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July 6, 1999 [Dodge's E-conomy]
Brace of New Federal Requirements
Could Help Out Disabled Web Users
By JOHN DODGE
Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
DOUG WAKEFIELD loves eBay, but he isn't a big fan of Omaha Steaks'
flashy Web page. Oh, Mr. Wakefield likes the steaks just fine -- it's
just that he's blind and www.omahasteaks.com is a nightmare for him to
navigate.
Dodge's E-conomy For obvious reasons, blind Web surfers much prefer
what their sighted counterparts consider dull and boring -- purely
textual sites. That's because text can be sent to a Braille display or
a speech synthesizer so the visually impaired can understand it, but
graphics don't register.
By next summer, however, there's hope that the Web will look different
to blind surfers and other disabled people thanks to a government
effort. Next Aug. 7, suppliers will be barred from doing business with
the federal government unless they follow electronic and
information-technology accessibility guidelines for people with
disabilities. The hope is that the guidelines' adoption by suppliers
will help change Web habits so other sites follow suit. (And if that
doesn't work, the fear of lawsuits may do the trick.)
Omaha Steaks
www.omahasteaks.com
eBay
www.ebay.com
U.S. Access Board
www.access-board.gov
EITAAC
www.access-board.gov/ notices/eitaacmtg.htm
Trace Research & Development Center
www.trace.wisc.edu
The initial guidelines were released to the public May 12 and are
being firmed up by the U.S. Access Board for a public-comment period
beginning in early November. By Feb. 7, they will be set in stone and
companies will have six months to comply. The mandate arises out of
the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, signed into law on August 7,
1998 and containing amendments strengthening and updating Section 508
the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
That guidelines would impose, for instance, that all that all
government suppliers "provide at least one mode that does not require
user vision." One commonly accepted way to accomplish this is by
providing tags with textual descriptions of graphics and photographs.
That way, the 57-year-old Mr. Wakefield would know his mouse rests on
a picture of steaks licked by barbecue flames at omahasteaks.com. Many
sites do this today -- eBay and the Interactive Journal are just two
examples -- but for such tags to be effective, they must be used
consistently and offer rich descriptions. Unfortunately, that tends
not to be the case.
Economically, the disabled represent a powerful chunk of the U.S.
population. The Census Bureau says one out of five Americans suffers
from a disability and one out of 10 grapples with a serious disability
-- on the order of 50 million and 25 million people respectively. With
the over-65 population expected to increase to 20% of the U.S. total
by 2030 from the low teens today, the number of disabled will increase
substantially.
Mr. Wakefield, blind since birth, is an accessibility specialist for
the Access Board, a small independent federal agency charged with
making government services, resources, jobs and facilities available
to all U.S. citizens. Despite their hostility to each other in the
marketplace, leading hardware and software companies such as IBM, Sun
Microsystems and Microsoft put down their swords to serve together on
the group's Electronic and Information Technology Access Advisory
Committee, or EITAAC, formed last fall to create a universal set of
guidelines. (In truth, these rivals come together more frequently than
you'd think, most often to wrestle with thorny technology issues such
as standards.)
"The incremental cost of adding accessibility features into new
products is actually quite small." says Microsoft director of
accessibility Greg Lowney, whose staff of 40 works full time to ensure
universal access to the software giant's products. "Accessibility is
in everyone's best interest. A person with disabilities affects five
other people they interact with. It might be relative or a co-worker."
IBM program manager for special needs John Steger is more blunt. "It's
good business."
Indeed, there is one very strong motivation for the private sector and
governments to quickly follow the federal government's lead next year
-- discrimination lawsuits. For instance, if a disabled person is kept
out of a job because of poor Internet access, he or she would likely
have a strong discrimination lawsuit, says Joe Tozzi, director of the
technology center at the U.S. Education Department, which in early
1997 came up with "Requirements for Accessible Software Design" for
its contractors to follow.
