kestrell

Properly.

And it's inaccessible.

The story is: I was cruising through the MIT IAP courses, as I do, and I ran across a lunchtime series on communicating better with your audience.

This will add extra irony later.

The registration form involved using Handshake, which requires you to use a university account to create the Handshake account.

Well, I don't have an academic account, so I contacted the office asking for assistance in registering.

The person got back to me asking for my MIT alum account, which I hadn't used in years, so I went to the alum website and requested a password reset, and checked what the email was for my alum account.

Which I sent back to the contact person at MIT.

This morning I got an email that said I should use the MIT alum email to create a Handshake account, and I should also fill out a disability accommodations form for MIT.

Note, still no offer to actually help me register for this course.

So I go back to Handshake, which requires that I fill out a bunch of personal info, including selecting my university and my major. I have to select these from these funky edit combo boxes, which are really finicky with a screen reader. I spent about ten minutes fighting with the first one to get my university entered, but I just can't seem to get the second list of majors to show me any of the items, and attempts to type into the edit field are not accepted.

I am now so annoyed --and I haven't even gotten to filling out the accommodations request form yet-- that any desire to register for this course has now completely evaporated.

I have now spent more time trying to register for this talk than the talk actually takes.

And the whole response of Oh, is something inaccessible? Our response is: fill out more forms!

Note: this talk is sponsored by the Career Advising Professional Development.