Skew-T diagrams removed because blind people can’t see them

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PaulS

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PaulS
I opened my favorite weather app, EZWxbrief yesterday to look at skew t diagrams in my area because local forecasts have not been doing that good on ceiling predictions, and lo and behold I got a message saying noaa had removed them from public view because blind people can’t see them. Today the option for skew ts is completely removed as this apparently isn’t a short term issue.

Now I am all in favor for setting up skew ts so that blind pilots can see them, but it seems to me that this work could be done while allowing sighted pilots to see them until that great day arrives. But no, the NOAA management has decided that no pilot should be able to see skew ts while they figure out how to address this issue that they probably should have dealt with years ago.

While I am certainly in favor of disabled people having accommodations for things like this, shutting down access for all while the work is being done is the ultimate act of stupidity IMO.

This is part of the announcement lifted from @scottd ’s blog post on this matter:

Reaching out to the team that administers this site, they responded that...



"NOAA management has decreed that all of our web pages must be section 508 compliant (https://www.section508.gov) or they would have to be shut down to the public. We're currently working on reaching compliance. We hope we can have the page available again soon, but we don't have an ETA right now."

Edit:

The site deleted:

As mentioned in the October EZNews, the NOAA site https://rucsoundings.noaa.gov was removed from public access earlier this week. This is the site that the EZWxBrief progressive web app uses to render the Skew-T diagrams found in the Airport Wx view.
 
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Here is a site I would also use. Notice the notice they have now versus RAOB Skew Ts.

NOAA - Global Systems Laboratory

gsl.noaa.gov gsl.noaa.gov

Only with the US government would they do stupid things like this! Unbelievable! Nothing like punishing the many for the benefit of the few.
 
Huh. Another thread complaining about the government. Imagine that…

There’s getting to be an awful lot of political cropdusting going on here these days: obviously political posts done in passing with the hope nobody notices the smell till it’s too late.
 
Llewtrah381 said:
Huh. Another thread complaining about the government. Imagine that…

There’s getting to be an awful lot of political cropdusting going on here these days: obviously political posts done in passing with the hope nobody notices the smell till it’s too late.
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Political? Complaining about government without naming/bashing a particular party or administration is political??? Grow a thicker skin for Christ's sake.
 
Llewtrah381 said:
Huh. Another thread complaining about the government. Imagine that…

There’s getting to be an awful lot of political cropdusting going on here these days: obviously political posts done in passing with the hope nobody notices the smell till it’s too late.
Click to expand...
You're the one bringing up politics.
 
hey, you have the right to speak highly of the government. just like people have the right to claim wagner is a good pilot or gryder is a decent human being.
 
Llewtrah381 said:
Huh. Another thread complaining about the government. Imagine that…

There’s getting to be an awful lot of political cropdusting going on here these days: obviously political posts done in passing with the hope nobody notices the smell till it’s too late.
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I'm sure you see no irony in complaining about other people complaining.
 
Llewtrah381 said:
Yeahright. And this thread - with its title - was posted solely as a public service announcement
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How Is the title incorrect?

I hope they quickly make it compliant by having scottd or similar person explain the current situation for every town every day : )

Yes, I’m old and keep forgetting how to read them. Use or lose it memory is all I have left
 
I highly suggest flooding the webmaster’s inbox with something like the following:

The removal of the skew-t/RAOB soundings page for section 508 non-compliance will have deadly consequences for people, pilots in particular, who use that for critical and timely flight information. Please address the timeline in which these pages will be made section 508 compliant and restored to public access.

And my senator will be getting a call.
 
Flying Keys said:
This is a dangerous decision. How hard would it be to make it compliant?
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Depends. The image and the website both need to meet WCAG2.2, now I think it is. Generally with images that means adding a text description to the image that a screen reader would be able to access and use to accurately describe the image presented on the site.
 
Flying Keys said:
This is a dangerous decision. How hard would it be to make it compliant?
Click to expand...

If you click on the link supplied above it’ll explain what alt text is, if you’re not already familiar. Basically if you hover over an image in a browser a little blurb of text will pop up so blind people can read that. Uh, I mean so they will have a textual description of the page they cannot see. But to answer your question, I don’t ‘think’ very difficult. I just don’t know the extent of what the alt text needs to contain. If saying something like “skew-t weather chart” is sufficient, they should just bang it out. If it needs to actually explain what the chart says, yeah, goodbye skew-t’s.

6ec96e3a98f40ed346963656a9a9c889.jpg
 
So, to redirect the anger to the right place, having been involved in many software audits myself, I'd wager *someone* has been told repeatedly about this problem for an extended period of time and nothing was done about it. This is probably a big stick to wake someone up. Doesn't make the end result make any more sense though.

I once was made responsible for a legacy application that had many compliance issues. The petty functionary in charge of assuring all compliance issues were resolved refused to allow me to deploy a version that resolved 80% of the issues (and all the high risk issues) because "no deployments with any single issue of any risk level are permitted". But the old application riddled with issues was allowed to remain. So, 100% of the issues were left in place for 3 extra months until I was able to resolve all the issues. He simply could not understand how he was making things worse with his moronic policy.
 
Can anyone tell me why they also disabled the non-graphical presentation of the forecast soundings?
 
