I’m in the process of evaluating a couple different financial packages for accessibility, and hope to have my reviews up soon. In the meantime, I stumbled across an interesting article this morning that might interest many of you.

Intuit building Quicken Online

"Intuit is planning to release a Web-based edition of its leading personal finance application this winter, possibly early in 2008. Quicken Online marks a key transition for a company that has made its bones selling new versions of its boxed software each year." Read more...

A web based version of Quicken could provide much needed access to a financial application solution for screen reader users, assuming Intuit does it right.

One way to make sure would be to sign up as an Intuit beta tester. Their current beta programs consist of:

• QuickBooks Point of Sale v7 (POSv7)
• Quicken 2008 for Windows (Taurus)
• QuickBooks 2008 for Windows (KonaBeta)

Sign up for Taurus, then when you’re done, send an email to beta@intuit.com, indicating your interest in testing the accessibility of the upcoming web release of Quicken 2008 with screen reading software like Window-Eyes.

I can’t guarantee this process will work. In the past, efforts to beta test Intuit software for accessibility issues have been less than productive. But if we don’t try, we only have ourselves to blame.