From the web page
http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1998/0413/fcw-mktaccessible-4-13-1998.html


Federal Computer Week
APRIL 13, 1998


PCs

Microsoft ups software accessibility

BY MARGRET JOHNSTON ([log in to unmask])

In response to demand from disabled workers who rely heavily on
computers to do their jobs, Microsoft Corp. has begun promoting
its plans for making its operating system and applications
software more widely accessible.

The plans include new features in the Windows 98 operating
system tailored for people with impaired vision and a World Wide
Web developers' toolkit that will make it easier to tailor Web
sites to users with special requirements.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates set the tone for the initiatives
in February when he pledged to make the PC "the greatest
accessibility aid ever," and now the estimated 130,000 federal
employees who reported having a disability in a 1996 Office of
Personnel Management survey are waiting to find out how this
will improve their work environment.

Gary Moulton, a Microsoft product manager who works full time on
accessibility issues, said the company is committed to
addressing the needs of disabled computer users during all
phases of product planning, development and support.

"There's a lot of great government work that's going on in this
area," Moulton said. "The government definitely appreciates the
challenges and is setting a good example and [making] sure
everything it purchases is accessible to people with
disabilities."

Moulton and two other Microsoft employees who are dedicated to
accessibility issues made a stop in Washington, D.C., during a
recent nationwide tour to inform key account managers about
Microsoft's accessibility plans. The changes include increasing
from nine to about 24 the number of full-time Microsoft
employees dedicated to accessibility issues and creating an
advisory council that will advise company executives on how
products can be approved.

Specifics on how the council will be organized have not been
worked out, but Moulton said he envisions a panel made up
exclusively of users of adaptive hardware and software
technologies.

"They have to have a fundamental appreciation of what an
individual with a disability goes through in terms of their use
of personal computer technology," Moulton said.

Microsoft also plans to include two new accessibility features
in Windows 98. One is a magnifier that will increase the size of
type and graphics up to nine times and that can be dragged to
any point on the screen and expanded. The other feature is a
wizard that guides the user through the process of setting
preferences for things such as the size of typeface within
dialog boxes.

To make Web content more accessible, Microsoft is encouraging
developers to use special files to separate the code that
determines a site's style from the code that determines content,
said Charles Oppermann, a Microsoft developer who works with the
accessibility/disability group. This would let users select
their own typefaces, colors and backgrounds for reading Web
sites -- simple adjustments that do not change content but make
a difference for people who have difficulty reading, Oppermann
said.

Furthermore, Microsoft in May plans to release a tool to help
Web content developers create more accessible sites. The
Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange tool can be used to
add closed captioning to an audio feed so that hearing-impaired
people can read the script. It also can add a spoken explanation
to the visual elements of a site so that blind people can
understand the content by hearing a discription, said David A.
Bolnick of Microsoft's accessibility/disability group.

"Every single customer I have has a significant number of
employees who have some type of disability," said Sean Kantorow,
government account executive at Microsoft. If the software
suddenly does not support their keyboards or screen readers,
they are locked out, and that is unnecessary, he said.

The disability initiatives follow complaints from people who
were angry over the release last year of Internet Explorer
Version 4.0, which did not include a set of tools called Active
Accessibility, which lets applications work with accessibility
aids, such as magnifiers and screen readers, and lets utilities
automate the control of the application.

Microsoft attempted to correct the problem by shipping Internet
Explorer 4.01, a version that supports Active Accessibility, but
the company was stung by the criticism and the appearance that
it had been insensitive to the needs of disabled users.

Jamal Mazrui, legislative analyst at the National Council on
Disability, said Microsoft deserves recognition for making its
software more accessible, but he said Windows 95 is not yet
truly accessible to blind people, and Internet Explorer 4.01 is
too slow in retrieving the information it needs from Active
Accessibility to make it practical to use when reading Web
pages.

Mazrui, who is visually impaired, complained that there is
generally always a lag between new products and the point at
which they become accessible, especially to blind people.

"It's like we're always getting access to yesterday's version of
the software," Mazrui said. Despite Microsoft's pledges to make
Windows 98 more accessible, Mazrui said he doubts Windows 98will
work with most third-party screen readers. "We still haven't
reached the point where the programs that are accessible to
[blind people] are the latest versions of the programs."

Mazrui said that with the next version of Microsoft Office, a
suite of productivity applications that is due out soon, the
most important thing the company could do for blind employees
would be to commit itself to making the software fully
accessible. "Because Microsoft Office suite has thoroughly
dominated the market, those applications are really critical for
disabled people to be able to succeed in the average place of
business," Mazrui said.

Microsoft's effort to promote greater accessibility is a good
example for corporate America and probably more effective than a
legislative effort, said Carol Hughes of Marietta, Ga., whose
21-year-old son is disabled. Hughes, who is chairwoman of a task
force on disability in the Georgia district represented by House
Speaker Newt Gingrich, considers technology the key to her son's
ability to find a job and support himself. "I would love to see
this happen in a lot of other places," she said. "The more we
see people with significant disabilities in the work place, the
quicker they will be accepted."


Copyright 1998 FCW Government Technology Group