Flying Keys said:
I highly suggest flooding the webmaster’s inbox with something like the following:

The removal of the skew-t/RAOB soundings page for section 508 non-compliance will have deadly consequences for people, pilots in particular, who use that for critical and timely flight information. Please address the timeline in which these pages will be made section 508 compliant and restored to public access.

And my senator will be getting a call.
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As noted, the information is available elsewhere.
 
eman1200 said:
If you click on the link supplied above it’ll explain what alt text is, if you’re not already familiar. Basically if you hover over an image in a browser a little blurb of text will pop up so blind people can read that. Uh, I mean so they will have a textual description of the page they cannot see. But to answer your question, I don’t ‘think’ very difficult. I just don’t know the extent of what the alt text needs to contain. If saying something like “skew-t weather chart” is sufficient, they should just bang it out. If it needs to actually explain what the chart says, yeah, goodbye skew-t’s.

6ec96e3a98f40ed346963656a9a9c889.jpg
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Maybe my question should have been: “how hard would it be to impress upon the government entity responsible for page maintenance to employ the necessary resources to restore the page in a timely manner?”
 
Flying Keys said:
Sorry, not good enough. I want the modeled information on the grid, displayed interactively and available in time slices as it was before.
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And you'll literally die without it? Histrionics in letters to your congress people are counterproductive.
 
Lindberg said:
And you'll literally die without it? Histrionics in letters to your congress people are counterproductive.
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Me? Probably not. But how many other people/entities *do* use it to make informed decisions? Icing levels, inversions, convection are all revealed by that, much more granularly than other tools provide. We could go down the slippery slope of removing more information from other tools - at what point is it enough?
 
StraightnLevel said:
They're going to be sued by a blind pilot?
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To be fair, this information is used by more than pilots and is not a strictly-aviation portal. However, pilots are one of several narrow use-cases that stand to be adversely affected by the reduction in publicly-available data. Unless there’s another compliant, public portal out there with all the granular data that I don’t know about…
 
Lindberg said:
As noted, the information is available elsewhere.
Click to expand...
Where? If you mean the Storm Prediction Center website linked to in post #3 above, it's not the same information. That website provides "current and recent observed radiosonde data." In other words, it reports conditions at the past time and specific location of actual balloons launched into the atmosphere. The rucsoundings website provided forecast soundings for arbitrary locations and future times. If you know of another source of that information, please link to it here as it could save the lives of pilots whose ADM includes consideration of forecast soundings to better avoid icing, severe turbulence, or even just IMC.
 
Llewtrah381 said:
Yeahright. And this thread - with its title - was posted solely as a public service announcement
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I’m feeling a little bad for you right now.
Flying Keys said:
This is a dangerous decision. How hard would it be to make it compliant?
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I’m not sure about dangerous, but it’s a great resource off the table. The forecast charts are great for estimating where icing levels are, potential turbulence and convective activity.
TCABM said:
Depends. The image and the website both need to meet WCAG2.2, now I think it is. Generally with images that means adding a text description to the image that a screen reader would be able to access and use to accurately describe the image presented on the site.
Click to expand...
Yeah, how do you do that with such a complicated graph? Not sure you have the answer, but I would think a pretty important one .
eman1200 said:
If you click on the link supplied above it’ll explain what alt text is, if you’re not already familiar. Basically if you hover over an image in a browser a little blurb of text will pop up so blind people can read that. Uh, I mean so they will have a textual description of the page they cannot see. But to answer your question, I don’t ‘think’ very difficult. I just don’t know the extent of what the alt text needs to contain. If saying something like “skew-t weather chart” is sufficient, they should just bang it out. If it needs to actually explain what the chart says, yeah, goodbye skew-t’s.

6ec96e3a98f40ed346963656a9a9c889.jpg
Click to expand...
I suspect they want a description of the graph. It’s a little ironic that the reason the graph is so complicated is so that the information it contains can be relatively easily discerned by a trained user.
Salty said:
So, to redirect the anger to the right place, having been involved in many software audits myself, I'd wager *someone* has been told repeatedly about this problem for an extended period of time and nothing was done about it. This is probably a big stick to wake someone up. Doesn't make the end result make any more sense though.

I once was made responsible for a legacy application that had many compliance issues. The petty functionary in charge of assuring all compliance issues were resolved refused to allow me to deploy a version that resolved 80% of the issues (and all the high risk issues) because "no deployments with any single issue of any risk level are permitted". But the old application riddled with issues was allowed to remain. So, 100% of the issues were left in place for 3 extra months until I was able to resolve all the issues. He simply could not understand how he was making things worse with his moronic policy.
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We may never know. The cynic in me think that someone’s bonus is dependent on noaa being able to say that all their output is compliant to these rules. Delete the non-compliant stuff, bonus earned.
Lindberg said:
As noted, the information is available elsewhere.
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This is the second time I’ve asked for someone to post a link to the information to which you refer. Keep in mind, the deleted site had actual radiosonde data, along with forecast/interpolated data for areas and times outside of actual readings. The times I’ve used it I found it to be pretty good.
Llewtrah381 said:
Exactly. So the outrage was just for giggles.
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Your outrage? You seem to be the only one trying to devolve this into a political argument. You’ve made your point, please stop.
 
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