Chronicle of Higher Education Volume 50, Issue 40, Page A23

    Left Out Online

Electronic media should be a boon for people with disabilities, but few
colleges embrace the many new technologies that
could help

By SCOTT CARLSON

    Herndon, Va. So far, Berry Cuffee has performed as well as anyone in
his first distance-education course at George Mason University. He is a
graduate student in education, planning to concentrate on a study of
"assistive technology," the software and hardware designed to help people
with disabilities use computers. For him, however, accessing online course
materials and keeping up with virtual class discussions are no small
feats.

    Mr. Cuffee, 42, was once an actor in Hollywood, and had even been a
double for Wesley Snipes. He was paralyzed in a car accident 10 years ago,
right after he landed his first big role.

    Now, he cannot turn the pages of a book, type on a keyboard, or insert
a disk into a computer. Instead, his computer interprets his voice
commands to browse the Web, open e-mail, scroll through electronic books,
and write papers. The system generally works well, but it sometimes needs
repeated commands, and it remains to be seen how well it will work with,
say, a live chat for a class discussion.

    Online media should be a boon for people with disabilities, but Mr.
Cuffee and other advocates for disabled students say that as colleges push
more of their business online, too few institutions are sufficiently
prepared to accommodate those who are blind, deaf, or motor impaired. In
fact, advocates for disabled students who have studied college Web sites
say the accessibility of colleges' online resources is decreasing as
college and course sites feature more video clips, animated menus, and
pages that are most easily reached with a mouse.

    A group of such advocates, computer-industry representatives, and
college administrators met last month in Washington to discuss raising
awareness of technology that helps disabled students. Among their goals
was drafting a policy to encourage colleges to make computers more
accessible.

    Some colleges already have accessibility policies. But at others, such
policies are only now being formed, have stalled, or are nonexistent.

    "It's ironic that we're talking 50 years after Brown vs. Board of
Education," says Mr. Cuffee, who navigates the George Mason campus with a
motorized wheelchair. At his parents' house here, he has a row of
computers that respond to his voice commands. "Here we are in what is
known as the information age, and disabled people are in a world of
information apartheid."

    Slow Progress

    In 2000 officials at 25 top-tier universities wrote a letter to
President Clinton expressing their support for the development of better
assistive technologies and promising to do more on their campuses. But
those colleges have made spotty progress.

    At Tulane University, which signed the letter to Mr. Clinton, David J.
Tylicki, the manager of disability services, says he doesn't know of any
online-accessibility policy in the works at the university. Asked how he
might accommodate a blind student in a class with a required online
discussion, he is stumped. "That I'd probably have to give some thought
to," he says.

    Many institutions are only now giving thought to providing accessible
technology for the disabled and are "scrambling around for solutions and
ways to deal with it," says Jeff Finlay, a technology project manager at
the University of Maryland's University College who wants to improve
computer access for disabled students. "The whole issue of providing
accessible courses out of the box is not something universities have
thought about. But they are starting to."

    College officials who attended the Washington meeting were brought
there by a mix of conscience and concern for the law. Some administrators
have long believed that the Americans With Disabilities Act and the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which guarantee equal access to education,
apply to online courses, though others say the law is unclear on that
point.

    In the past few years, however, stricter and more-specific measures
have been enacted to improve online communications for those with
disabilities. In 1998 Congress beefed up a portion of the Rehabilitation
Act known as Section 508. The new provision requires federal agencies to
buy and use accessibility technology for disabled people, and it provides
guidelines for accessibility. Many states have started adopting their own
versions of the law.

    Tracy B. Mitrano, director of Cornell University's
computer-policy-and-law program, foresees a day when the standard applies
not only to federal agencies, but to any institution that takes federal
money. She says she attended the meeting in Washington because she wants
Cornell to be ahead of the law and because "it's the right thing to do."

    More Disabled Students

    The number of people with disabilities in America is steadily
increasing, and more people with disabilities are attending college than
in the past.

    Troy R. Justesen, an acting assistant secretary for special education
and rehabilitation services at the U.S. Education Department, says the
number of students who identify themselves as disabled (which includes
those who are learning disabled) has grown from 3 percent in 1973 to
almost 10 percent in 2000, the latest year for which statistics are
available. He says the Education Department is investing in research on
accessibility technology to serve those students.

    Education Department statistics indicate that disabled people who
enroll in college graduate at lower rates than any other group of people,
Mr. Justesen says. With distance education, online course materials, and
new technologies under development, "they are going to have access to
higher-ed curriculum in ways that they have never had before," he says.
"The challenge has been for the colleges to adopt the standards that they
need to adopt" to make online education more accessible, he adds.

