The Wall Street Journal
    January 5, 2001


Tech Q & A

Group Pushes for Web Sites
Designed for All Internet Users

   By BECKEY BRIGHT
   WSJ.COM

   Legislation passed by Congress in 1998 requires most federal Web sites
   to be accessible to people with disabilities, but many still fall
   short. New rules passed last month attempt to enforce those guidelines
   by imposing a six-month deadline for design changes. These rules also
   could be the first step toward enforcing a federal mandate that all
   private commercial sites become accessible.

   Judy Brewer, named by Internet World Magazine as one of the "Net's
   Rising Stars" for 2000, has fought for policy changes regarding
   accessible technology, as well as for awareness of accessibility
   issues.

   As director of the Web Accessibility Initiative, a division of the
   World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) based in Cambridge, Mass., she helps
   develop Web-content guidelines, conducts education and outreach on
   Web-accessibility solutions and monitors research and development
   which may impact future Web accessibility.
   Judy Brewer photo

   The WAI works with some 480 mostly industry-based member organizations
   of the W3C world-wide. And while it doesn't focus solely on the
   disabled community, Ms. Brewer says disabled persons are most affected
   by accessibility issues. She points out that poor Web design can also
   hinder accessibility for nondisabled persons, as well.

   Q: What have been the major impacts of the Web for persons with
   disabilities?

   A: I call it a mixed blessing. The positive aspects are along the
   lines of how the Web has benefited nondisabled people, but magnified,
   because traditionally, there have been so many barriers to accessing
   different kinds of information for people with disabilities.

   The great majority of our information up to recent years, up to the
   digital age, has been hard copy, print-based, so for someone with
   visual disabilities, dyslexia for example, there are many kinds of
   barriers.

   When you move to a digital basis of information, what changes is the
   potential for accessibility. The question is whether people will take
   advantage of that potential when they're producing information.

   If someone has a particular disability, they can take care of certain
   accommodations sometimes on their own end. For example someone who's
   blind might need a screen reader, which redirects text on a screen to
   synthesized speech output or refreshable Braille output or to a
   combination of both. But it depends on the author of the information
   having had a little flexibility in thinking initially -- realizing
   that people may be coming at their information with different
   requirements. And it also depends on the browsers or the multimedia
   players that might be used in conjunction with somebody's specialized
   software.

   Q: What type of information is available on the WAI site?

   A: Last February the WAI produced what's actually one of our less-well
   known set of guidelines for Web accessibility. (The one that's most
   well know is the Web content accessibility guidelines, which were
   released in May 1999.)

   The authoring tool accessibility guidelines (ATAG) is one of the
   things that we believe will have the biggest impact on accessibility
   over the Web.

   Our feeling is that if the software developers actually ensure that
   they produce valid html, and if they actually prompt it and provided
   some help with regard to accessibility and provided a way to do some
   accessibility checking, this would facilitate accessible design. If
   you provide an image on a page, why not prompt for the alternative
   text for the image? So many authors just forget to put alternative
   text in, and then somebody who's blind doesn't know what information
   is that the image has. Or if somebody puts an audio file on a page,
   why not prompt for the caption, so that someone who's deaf would have
   that there?

   Those things are not so complicated to do and they would really
   greatly facilitate people designing accessible sites because you
   wouldn't have to be staring at a page of guidelines while you're
   making a site. The software would actually just kind of walk you
   through.

   Q: What are some other examples of new technologies that raise
   accessibility concerns?

   A: Because there's this proliferation of different kinds of devices
   used to access the Web right now, it's really becoming much harder for
   somebody who's designing a Web page to think, 'Anybody coming to my
   site is sitting at a desktop computer with a keyboard and a mouse
   using a graphical-user interface.'

   Accessible design is very interesting to some people in the
   mobile-phone industry, for instance, because they feel that it
   promotes device independence. In other words, that one set of
   information can be prepared so that it's flexible, and it can be
   displayed in different modalities: audio or visual, or tactilely. When
   you're designing for accessibility you're designing with a
   multimodality that enables you to repurpose content, not only for
   people with different kinds of disabilities, but for a whole range of
   different kinds of devices.

