https://applause.com). The latter company offers #accessibility testing services, the former does not, and as far as I know there is no connection of any kind between them other than an unfortunately shared name. This partially or entirely invalidates at least one of my posts on the subject which I'll leave up for posterity, but wanted to set the record straight.
@jscholes I agree with your observations, but yes Applause does hire many disabled contract testers to do testing, so wanted to set that part of your comments straight.
@Jage@jscholes Applause is UTest, right? Aren't they doing a similar thing as Fable accept that Fable is specific to PWD whereas Applause is more generalized?
@jscholes they do work with people with disabilities, just not that many of them to my knowledge. And that is really just the accessibility-related stuff they do. I have no idea who over there actually works on the app though, could easily be some third-party contractor
@jscholes actually ignore this. I was speaking about Applause App Quality Inc., which is not Applause Group. I naively assumed the same name meant some kind of link but there isn't
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