    Mr. Cuffee's college experience is an example both of the benefits of
technology and of the barriers that someone with disabilities can
encounter. George Mason is a leader in disabilities technology, running an
extensive program to make all facets of the university accessible to those
with disabilities. The university's home page is set up for "screen
readers," programs that read Web pages aloud for blind users. A wheelchair
icon on the home page leads to a description of the university's
online-accessibility policies, which can be read by a screen reader.

    When Mr. Cuffee arrived at George Mason in 2000, he enrolled in the
law school, hoping to use his law degree to help fight for the rights of
disabled people. Because he can't turn pages, the staff members of the
disabilities-services office at George Mason digitized his law books for
him. But professors often assigned readings too late to be scanned in time
for class. Mr. Cuffee soon fell behind, and he dropped out after two
courses. He says he will take another shot at the law school in the fall.

    Now that he is taking his course on assistive technology through the
education school, he thinks he'll be able to keep up.

    At home, Mr. Cuffee gives a demonstration of the technology crowding
his room. With simple voice commands, he can move a cursor across the
screen and click on a link, or open a word-processing program. He starts
dictating an example of writing.

    "Today Scott has come over," Mr. Cuffee says, but the computer writes
"Today's cicadas come over." He tells the computer to highlight "cicadas"
and change it to "Scott has." Then he finishes the sentence, error free:
"to interview me about how assistive technology will help me in higher
education." The whole exercise takes only a bit longer than it would for
someone who could type.

    A Lab Full of Gadgets

    The distance-education course Mr. Cuffee will take includes some
online discissions. Kristine S. Neuber, who sets up assistive technology
for the university students, says she is eager to see whether Mr. Cuffee's
voice-activated technology can keep up with those discussions.

    George Mason runs a lab full of technological gadgets and software
that can help people with disabilities get around on the Web and type
papers -- even people who are completely paralyzed and unable to speak.

    In the lab, Ms. Neuber sits down at a computer and demonstrates a
screen reader. For screen readers to work properly, Web developers must
add codes to their Web sites that describe nontext elements, such as
pictures. If a Web page contains a banner graphic announcing what the page
is about, for instance, a blind person won't know it is there unless the
Web page has a code that says something like "graphic: college logo." The
screen reader looks for such codes and deciphers the page for a blind
user.

    Ms. Neuber advises other institutions on setting up
online-accessibility policies. Creating an office to review Web pages
before they go online would be impossible at a large, decentralized
institution, she says. Instead, she tells institutions to first try to
raise awareness and to train faculty and staff members in making Web sites
accessible, then create a policy.

    "If you tell people, 'Here's the policy you need to follow,' you get a
lot of negative feedback," says Ms. Neuber. "It's perceived as just
another problem created by people with disabilities."

    Clear Guidelines

    Online-access policies are important, advocates say, because they
offer faculty and staff members clear procedures for disabled students.
Mr. Finlay, of the University of Maryland's University College, says
professors frequently don't know how to handle queries from students with
disabilities who are having trouble with their online course work.

    "Often what will happen is that the professor will try really hard to
help the student, but the professor might not understand the problem," he
says. "The faculty member might say, 'Why don't you just skip the
assignment?' This is insulting to the student and also illegal."

    Getting a policy in place can be an arduous process, however.

    At Temple University, Amy S. Goldman, associate director of the
Institute on Disabilities, says her staff worked on a policy for two
years, then took it to administrators for approval. The administrators
shot it down, preferring to deal with disabled students' problems case by
case.

    Without a policy, institutions can be inconsistent about whether
online services are accessible, say officials at Web Accessibility in
Mind, a group based at Utah State University. The group has analyzed
hundreds of college Web pages over the past three years. Although the
number of accessible sites is growing, the latest study shows that less
than 30 percent of the home pages surveyed were deemed accessible.
WebAIM's researchers say they generally found that the deeper one goes
into a college Web site, the less accessible the pages get.

    Sachin Pavrithran, a graduate student who is blind and works in
WebAIM's office, recently used his screen reader to go through the Web
pages of universities that had signed the letter to President Clinton. He
found that most had fairly accessible sites.

    But one page on Washington University's site, for example, had 160
links -- a cumbersome number for blind people using screen readers because
the computer has to recite the links one by one. The home page for the law
school at Tulane, meanwhile, was almost completely unreadable.

    Testing Accessibility

    Visiting other institutions online, Mr. Pavrithran finds serious
problems right on their home pages. Pennsylvania State University's Web
site offers a text-only alternative page for users of screen readers. "We
don't recommend this," he says. "In our experience, the text-only page is
not usually kept up to date." (Penn State's Web page, however, appears to
be up to date.)

