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Advocates of People With Disabilities Take Online Stores to Task
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/01/technology/01ECOMMERCE.html
January 1, 2001
E-COMMERCE REPORT
By BOB TEDESCHI
Just before Christmas, when the federal government committed itself
to making its Web sites fully accessible to people with
disabilities, it raised an issue that has been ignored by many
e-commerce sites. Namely, to what extent should Internet stores
mirror their bricks-and-mortar counterparts?
While the Americans With Disabilities Act compels physical stores
to make themselves reasonably accessible to disabled people, courts
have not said conclusively whether the law applies to online
stores. In the meantime, many e-commerce executives say they have
only recently become aware of the needs of the disabled, and have
begun to address the situation in a way that will not heap even
more economic stress on their companies.
But as e-commerce sites embark on that journey, advocates for
people with disabilities say they have been essentially shut out by
as many as half of all Internet stores. Furthermore, they say their
patience may run thin if reforms do not proceed a sentiment that
could translate into expensive and embarrassing lawsuits for
recalcitrant Web merchants.
"When it comes to what's usable by people with visual impairments,
it's not better than 50 percent, in general," said James Gashel,
director of governmental affairs for the National Federation of the
Blind, an advocacy group based in Baltimore.
Mr. Gashel, who is blind, said that 300,000 to 400,000 blind
people commonly relied on "screen reader" software and a speech
synthesizer, which turn words on the screen into a
computer-generated voice. Some software can even interpret images
and hyperlinks on a Web page, assuming the page is designed
properly. But blind users encounter problems when Web sites fail to
design pages compatible with screen readers.
For instance, instead of a screen reader's describing a given
image or link, "a lot of times we'll go to a link and it'll say
`link,' or we'll go to an image, and it'll just say `image,' " Mr.
Gashel said. The problem, he said, is that the sites have not put
descriptive "tags" into the code used to build those Web images or
links. Such tags commonly substitute descriptive text for the
images.
Meanwhile, people with impaired motor skills are thwarted by small
or crowded links, which are often difficult to hit precisely with a
mouse. In addition, people with hearing impairments increasingly
miss audio messages that have begun to creep into e-commerce sites.
In most cases, sites that use audio have not yet incorporated
closed- captioning devices.
"The things that need to be done to make a site accessible are not
that hard to do, but they get ignored until somebody raises a
stink," said Jane Jarrow, president of Disability Access
Information and Support, a consulting firm. "It'd be hard to make a
case for saying that e-commerce sites are legally required under
the A.D.A. to be accessible to everyone, but it's silly for them
not to be."
"It just makes good business sense to be accessible, and there may
come a time where it will be legally required of them," Ms. Jarrow
said. "Above and beyond that, it's good p.r., since no one wants to
be accused of kicking a guy in a wheelchair."
To date, America Online is the most well- known Internet company
to face such a reality, having been sued by the National Federation
of the Blind in late 1999. The suit was settled out of court in
July, but Mr. Gashel said the federation "retained the option of
initiating that suit again."
"AOL is partly usable now, and they say they're going to make it
more usable," Mr. Gashel said. "We'll see if they get there."
Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman, said that when the company
created its latest software, version 6.0, "it was designed from the
ground up to support accessibility."
"And we plan to make all AOL features and services even more
accessible in the coming months," Mr. Weinstein said. "But we've
taken some large and important steps."
Web design experts generally concur with Ms. Jarrow, of Disability
Access, in saying that it is not hard to design a site with
accessibility in mind. But making existing Web pages conform to
accessibility standards is a much more vexing task. "It is a
monumental job to go back and retrofit a site," said Rich Fahle, a
spokesman for Borders.com, a retailer of books, music and video.
Mr. Fahle said that to retrofit a site, designers must essentially
rewrite the code of tens of thousands of pages. But just as AOL is
making improvements with each new version of its proprietary
software and its Web site, Mr. Fahle said that Borders.com could
more easily address access issues in coming redesigns. "The A.D.A.
has not been on our radar until very recently. But it's in the mix
now," he said.
Mr. Fahle said that Borders.com already provided "some of the
things" disability advocates seek, like pages that can be
translated by screen-reading devices. Like some other Web sites,
Borders has built its pages that way because such an approach is
useful to people without visual impairments.
People often set their Web browsers to ignore images, and thereby
improve viewing speed. Because Borders.com is "planning for a
completely new site architecture," Mr. Fahle said, "we can do more
of those things going forward."
•
A rare few sites have found a technological solution to
retrofitting. Take Amazon.com. Maryam Mohit, Amazon's vice
president for site development, said that since 1997, the company
had provided a text-only version of the site, not just for people
with disabilities, but for all customers who might prefer such a
design.
The company essentially built two versions of a page whenever it
added information to the site, Ms. Mohit said, until it created
technology to automate that process. "What a great day that was,
when we rolled that out," she said. "We were so happy.
"But we're also conservative" about using design elements that
incorporate Flash and Javascript technologies, which screen readers
can have trouble interpreting, Ms. Mohit added, "because we want to
be accessible to everyone."
On the other end of the spectrum are merchants that continue to
build graphically heavy, multimedia-enabled sites, which frequently
complicate or block the efforts of disabled Web users. "There are a
lot of sites now that go for look over function," said Charley L.
Tiggs, a Web site design consultant in Rochester. "That adds a lot
of extraneous information, which makes it hard for people with
visual impairments to use."
Mr. Tiggs, who is deaf, said that it was possible to design a site
to be accessible to all disabled groups, but that even the e-
commerce sites he had designed had not lived up to that standard.
"As much as I work to make sure the site's accessible, ultimately
it's the owner's site. I can take what they want and make it as
accessible as possible, but if they want a feature and I can't talk
them out of it, I don't have much of a choice."
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