Inclusive Design over Incidental Accessibility: Why Your Existing Remote Desktop Solution May Not Be Serving You as Well as You Think

Introduction

It is easy for a visually impaired support technician or recipient to determine that Remote Incident Manager clearly surpasses any industry-standard offering. We even have a Self Advocacy Kit written from the point of view of a visually impaired support person. But we’ve all done comparison shopping at one time or another for anything from home/office renovation to a new phone upgrade, and that involves none other than making your own point-by-point comparison of each item derived from various spec sheets, online reviews, etc. This can be quite difficult for anyone who has not had direct experience with the product being looked into.

Fortunately, we’ve done the work for you in the form of a Feature-by-feature comparison chart of RIM vs. various industry mainstays, using none other than hard data and lived experience. Let’s take a deeper dive into this comparison chart and discuss why each criteria is important and why we chose to highlight it. We relate the experience from a visually impaired person’s perspective to give you – the reader seeking an inclusive solution – an idea of how inclusive RIM really is designed to be.

Remote Accessibility

This is, without question, the most important point of comparison from an accessibility standpoint. Regardless of how good the accessibility of TeamViewer, QuickAssist, etc. may be, none of those solutions allow a visually impaired technician the opportunity to provide support for a computer that lacks a screen reader. Installing a screen reader on the remote computer:

• Needlessly adds time to a support session, and/or takes time away from a support technician’s task of actually solving their problem
• Makes it obvious to the person on the other end that the support technician has a visual impairment

With Remote Incident Manager, these concerns are fully addressed. As long as the support technician is running the NVDA screen reader on Windows or using VoiceOver on Mac OS, they are automatically given speech-enabled access to a remote computer lacking a screen reader, irrespective of platform! None of the industry standards have even come close to matching this level of access. This will allow your visually impaired employees to complete support sessions with times comparable to their colleagues.

Installation

Why should a person in need of tech support need to go through a needlessly complicated installation? The answer is simple: They shouldn’t. Our team knows this, thus RIM’s installation is fully automatic and seamless on Windows.

Note that while we would love to say the same for macOS, macOS’s own restrictions unfortunately prevent us from fully automating the installation and setup procedure. However, we do our best to provide as much comprehensive instruction as we can, both for the VoiceOver users and for the non-VoiceOver users. As such, while RIM is required to display permission dialogues similar to other offerings, the other offerings do not provide nearly as much assistance. Better still, if your business provides technical support to Mac customers on a regular basis, we highly recommend adding in a complimentary support session to your after-sales routine in order to assist the customer in installing RIM so that the customer can have an optimal tech support experience at the ready when they need it.

Updates

We dislike update dialogues as much as you do, perhaps even more so. They get in the way, they reappear when we reject them for fear of losing accessibility, and eventually we lose patience and carry out the update anyway. Many remote desktop packages will refuse to establish a connection if one of the connecting parties is out of date, and there is good reason for that; security is (or should be) of paramount importance to any remote desktop package’s success, and many updates fix crucial security flaws.

However, the two key issues include putting what little existing accessibility you have to chance, as well as unnecessary need for user interaction. The former can leave any of your disabled employees without a job through no fault of their own, and the ladder can irritate customers and employees alike.

RIM addresses both of these concerns. Being designed with accessibility in mind, we will never throw the dreaded “visual refresh” into an update. We have a fully transparent and detailed change log available within the program’s documentation. Most importantly, updates happen seamlessly, without you having to do a thing. But just in case, we have the ability to push an update to the remote computer during a support session.

UI Accessibility

As mentioned in the previous section, our user interface is fully usable and accessible. Remote Incident Manager was created to address a need all of us at Pneuma Solutions knew needed addressing: the need for an honest accessibility effort. While accessibility and usability are separate criteria in nature, they go hand in hand within a well thought out accessibility effort. Consequently, everyone benefits from solid accessibility and usability.

While our competitors are either stagnating or regressing, RIM has continually excelled in this department. Regardless of which side of the connection you’re on, RIM’s accessibility and usability is consistently solid. As such, your customers will appreciate the simple and consistent user experience, and your employees can spend more time working productively now that spending unnecessarily large amounts of time figuring out how to work the software is a thing of the past.

Audio

While Remote Incident Manager displays the visual output of the computer as well as any industry mainstay, RIM’s audio is in a league of its own. By utilizing the latest advancements in real-time audio encoding technology, we are able to deliver low-latency, high-quality stereo audio. Our competitors often assume the support technician does not care for the audio, so they turn it off by default and/or don’t give it much thought. By contrast, RIM’s audio delivery not only addresses the needs of the visually impaired, it may potentialy be the best tool for diagnosing problems with an audio production rig.

Voice Communication

The existence of Teams or Zoom within a support workflow is yet another reason other programs insist on disabling audio across the remote connection. Rather than run away from the problem, RIM addresses it head on by building low-latency, high-fidelity, easy to access voice communication right into the session.

File Transfers

For a visually impaired technician, nothing is worse than drag-and-drop, particularly on a remote connection. For the masses, having a separate session type for file transfers, such is what some of our competitors do, is inefficient. Once again, RIM to the rescue! Easy file transfer ability exists across all support sessions, irrespective of platform. Either the clipboard or our easy-to-use in-session file transfer mechanism can be used.

Input

With RIM directly addressing the needs of screen reader users, having full, unobstructed keyboard support was crucial to its success. While our competitors either interrupt some keyboard input on the regular, or simply don’t support keyboard input as well as they should, we took a keyboard-first approach when designing RIM. Thus, RIM can utilize the keyboard as effectively as our competitors utilize the mouse.

Unattended Access

It is critical that the configuration of unattended or prompted access to a remote machine be easy and accessible for both the technician and the customer. It is of further importance that this configuration be secure, with the target end user in complete control of the approval process. Less accessible industry mainstays forego the accessibility and simplicity of the process, the security surrounding it, or both.

By contrast, RIM has an extremely simple user experience for configuring and connecting to unattended or prompted targets. And for mass deployment to Windows machines in your workplace, our custom installers are secure as well with expiration dates to ensure they cannot be reused by potential bad actors years down the line.

Session Flip

Competing solutions will let you flip the screen-share, sure. They may even let you flip the session completely, but good luck finding the option to do so. With all of RIM’s session controls in one easy-to-access menu, accessing the session flip feature could not be easier. Once activated, the end user will instantly be placed inside the technician’s computer, with full remote control support. You’ll wonder how you completed a single sales demo without this!

System Information

A support technician needs easy access to the essential information about a target machine they are attempting to diagnose. RIM displays this information in an extremely accessible view, allowing the technician to locate that problematic process, unusually out of date Windows version, etc. in no time.

Overall Accessibility

By now it is clear to you as to what goes into making Remote Incident Manager the most accessible support package around. As if the above isn’t enough, we have the documentation to back it up in the form of a VPAT® report that certifies RIM’s accessibility compliance. You’ll have the compliance department in and out in no time, and you’ll have the undying gratitude of your employees and your customers for putting their accessibility needs first and/or simply making the support experience orders of magnitude more simple and efficient! What are you waiting for? Invest in Remote Incident Manager today!