    Augsburg College, a small liberal-arts institution in Minneapolis, has
a snazzy, animated home page. But none of it is programmed for a screen
reader, which instead "just says 'button, button, button,'" Mr. Pavrithran
says.

    The University of Phoenix's home page opens with three animated links
that lead to different types of courses the university offers. The screen
reader recites technical gibberish when it encounters them. "I pretty much
skipped over those three links because I don't know what they are," Mr.
Pavrithran says.

    Axel Schmetzke, a librarian at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens
Point, used automated software to analyze the Web sites of top library
schools and of his own university system, and found similar problems. In
the past five years, Web pages at various Wisconsin campuses, such as
River Falls, have become significantly less accessible, according to his
report.

    Michael Woolsey, the Webmaster at River Falls, says he tries to make
sure that the university's sites are accessible, but he cannot control
what departments and professors put up on their own. He says he recently
advised the communicative-disorders department to redesign its Web site,
which features a greeting in the form of an audio file -- completely
inaccessible to deaf people.

    In Mr. Schmetzke's study of library pages, about 50 percent of those
he surveyed were deemed accessible. Twenty of the 49 American libraries he
surveyed got dismal scores, with less than 20 percent of their pages
accessible. Sites for the various schools of library science fared even
worse.

    "What concerns me is that the organizations that train the next batch
of librarians aren't concerned about accessibility, or they would have
made their own pages accessible," he says.

    'Radical Activism'

    Because those more sophisticated visual features are becoming more
common, even in online courses, institutions should start thinking about
how to deal with them now, says Marty Blair, policy director for the
National Center on Disability and Access to Education, which organized the
conference in Washington.

    Disabled people generally take one of two routes to gain
accommodations at a university: building awareness that leads to a policy,
or engaging in "radical activism," which can take the form of a lawsuit.

    Mr. Blair cites a lawsuit filed against two University of California
campuses in 1999 by a group of deaf students who charged that the campuses
had failed to provide adequate accommodations for classes. The
universities settled with the students in 2002, paying $1-million in legal
fees and promising to improve accessibility.

    Mr. Blair says he'd rather persuade colleges on moral grounds than
bring up the specter of lawsuits. Providing accessible online services
upfront is more efficient, he says, and makes the university a more
attractive place for students with disabilities. He says Utah State
University, where he works, enrolls disproportionately more blind students
than other institutions in the state because it offers more services for
them.

    His group doesn't expect to have a policy that it can show to
institutions for at least a couple of years. "Since we're dealing with
universities that are decentralized and independent, finding a model
policy that can be readily adopted is not going to be easy," he says. "But
we need to take steps in that direction. We want to give them a foundation
to work from."

    In the meantime, Mr. Cuffee is waiting for the day when Web pages are
easy for everyone to operate, when books and notes can be offered in
electronic format, and when all professors wear microphones so their
lectures can be transcribed by people or by voice-recognition software.
Mr. Cuffee's fear is that even in the assistive-technology program at
George Mason, he might someday run into the same problems he had at the
law school -- that he'll encounter materials that he can't work with, and
professors who won't understand the challenges he faces.

    "Professors think, 'I have been teaching this way for so long, so why
do I need to change?'" he says. "There are times when I feel like Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---- PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS FOR DISABLED COMPUTER USERS

    Web Accessibility in Mind, a group based at Utah State University,
produces educational materials and presentations about online
accessibility in education. Some of the group's suggestions on accessible
Web-site design are detailed below.

    CHALLENGE SOLUTION For blind computer users: Blind users can't see
images, photos, and graphics.

    Provide written descriptions of the images that can be interpreted by
"screen reader" software, which uses a voice synthesizer to read aloud and
characterize a visual computer display.

    Blind users often must listen to a screen readers' long descriptions
of Web pages.

    Create links, which a screen reader can translate, to allow users to
skip navigational menus, long lists of items, and other elements that
might be difficult or tedious to listen to.

    Blind users generally do not use a mouse.

    Avoid features like pull-down menus that require the use of a mouse.
Make the site navigable with a keyboard.

    Complex data tables and graphs can't be interpreted clearly by a
screen reader.

    Provide written summaries that blind users can hear with a screen
reader.

    For deaf computer users: Deaf users cannot hear the audio in
multimedia.

    Provide transcripts of audio clips and synchronous captioning for
video clips.

    For motor impaired computer users: Motor-impaired users may not be
able to operate a mouse.

    Make sure that all functions are available from the keyboard. Users
should be able to move from link to link by pressing the tab button, and
those links should be navigable in a logical order.

    Users may need voice-activated software, which generally cannot
replicate mouse movement as effectively as it can replicate keyboard
usage.

    All functions should be available from the keyboard.

    SOURCE: Web Accessibility in Mind

    ---------------------------------------------------------- Copyright c
2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education


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