   Q: What other recent developments do you find particularly exciting in
   terms of accessibility?

   A: One of the issues with regard to accessibility has always been,
   well if you design your site to be accessible, how do you know if
   you've made it accessible? ... What interests me is the growing
   commercial development of tools. There are a number that are available
   for free over the Web that can semiautomate the process of checking a
   Web site for accessibility. And there are some others done by
   different organizations.

   The fact that there is some commercial development, both in the area
   of software development, but also just businesses starting up that do
   Web-site evaluations as part of their work, I find very exciting. ...
   From the jump we've seen this year, it seems obvious to us, that there
   are more organizations seeing Web-site accessibility as a commercial
   opportunity.

   Q: As organizations become more aware of accessibility issues and
   begin to make changes, do you think these are primarily driven by a
   desire for accessibility or a desire to be on the cutting edge of
   technology, or is it impossible to separate the two?

   A: There are actually four motivators that I would name with regard to
   why people start doing something about accessibility past the initial
   point of awareness.

   The first is marketplace demographics. The Web industry is obviously
   intensely competitive. In most countries between 10% and 20% of the
   population have some kind of disability. In the U.S. it's around 54
   million. And that's a lot of people. Not all of those have a condition
   that directly affects access to the Web, but probably between 8% to
   10% of the population has something that can affect access to the Web.
   Very few companies want to throw away that significant a slice of the
   marketplace.

   The second factor is the carryover benefits of universal design. When
   you design for access, you design Web-based information or
   applications that can work better for many other users. There's a
   magnification of accessibility. You're not just designing something to
   keep that 8% to 10% of the population, you're helping to support other
   people's participation as well.

   The third case, is that in some cases accessibility is required. In
   the U.S., any federal government sites and many state governments
   sites are required to be accessible.

   The fourth thing is visibility and leadership. We've seen a lot of
   companies getting involved in accessibility, not just because of the
   marketplace issue, or the carryover benefits, or the requirements, but
   because they want to make a public statement that they feel is
   important to ensure that people with disabilities are included in the
   work that they're doing. Verizon has repeatedly made that part of
   their public appearance. IBM has been doing this kind of work for
   about 20 years, I think, and Microsoft also has a fairly large
   accessibility presence.

   Q: What was your own motivation for becoming involved in this work?

   A: I've been working a number of years on the intersection of the
   disability community's needs and technology issues. One of the things
   that was constantly coming up, was that with how society is changing
   right now for many people with disabilities the biggest issue isn't
   getting access to some of the specialized technology as to make sure
   some of the more mainstream technologies are accessible.

   The loss resulting from inaccessible mainstream technologies can just
   be overwhelming to many parts of the disability community. If you look
   at the blind community, a number of people who were fully employed and
   very productive in their careers when DOS was being used as the
   primary operating system in industry and in the public sector started
   to loose their jobs when Windows 3.1 started to spread through the
   private and public sectors, because it did not enable screen readers
   to be used with that.

   As someone with a disability I feel very strongly about the benefits
   that technology can bring for people being able to achieve their full
   potential. In so many countries there's really been a lot of
   segregation historically between people with disabilities and people
   without disabilities. ... However, if you look over the course of the
   majority of people's lives there's kind of a continuum of ability and
   disability. People may have an outright fairly stable disability or
   have a variable one or it might be that somebody has a temporary
   injury.

   There's also situational disabilities. Like if you're trying to use an
   information kiosk in a noisy mall. A lot of these have wonderful
   multimedia intros. If it's a really noisy area, then you can't hear
   the audio. But if it were captioned, you could still know what's
   there.

   From my perspective when you design for accessibility you're really
   using one of the best litmus tests for good design, period. And it
   certainly helps those of us with disabilities.

   Write to Beckey Bright at [log in to unmask]


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