from wired news
Ramping Up Accessibility
Making mainstream software accessible to the disabled is the right - and
profitable - thing to do
by Simson Garfinkel
14 November 1997
How can we make computers more accessible for the disabled? One
approach is to build special-purpose gizmos, Web sites, and software
for people with different kinds of problems. But a far better approach
is to rethink our technology to make it more accessible for everybody.
It not only makes good sense philosophically, it also broadens the
software market for most developers and ensures that our own future
disabilities will not completely disrupt our lives.
I've been thinking about disabilities a lot lately, thanks to an old
typing injury that has revisited my arms and fingers with a vengeance.
Three years ago, when I had my first taste of repetitive stress injury
(RSI), my only recourse was to stop typing. It was hard then; today it
would be even harder, as I have more reasons to type than ever before.
Between email, my computerized address book, my online banking, and my
digital camera, it seems that I have enveloped myself in a world where
typing is a necessity.
I've realized something: Just as technology develops to fill our
needs, we come to depend upon those technologies. When we lose access,
we lose much of our control over our lives.
My salvation has been a high-speed multimedia laptop that runs two
programs from Dragon Systems: DragonDictate and Dragon
NaturallySpeaking. With this setup, I'm able to give my hands the rest
they need and still get my job done.
What's possibly more amazing is the dramatic change that the software
from Dragon Systems has witnessed in the past year. Last summer,
Dragon's DragonDictate speech recognition system had a 60,000-word
dictionary, could recognize only a single word at a time, and cost
between US$1,500 and $2,000. But as the price of Dragon software has
dropped over the past year, it has also gained more and better
features, including a dramatic increase in ease-of-use. Today Dragon's
top-of-the-line program is Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It offers
continuous speech recognition (so you need not speak just one word at
a time with a pause between words as you do with so-called "discrete"
systems), a 230,000-word dictionary, and a sticker price of less than
$200. DragonDictate, meanwhile, now costs just $99 for the 30,000-word
system, and roughly $300 for the 60,000-word version.
Better software for less money? It's not coincidental: The increase in
usability and the decrease in price are synergistic phenomena.
In the past, discrete voice systems were extremely difficult to use,
so only the most motivated users - people who had no other choice -
used the products, according to Roger Matus, Dragon's vice president
of marketing. "With the advent of NaturallySpeaking, we now have a
product that is not only of use to [the highly motivated], but is also
of use to the much larger community.... We have sold more copies of
NaturallySpeaking since it started shipping in June than we sold of
DragonDictate from 1990 to 1997."
What Dragon Systems has learned is that it is much cheaper and more
profitable to build accessibility into mainstream products than to
build special-purpose accessibility systems for people with special
needs. Even people who don't have special needs can benefit from
improved usability. Within a few years, speech recognition will likely
become standard on every computer sold. That will be a boon not only
for disabled people, but for everybody.
Unfortunately, many other businesses and organizations are slow in
realizing this fact. And nowhere is this more apparent than on the
Web.
If you happen to be blind, then the Web is one of the best things that
has ever happened. For years, blind people have been able to read
electronic text with the help of text-to-speech devices, Braille
printers, and electronic Braille displays. With the Web, blind people
can put all of this technology to work: reading the daily newspaper,
reading utility bills that are delivered by email, and even accessing
dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books that are
available online.
But recent innovations on the Web are challenging this progress. Web
developers are moving away from simple electronic text in the quest
for flashier, higher-production-value sites that leave the blind quite
literally in the dark.
For example, a growing number of Web designers are using JavaScript,
Java, and text embedded with graphic images and motion. The result is
Web pages that are visually compelling, but utterly inaccessible to
people without vision. Most screen readers are confused by text that
is arranged in columns or tables, but they're absolutely helpless when
Web designers embed text in images (like the Synapse logo on the
frontdoor of this section) and then don't provide the same information
in plain text (Synapse does!) elsewhere on the screen.
"I would say, unofficially, that 98 percent of Web sites" have some
kind of accessibility problem, says Geoff Freed, project manager of
the Web Access Project at the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible
Media in Boston. "That's not because [designers] are lazy and stupid.
It's because they are unaware of what they can do."
In fact, organizations can do several things to ensure that their Web
sites are accessible to all. The simplest is to provide alternative
text (via alt text in the HTML, as we have for the Synapse logo) to
information that is embedded in graphics. Another approach is to
create alternate text-only Web sites.
These approaches don't just help the blind, they also help people who
simply have impaired eyesight and need to use large fonts. They also
make things easier for Web search engines, which cannot read a piece
of text buried inside a GIF.
People creating accessible software and Web sites need to realize that
there are many different kinds of disabilities. "We throw around
numbers like 49 million people with disabilities," says Randy Dipner,
president of Meeting the Challenge, which develops software and sells
products for people with special needs.
But those 49 million people aren't in any one market; instead, there
are dozens of splinter markets with a few hundred thousand to a few
million people in each. Making a distinct product for each specialized
group would be costly, and the product's market is limited by
definition. A better idea is to market fewer products, but make them
accessible to numerous markets.
But there are obstacles. For example, what works for a group with one
disability can mean disaster for another. Consider this: There are 9.6
million people who have difficulty seeing words and letters, but only
1.6 million who are unable to see words or letters altogether.
Strategies that work well for people with limited vision - such as
high-contrast color schemes, big fonts, and screen magnifiers - just
don't make any difference for people who are blind. On the other hand,
a person who has limited sight may still not be inclined to learn
Braille.
This has been a big problem for Microsoft. The company has spent
considerable effort making Windows 95 accessible to a broad range of
customers with various needs, says Luanne LaLonde, Microsoft's
accessibility product manager. She says Windows 95 has an
accessibility control panel that lets visually-impaired users select
large, high-contrast fonts and users with Parkinson's disease
reprogram the keyboard to ignore brief, unintentional keystrokes.
But, for many years, Microsoft's Windows and Windows 95 - both
graphical user interfaces - have not been well received by advocates
for the blind, who found the operating system much more difficult than
DOS - which was a text-based system.
"The final generation of DOS screen readers did a great job on DOS
applications," says Jim Functerman, president of Arkenstone, which
creates special-purpose software for blind users. But Windows screen
readers had a much more complicated job: They had to decode an entire
graphical user interface, complete with pop-up boxes, pull-down menus,
scrollers, and button bars, and make the entire thing understandable
using voice alone. "It has only been in the last year that Windows
screen readers have gotten to the point that they are pretty decent."
One thing that is helping today's screen readers function better is
Microsoft's accessibility API (MSAA), which gives programmers a
standard way to make their programs compatible with technologies
designed for people with special needs. But Microsoft hasn't yet
implemented the API in all of its applications, and neither have
third-party Windows software developers. It's a time-consuming job
that not every developer always gets around to. Microsoft shipped its
Internet Explorer 4.0 Web browser without the accessibility hooks
built in; the programmers just ran out of time, LaLonde says.
(Microsoft is reportedly working on a new version of IE 4 that
includes the accessibility features.)
Ultimately, it's in everybody's best interest to make computers as
accessible as possible. That's because, sooner or later, we will all
need computers that can cope with a variety of human frailties.
Building these features into every computer that's in use today isn't
just a nice gesture for the disabled; it's insurance for everybody's
future.
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