New York Times
February 12, 2004
A New Cellphone Nods to the Needs of the Disabled
By LISA GUERNSEY

BONNIE O'DAY, a slight woman with nimble fingers, is standing in the
dining room of her home in Alexandria, Va., demonstrating how she uses
her cellphone. She presses some buttons and the phone emits a beep. "I
don't know what I just did," Dr. O'Day said. "It beeps and I don't know
what's going on."

For most users, a glance at the screen would answer that question. But
Dr. O'Day, a 48-year-old senior research associate at the Cornell Center
for Policy Research in Washington, has a condition called low vision,
meaning she can discern little more than forms and colors.

She can make and receive calls by feeling her way around the keys. But
she has no way of knowing that her battery is almost fully charged and
that she is receiving a fairly strong signal. She cannot read the caller
ID. It is difficult for her to add contacts to the phone book and
impossible to scroll through it to retrieve stored phone numbers. For
that, she must use her five-pound, $3,500 Braille computer.

Those barriers led Dr. O'Day to file a formal complaint with the Federal
Communications Commission last year against her service provider,
Verizon Wireless, and Audiovox, which made the cellphone she was using
at the time. Her case against Verizon is still pending, but in December
she settled her case with Audiovox after the company agreed to include
new features in its next crop of phones.

The first of those models, the Toshiba VM4050, became available last
week at Sprint PCS retailers. (Toshiba owns part of Audiovox's wireless
subsidiary.) One of its tricks is the ability to talk: when this feature
is turned on, it tells users in a recorded voice that, say, the battery
is low or the phone is in roaming mode.

Darren Burton, a technology associate for the American Foundation for
the Blind, has been using the phone for about a week to evaluate its
ease of use. "This is certainly a significant step forward," said Mr.
Burton, who said he most appreciated the voiced reports on battery
level, signal status, roaming, new voice-mail messages and missed calls.
But he said it still had "a way to go'' in making other features equally
accessible, like the phone's menus, e-mail in-box, text messaging and
Internet browser.

Advocates for the blind say they hope Dr. O'Day's case will prompt other
companies to address the needs of disabled people, as required by the
Telecommunications Act of 1996. Section 255 of the law says telephone
makers and service providers must do all that is "readily achievable" to
make their products and services accessible to people with disabilities.
Dr. O'Day helped push for the 1996 law as a member of the National
Council on Disability, an advisory board to the president and Congress.
She was appointed to the agency by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and
served for eight years.

Makers of land-line telephones have long since created telephones like
the one that hangs in Dr. O'Day's kitchen and announces the caller ID
for each incoming call. But when AccessWorld, a publication of the
American Foundation for the Blind, queried 10 cellphone companies about
the law two years ago, it found that only two of the companies were
aware of its requirements.

"We were hoping that Section 255 would be the impetus" for improvements
to cellphones, Dr. O'Day said. "Unfortunately, we had little compliance
up until last year."

She also faulted the F.C.C., which is charged with making sure that
companies comply with the law. In June 2001, she sent an informal
complaint to the commission, but its initial response indicated that it
had no intention of taking action, she said.

"The F.C.C. sat on the informal complaint for 18 months and did
nothing," she said.

Eventually, Dr. O'Day sought help from two lawyers, Scott H. Strauss and
Allison L. Driver of the Washington law firm Spiegel & McDiarmid. The
two, working pro bono, helped her file formal complaints in February
2003. (Informal complaints do not have to conform to a specific format
and can be sent by anyone to notify the F.C.C. of problems. Formal ones
usually require the help of a lawyer, can lead to an F.C.C. order that
interprets the law and may result in damages being awarded to the
complainant.)

Thomas D. Wyatt, deputy bureau chief for the F.C.C.'s consumer and
governmental affairs division, said he was aware of Dr. O'Day's case and
could "understand her frustration." But, he said, "the issues were
fairly complex and technical and conducive to work in the formal
context."

Indeed, part of Dr. O'Day's discussions with Audiovox included a
technical conference with engineers who discussed the feasibility of
enhancing the phone by improving both hardware and software.

Verizon, which declined to comment aside from saying that discussions
with Dr. O'Day were continuing, has previously argued that technical
accessibility issues are the province of manufacturers rather than
service providers. Yet Dr. O'Day's lawyers argue that it is service
providers like Verizon that wield the most leverage, since they have
influence over aspects of the design of the cellphones that they offer
to their subscribers.

Travis Larson, a spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications and
Internet Association, a trade group for mobile phone companies, said its
members "are committed to providing accessibility," and pointed out that
the association has created a Web site, www.accesswireless.org, to
provide information about phones with features to help the disabled. The
Web site describes features like tactile buttons, which can be
distinguished by touch, and audible cues like beeps, but it does not
include any reference to voice output, the feature that Audiovox has
just agreed to add to its phones.

Voice output is one of the three most desirable features among blind
users, according to the American Foundation for the Blind, which
surveyed 20 such users and pinpointed 16 features that it now uses to
evaluate new phone models. Besides voice output like talking menus and
spoken numbers on caller ID, the features at the top of the list
included tactile keys and manuals in Braille or spoken form.

A few phones marketed in Europe and Japan already meet some of those
needs. Recent reviews in Access World have focused on a pair of Nokia
phones that are compatible with talking software for the blind. They use
the G.S.M. wireless standard, which is more conducive to development of
third-party software than the C.D.M.A. standard, which remains dominant
in the United States. They are not cheap, however. With software, one of
the phones costs over $500 and the other almost $800.

The new Toshiba-Audiovox phone, which features a color display screen
and digital camera with video capabilities, is now selling for $180 to
users who sign a two-year Sprint service contract. It is one of the
first to put voice output into a handset that runs on C.D.M.A. It does
not read menus or words on the screen aloud, but it has a "voice
guidance" feature that can be turned on by holding down the menu key for
two seconds.

With voice guidance, users can find their way through menus by listening
to beeps or waiting for vibrations that indicate their place in the
menu. When the O.K. key is pressed and held for a few seconds, a female
voice announces the battery level and signal strength. The same voice
reads out caller ID numbers when calls come in and when users scroll
through the call logs.

The features may also appeal to people who see perfectly well, said
Katie Wasserman, vice president for marketing at Audiovox. "If you are
driving, it allows you to focus," she said. "You don't have to look down
at the handset to realize who is calling you." Mr. Larson of the
cellular trade group said that the industry was also aware that as the
years go by, a greater proportion of cellphone users will be elderly and
will make use of such accessibility features.

Dr. O'Day has argued all along that features for the blind could turn
out to have unexpected benefits for the broader public, just as
wheelchair ramps have for people with baby strollers. But until more
companies actually sell phones with those features, she said, she will
keep pushing to ensure that access for disabled people is taken into
account as mobile technology evolves.

"People may say these are trivial things right now," Dr. O'Day said.
"But this technology is developing very quickly. If we don't act now,
we're going to lose the ability to keep up."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


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