Most Web sites I frequent contain some tags, but their application is
inconsistent: Standing items tend to have them, but time-sensitive
content such as a news photograph either doesn't or just says
"graphic" or the name of the subject. If you're wondering how
compliant your site is insofar as tags are concerned, measure it
against www.trace.wisc.edu. Just run your mouse pointer over the
graphic and if there is a tag, it should automatically appear. Tell me
what you find: Share your results with John Dodge and other
Interactive Journal readers, or send e-mail to
mailto:[log in to unmask]
Invariably, new guidelines invite more lawsuits, but that's the price
of a better society. "It's kind of like consciousness raising -- all
of us weren't as conscious 25 to 30 years ago as we are today about
gender, racial and ethnic issues," says Mr. Tozzi. Resistance to the
guidelines and bickering over their substance among the 27 EITAAC
members has been almost nil, he adds.
"I have not spoken to a software designer or developer that hasn't
said, 'Had we thought about accessibility up front, it would have been
an easy [problem] to address,' " says Mr. Tozzi.
The people the guidelines are intended to help often respond with a
resounding "huh?" when asked about them.
"I don't know what you're talking about," said Rusty Perez, a
30-year-old blind high-school teacher in Lakewood, Calif., when asked
how the guidelines could help him. As Web-savvy as he is, he still has
problems surfing the Net.
Mr. Perez uses software that reorganizes the Web page into more
logical form so the text can be read to him. But sometimes the logic
of the page doesn't follow, or tags are absent. "Often I come across a
link that is not labeled," he says. "Then I've got to sit there and
wait 35 seconds while the reader goes 'http:// blah, blah, blah'
before I hear the file name -- which may not be meaningful to me."
Mr. Wakefield recalls the time he mistakenly ordered four copies of a
software package from a Web site instead of the single copy he wanted.
"You had to check the number of copies and I just totally missed it
until I saw my bill," he says. "If you're blind, it was very hard to
see. I thought I was being careful."
The guidelines cover the full range of disabilities, including
deafness and hearing loss; physical disabilities such as loss of
strength, reach and manipulation; tremors and lack of sensation;
speech and cognitive disabilities such as thinking, reading and
remembering disorders; and other disabilities such as epilepsy and
short stature.
"This is almost as big as Y2K in terms of the amount of energy and
time that will go into this," says Martin Bayne, a 46-year-old
newsletter publisher in Clifton Park, N.Y., who suffers from
Parkinson's disease. "This will be the first time sites will have been
built from the ground up by both disabled and able-bodied Web
designers with the scaffolding in full view every step of the way,"
An egregious omission from any article on the topic of accessibility
would be failure to mention The Trace Center at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, which has pioneered and catalyzed technology
solutions for the disabled since 1971. It sat on the EITAAC, and
influential business leaders such as Microsoft's Bill Gates
characterize its director, Gregg C. Vanderheiden, as a pioneer in the
field.
Stamps of Approval: Why it is you can never find a stamp when you're
sending that late birthday card or overdue bill? Now, you can print
professional looking first-class postage on demand if you have a
personal computer, a printer, commonly used office or accounting
software and a connection to the Internet. E-Stamp.com
(www.e-stamp.com) promises to launch a nationwide site this summer;
www.stamps.com is already up and running.
Both sites have partnered with the U.S. Postal Service Information
Based Indicia Program, or IBIP, which aims to stamp out (no pun
intended) postage-meter fraud. The technology, which claims to
undercut postal meters on a cost basis, uses digital signatures and
bar codes that the Post Office says it can verify as authentic.
According to the Postal Service, fraud has been so rampant that it has
considered banning postal meters altogether. "The IBI solution renders
each indicia [an identifying mark] unique to the mail piece, making it
possible to detect duplicates and therefore identify probable
counterfeit activity," according to the Postal Service online FAQ on
the topic.
Businesses willing to format printed envelopes with Microsoft Word or
similar software are the prime target for the service, but as a
consumer, I plan to give it a try too, so Aunt Ruthie won't have to
wait an extra couple of days for the birthday card that's already a
week late. A demonstration of how it works is at www.stamps.com.
_________________________________________________________________
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